Farm Harvest Quotes

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs. The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel. If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.

The kind of soil in your area determines the type of crop you will plant to harvest; The kind of potentials in you will decide the type of success you will celebrate.

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak.

For us hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us. Lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects. We lived close to the animals we ate. We knew their habits and that knowledge deepened our thanks to them and the land that made them.

An image suddenly loomed in his mind: the greenhouse effect. Yes. The Earth is a gigantic greenhouse. With us planted here millions of years ago by aliens. Soon they’ll be back for the harvest.

The farm labourers employed to harvest the corn often displayed a real fear of cutting the last sheaf, due to the fact that they felt they were slaying the spirit of the corn.

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth. The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death. The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade. The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it.

with farming, if you plant seeds in the spring you harvest them in the fall. If you plant spinach seeds, there is spinach; where you plant corn, there’s corn.… But there’s no beginning or end to kitchen work.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.

In this age of quick fixes and microwave mindsets, most of us want what we want, and we want it right now, whether it is instant download speed, instant riches, or an Oompa-Loompa, but just as you can’t force the farm to produce a harvest, you can’t force your seed of potential to grow until it is ripe and ready.

All farms require a resident dreamer, someone to thumb through seed catalogs in the cold days of late January, imagining summer fields of squash and cucumbers, tomatoes and sunflowers. Fall harvests are the reward of winter dreams. Someone must decide where the next fence should be placed, or conceive of a clever new way to organize the market stand. On a farm, there's no shortage of little dreams needing to be dreamed.

North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects … Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. That man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat … The driver could not control it – straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the ‘cat, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow gotten into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him – goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor – its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades – not plowing but surgery … The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

In Spain, hilly terrain and antiquated planting and harvest practices keep farmers from retrieving more than about 100 pounds [of almonds] per acre. Growers in the Central Valley, by contrast can expect up to 3000 pounds an acre. But for all their sophisticated strategies to increase yield and profitability, almond growers still have one major problem - pollination. Unless a bird or insect brings the pollen from flower to flower, even the most state-of-the-art orchard won't grow enough nuts. An almond grower who depends on wind and a few volunteer pollinators in this desert of cultivation can expect only 40 pounds of almonds per acre. If he imports honey bees, the average yield is 2,400 pounds per acre, as much as 3,000 in more densely planted orchards. To build an almond, it takes a bee.

Does my farming technique have enough fish tank to support a powdered-water lifestyle? This is something I think about while harvesting my grain on bicycle.

Bad weather never stopped anyone from reaping a good harvest.

The ripen fruit is for a sacred season.

Many California farmers have transitioned from delicate crops like tomatoes to more robust nuts because they can be harvested mechanically. Overall agricultural employment in California fell by about 11 percent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, even as the total production of crops like almonds, which are compatible with automated farming techniques, has exploded.

I seek him in the landscape of home, in the breeze brushing over rows of crops. I seek him in the seasons of planting and harvesting. A rugged man of the earth, he breathed life into this farm.

some modern ‘labour-saving’ devices might more precisely be labelled ‘male labour-saving’ devices. A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour-intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’.20 Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’.

Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.

It doesn’t matter how the harvest will come out”, says Masanobu Fukuoka. “Just sow seeds and care tenderly for the plants and soil. You have joy. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

Before researchers become researchers they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create.Doctors should first determine at the fundamental level what it is that human beings depend on for life... Modern scientific agriculture, on the other hand, has no such vision. Research wanders about aimlessly, each researcher seeing just one part of the infinite array of natural factors which affect harvest yields. Even though it is the same quarter acre, the farmer must grow his crops differently each year in accordance with variations in weather, insect populations, the condition of the soil, and many other natural factors. Nature is everywhere in perpetual motion; conditions are never exactly the same in any two years. Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experiences. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer.

She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

In early autumn the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: 'No Japs Allowed.' Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

People came from far and wide to see the Italian Gardens and buy a honeycomb or damson jam in the farm shop. The wool from the sheep and the cheese from the goats drew buyers in a queue the day they were ready for purchase. In June, the pick-your-own strawberry fields were filled with children carrying baskets of berries, their lips stained red with sweet juice. In August, the dahlia fields were so flush with color that the cloudy days seemed brighter, and in autumn the apple and pear orchards were woven through with ladders and littered with overflowing bushels.

