Desystemized

Early spring is one of the toughest seasons in Western Pennsylvania.  Winter has taken its toll: vegetation is fully deadened, dampened, and drab, precipitation assaults us with alternating downpours and flurries, and the saturated landscape yields thick, sticky mud at the slightest provocation.

If you’re a farmer planning to get an early start on field work, mud is a major problem.  Farmers have found some relief from mud by attacking the water that causes it.  Each spring I see pictures of peers installing field drains to channel nuisance water into the ditch and away from the farm.

A field drain is like a subway for groundwater:  networks of perforated pipes are buried under low spots in the field and swiftly shuttle a stream of water out from under the equipment rolling overhead.  Unobstructed pipes are like a magnet for water.  Tilled soil does not provide clear passage for water because any natural structure that exists prior to tilling is destroyed by the continuous breaking up and re-settling of soil particles.  Imagine a group of your friends trying to walk close together through thick brush; the going would be very slow.  If someone cut a path, you’d line up and stroll out easily.  That’s the freedom a field drain provides to stalled water.

Irony rears its head several months later when water becomes the biggest limiting factor for the crops that grow.  Drought is a disaster for farmers, so systems are in place to cover losses caused by excessively dehydrated soil.  In other words, we have systems to dehydrate the soil coupled to systems that cover losses for dehydrated soil.  The national agricultural expenditure associated with water is staggering.

Orthodox agriculture battles water so it conforms to cropping systems.  The consequent strain on farmers is never ending and very one-sided: nature works relentlessly day and night for free to reestablish it’s order, while farmers’ costs rise every year, their equipment wears out, and they die.  I see no sign of efficiency in a system that pours resources into a battle that can never be won.

I wonder to myself what happens if we instead design our farming systems so they conform to water’s natural setting.

In 2012 I stopped tilling our soil.  We seeded fields to grass, covering the bare cropland with a thick carpet of greenery.  Since the seeding, I’ve allowed the land to do mostly what it pleases; grasses are harvested via a mini-migration of domesticated ungulates and the seasons each express their unique characteristics.  For the most part, whatever wants to grow, grows, and wherever the water wants to go, it goes.  Something interesting happened.

Water is settling back into its routine.  No longer affronted by mechanical interruptions, landscape hydration took the opportunity to establish a logical order of progression as it converts itself from rain to surface water, then groundwater.  Clear delineation between waterways and dry soil is obvious: I see different vegetation establishing along the waterways while toads and peep frogs settle in droves.  Birds, in increasing diversity, are attracted to the changing plants and insects that congregate around the water.  This variety of life exists where muddy puddles surrounded by barren earth once existed.  The transformation is astounding, and it required no effort on my part.

Self-induced stress melts away when agriculture stops fighting nature.  Farmers aren’t the only benefactors of the change in mindset.

When tension exists in the production of food, discomfort jumps to the end user.  Nobody can eat contentedly from a platform that’s hanging on the edge of catastrophe, yet that’s exactly where we find ourselves today.  Stress created by centralized and domineering agriculture is palpable: City dwellers are at least peripherally aware of their utter dependence on a delivery system that brings food from parts unknown, and rural citizens are watching family farms fold and collapse after generations of existence.  Whenever a person is eating, no matter where they live, their subconscious is alerting them that something is fundamentally wrong with our system.

Peace of mind is the most important agricultural product of the day.  Such an abstract crop can be delivered to a wanting public when farmers decide to sidestep dated systems in search of inherently stable methods.  Local food can cure the exasperation brought forth by layer upon layer of futile legislation and intolerable bureaucracy that plagues both the farm worker and the office executive equally.  We can inject stability, joy, relationships, security, pride, and self-sufficiency directly into the lifeblood of our towns by substituting nationalized systems with localized logic.

When visitors tour our farm this year, I’m excited to talk about water.  The landscape is pleasant, somehow radiating comfort via the beautiful arrangement of nature.  Each time a family witnesses the transformative power of their food budget when it’s directed onto a local farm, they are fulfilled in a way they never thought possible.  Sustenance reaches beyond physical nutrition and into the realm of mental health, ecological collaboration, aesthetics, security, frugality, political liberation, independence, local pride, close relationships, and infectious common sense.  The gift keeps giving year after year, because we’re never quite finished with refinements.  That’s farming for the future.