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.

legitimate policy questions, such as corporate ownership of genomes, monoculture farming and its effects on pollinators, economic justice, farmers’ inability to harvest their own seeds, and the possible spread of GM pollen. These are issues we should be discussing, but the evidence does not support health concerns.

Instead of hunting and gathering, instead of farming and harvesting in the area where we live, we are flying God’s fruits and vegetables around the planet, not eating foods designed for our terrain and climate. We are distributing, selling and consuming “fresh foods” (or so the package says) days and weeks after they have been harvested.

You sow seeds and hope for the best. You pray for good weather. If you have good weather you have higher yields. But you don’t always get good conditions. No two summers are alike; everything is seasonal. You have dark times and bright ones. For human beings, every season can be a growing season. The ones that are fallow can teach you as much as the ones that are bountiful. In life - and in business - I continue to ask this question: What do you do with the ugly fruit? Life is a field run harvest. Do you discard the ugly fruit and till it back into the earth? Or do you see past the imperfections? Do you look for the good in it, and cherish that? Do you find its greater purpose?

Harvest Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. -Hesiod Shall we gather the sunset pluck what is ripe harness the cicada's song? Even if this isn't the season of new love let us remember the buds and reap what we can. No crop is too small. No harvest too lean. The grain will yield. So scatter and slash call in the cows and let us milk them all dry. Plow as you will. Bulldoze away. Why not make every season our season each day our day to till and tease to clear and seed to plant and replant as we please. Come my sweet smell of hay do not be deceived by Hesiod. He says that I am after your barn. I want the whole fucking farm!

We depended on the indigenous of this land to teach us farming and harvesting skills that we largely lacked upon arrival. Indeed, had it not been for the wisdom of native North Americans, the first attempt at European colonization would have failed entirely. We were starving in droves, perishing in Jamestown because we had spent so much time looking for gold that we’d forgotten to plant crops that could sustain us through the harsh winters. Four hundred–plus years later that folly has been repeated, at least metaphorically, in an economy so focused on the chasing of wealth for wealth’s sake that it has failed to re-sow its crops, to invest in the future, to actually produce anything of value as it opts, instead, to chase financial fortunes and immediate riches.

WINTER Puir laboureris and busy husbandmen, Went wet and weary in the fen; The silly sheep and their little herd-groomis Lurkis under lea of bankis, wodes, and broomis, And other dantit greater bestial, Within their stabillis sesyt into stall, Sic as mulis, horsis, oxen and kye, Fed tuskit boaris, and fat swine in sty, Sustainit were by manis governance On harvest and simmeris purveyance.

The smart way to be assured of quality organic food is to join a community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) cooperative and buy a share in a local organic farm every year. Every week for an average of twenty-four weeks in the North, and all year round in the South, you share the harvest, which can include fresh vegetables, fruit, and free-range eggs, chicken, and lamb. (See the Resources section for information on CSAs.)

You know anything about farms?” “Worked on one, up in Marshall,” Virgil said. “One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I’d be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos—we didn’t do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We’d box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now.

The new migrants from the dust bowl are here to stay. They are the vest American stock, intelligent, resourceful; and, if given a chance, socially responsible. To attempt to force them into a peonage of starvation and intimidated despair will be unsuccessful. They can be citizens of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering to take what they need. On their future treatment will depend the course they will be force to take.

I think about that centurion from time to time and wonder, had he retired to a farm in Campagna, happy with his harvest of grapes and grandchildren, or had he fallen amongst his comrades on some distant, ruined field, defending the honor and the ever-expanding borders of the Republic? What we foreigners have failed to comprehend over the centuries is that the proud centurion would have found either fate equally satisfying. This is why Rome grows, and the rest of the world shrinks.

The Radaune pounded along against the muddy tide that knew but one direction, deftly avoiding sandbanks with the aid of constantly changing pilots. To right and left, beyond the dikes, the same flat landscape with occasional hills, already harvested. Hedges, sunken lanes, a hollow basin with broom, a level plain between the scattered farms, just made for cavalry attacks, for a division of uhlans to wheel in from the left onto the sand table, for hedge-vaulting hussars, for the dreams of young cavalry officers, for battles long past and battles yet to come, for an oil painting: tartars leaning forward, dragoons rearing up, Brethren of the Sword falling, grandmasters staining their noble robes, not a button missing from their cuirasses, save for one, struck down by the Duke of Mazowsze, and horses, no circus has horses so white, nervous, covered with tassels, sinews rendered with precision, nostrils flaring, crimson, snorting small clouds impaled by lowered lances decked with pennants, and parting the heavens, the sunset’s red glow, the sabers, and there, in the background—for every painting has a background—clinging tightly to the horizon, with smoke rising peacefully, a small village between the hind legs of the black stallion, crouching cottages, moss-covered, thatched, and inside the cottages, held in readiness, the pretty tanks, dreaming of days to come when they too would be allowed to enter the picture, to come out onto the plain beyond the Vistula’s dikes, like slender colts among the heavy cavalry.

Kombu is a species of edible kelp (Laminaria japonica) that thrives in long streamers about a palm's-width wide that can reach up to thirty feet in length. Along with katsuobushi, it is the other main ingredient for making dashi. Kombu contains a high level of the amino acid glutamate, which is the source of the "fifth taste", umami, and a precursor to the flavor enhancer MSG. Japan consumes about 50,000tons of kombu a year--- about half wild, and half farmed--- most of it harvested off the coast of the northern island, Hokkaidō.

For us, hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild, unprocessed food, free from pesticides and hormones, and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever-scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness—direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us, lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects.

That remark by Tim illustrates one reason for the rise and fall of Montana farming: the lifestyle was highly valued by older generations, but many farmers’ children today have different values. They want jobs that involve sitting indoors in front of computer screens rather than heaving hay bales, and taking off evenings and weekends rather than having to milk cows and harvest hay that don’t take evenings and weekends off. They don’t want a life forcing them to do literally back-breaking physical work into their 80s, as all three surviving Hirschy brothers and sisters are still doing.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

Where, exactly, did rainbow colored, sugar frosted, air puffed, marshmallow infused cereal come from? Was it raised by cartoon rabbits and harvested by mischievous leprechauns? These products were so distantly removed from the local farms, so thoroughly metamorphosed, that we couldn’t even be sure what the raw ingredients had been... Looking back on these farming families standing in line with their shopping carts, I wonder if the money they received for growing the right ingredients even covered the cost of their shopping bills. Could a farmer who planted fields of wheat and oats now afford a box of cereal made from his own grain?

say that you were a woman living on a farm at the turn of the last century. You have a lot of kids and not a lot of money. Winter’s coming, and you’ve got to feed them all the way through it. When do you start planning? The split minute you get through the last winter, that’s when. You pull out the seeds you saved from last year’s crop, you start your seeds, you plant your garden (and no, you can’t rent a rototiller, so you probably have to fuss around with a hoe or a horse and plow or something). And don’t forget that if that garden is going to feed the family it’s going to have to be a rather massive—cute container gardening or interesting Pinterest-worthy novelty gardens would not cut it. You tend it all summer, and you harvest. You can, you dry, you preserve. You fill your root cellar and hopefully by midway through autumn you can stand back and survey the fruit of all that labor, grateful that it all came together and secure in the knowledge that you have supplied your family with what they need. Now compare that feeling with grabbing a can of beans at the store and feeling happy that you remembered to do that so there’s some green on your kids’ plates tonight. It’s much easier, yes . . . but not quite the same in terms of satisfaction in a job well done.

In families it’s hard to trace the story. If you’re in it the Plot Points aren’t clearly marked. You don’t know when things turn until much later. You think each day is pretty much as dull as any other, and if there is something happening it’s not happening in your family and it’s definitely not happening in Faha. You think your own oddness is normal. You think Nan harvesting a lifetime of Clare Champions is normal. You think having a grandfather who published a book but didn’t want his name on it is normal, having a father who wants to be a poet but has to be a farmer, who has no clue about farming, and won’t publish any poems, all Normal.

I have placed my wager on a vegetarian diet and I have enough respect for people like Frank, who have bet on a more humane animal agriculture, to support their kind of farming. This is not in the end a complicated position. Nor is it a veiled argument for vegetarianism. It is an argument for vegetarianism, but it’s also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory. If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That’s the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?

You pay homage when and where you can. I love the smell of the bulb as the earth opens and releases it in harvest, an aroma that only those who grow garlic and handle the bulb and the leaves still fresh from the earth can know.Anyone who gardens knows these indescribable presences--of not only fresh garlic, but onions, carrots and their tops, parsley's piercing signal, the fragrant exultations of a tomato plant in its prime, sweet explosions of basil. They can be known best and most purely on the spot, in the instant, in the garden, in the sun, in the rain. They cannot be carried away from their place in the earth. They are inimitable. And they have no shelf life at all.

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients.

Demographer Jean-Paul Sanderson, estimated the decline of the Congolese population during the reign of Leopold II and after, between 1885 and 1920 at several hundred thousand, and there were several reasons for this: diseases, malnutrition (including because men worked in the rubber harvest rather than farming), fewer births. Professor Anatole Romaniuk of the University of Alberta in Canada wrote a study on this, showing that almost half of the women in Congo in the second half of the 19th century suffered from Afro-Arab slavery and did not give birth to a single living child because of 'une stérilité massive pathologique d'origine vénérienne', i.e. because of massive infertility due to venereal disease. This factor trumped all other causes.

The adults continued having nightmares. They cried out in their sleep. In the mornings, they sat at the table and talked to us about their bad dreams: the war was around them, the land was falling to pieces, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers were coming, the sound of guns raced with the beating of their hearts. In their dreams, they met people who were no longer alive but who had loved them back in their old lives. There were stomach ulcers from worrying and heads that throbbed late into the night. My aunts and uncles in California farmed on a small acreage, five or ten, to add to the money they received from welfare. My aunts and uncles in Minnesota, in the summers, did “under the table” work to help make ends meet if they could, like harvesting corn or picking baby cucumbers to make pickles. And the adults kept saying: how lucky we are to be in America. I wasn’t convinced.

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT. As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends— all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed. Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.

He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, or a life about to end. Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin. It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.

How did farming change how much physical activity we do and how we use our bodies to do the work? Although hunting and gathering is not easy, nonfarming populations like the Bushmen or the Hadza generally work only five to six hours a day.36 Contrast this with a typical subsistence farmer’s life. For any given crop, a farmer has to clear a field (perhaps by burning vegetation, clearing brush, removing rocks), prepare the soil by digging or plowing and perhaps fertilizing, sow the seeds, and then weed and protect the growing plants from animals such as birds and rodents. If all goes well and nature provides enough rain, then comes harvesting, threshing, winnowing, drying, and finally storing the seeds. As if that were not enough, farmers also have to tend animals, process and cook large batches of foods (for example by curing meat and making cheese), make clothing, build and repair homes and barns, and defend their land and stored harvests. Farming involves endless physical toil, sometimes from dawn to dusk. As

Ironically, in spite of all the care and attention my grandparents devoted to their land, all the food they grew each year ultimately became anonymous, and it ended up eaten by complete strangers. Young calves were sent to feed lots in the Midwest to be fattened on grain. Apples, their skins never perfect enough to be sold as fresh fruit, were transformed into juice, or sauce, or apple pies. The corn, like most grain raised in America, was destined for animal feed. It was, perhaps, fed to the very calves that they had sold, now 1000 miles away. Once the food left the farm, the entire system was turned on its head. The freshness they had worked so hard to attain, picking the fruit at the peak of harvest was replaced with shelf life… their harvest was trucked all across America. It was processed, boxed, frozen, and then shipped again. Their food was trucked down the interstate in 18 wheelers, and hauled away by trains while they slept. Their apples might end up in the filling of a donut in Chicago, or their beef in a taco in Alabama. They had no way of ever really knowing.

Everyone assumed she’d get in. That meant she knew, when she burned down the Kincaid Farms Event Barn, that she wasn’t likely going to have to put up with kids being mad at her for long. And what had she said? That it didn’t matter what you did. Nothing was going to make them stop. So why would she have written a note to Blake, saying she was going to tell on him? Answer: she wouldn’t. One other thing, too, that had been gnawing at me. How had Rachel gotten into the barn? It had a huge, heavy door. I’d seen it, at Harvest Fest and the day I tried to find Sierra. Had she broken a window and climbed in? But Rachel was short—one of the shortest girls in the eighth grade. Small, too. She’d need help—someone to lift her, or something. Could she have started the fire from the outside? But then how could it have possibly been an accident? But if she did have help, wouldn’t everybody know about it? You can have evidence, or you can have a gut feeling. Sometimes both. This was my gut, pure and simple: Rachel Riley was covering for someone. Someone else was there the night of June 4, and only Rachel Riley knew who.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

Last night they stole the watchman’s rattle, and knocked the watchman down. Now they go rattling through the streets, proclaiming the ballad of Worse-was-it-Never. There was a former age, it seems, when wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If these times are not those times, who is to blame? Londoners, probably. Members of Parliament. Reforming bishops. People who use English to talk to God. Word spreads. On the farms around, labourers see the chance of a holiday. Faces blackened, some wearing women’s attire, they set off to town, picking up any edged tool that could act as a weapon. From the marketplace you can see them coming, kicking up a cloud of dust. Old men anywhere in England will tell you about the drunken exploits of harvests past. Rebel ballads sung by our grandfathers need small adaptation now. We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled … O, Worse was it Never! Farmers bolt their grain stores. The magistrates are alert. Burgers withdraw indoors, securing their warehouses. In the square some rascal sways on top of a husting, viewing the rural troops as they roll in. ‘Pledge yourselves to me—Captain Poverty is my name.’ The bell-ringers, elbowed and threatened, tumble into the parish church and ring the bells backward. At this signal, the world turns upside down.

Bibb Steam Mill Company also introduced to the county the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so important as the Civil War loomed. The mill acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly all strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six small barracks on its property. The Cottingham slave cabins would have seemed luxurious in contrast.51 The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named William S. Philips, John W. Lopsky, Archibald P. McCurdy, and Virgil H. Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmill to cut lumber and grind corn and flour.52 In addition to the two dozen slaves, Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from nearby farms during its busiest periods of work. The significance of those evolutions wouldn’t have been lost on a slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of slave leasing was already a fixture of southern life. Farm production was by its nature an inefficient cycle of labor, with intense periods of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during the months of “laid-by” time in the summer, and then another great burst of harvest activity in the fall and early winter, followed finally by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

There is a story that illustrates this view. A long time ago in China there lived a very greedy monk. Whenever there was some temple donation, or a distribution of money from a rich layman, this monk was always the first in line. He officiated at many ceremonies, accumulating enough money to buy even the nicest house in town! He was so greedy for money, it seemed he took pleasure only in the joy of collecting it, and never spent any of it. He never even bothered to spend it on himself. His clothes were still quite shabby despite the fact that everyone knew he had a lot of money. “There’s the greedy monk in his ragged clothes,” the laypeople would say. “He’s so cheap he won’t even buy something for himself.” Then one day, it started to rain, and the rain did not stop for several weeks. The little town below the temple was washed out. Houses were destroyed, farms were submerged weeks before the big harvest, and cattle perished. The whole town faced a terrible winter without food or housing. The villagers were very sad and frightened. Then one day, the villagers woke up to find a great number of carts filling the village square. The carts were loaded with many bags of rice and beans, blankets, clothing, and medicine. There were several new ploughs, and four sturdy oxen to pull them! Standing in the middle was the “greedy monk,” in his shabby, patched clothes. He used half his money to buy these supplies, and he gave the rest to the mayor of the town. “I am a meditation monk,” he told the mayor. “Many years ago I perceived that in the future this town would experience a terrible disaster. So ever since then I have been getting money for this day.” When the villagers saw this, they were ashamed of their checking minds. “Waaah, what a great bodhisattva he is!” This is the story of the greedy monk.

(...) the farming districts, the civilized world over, are dependent upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it again. But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how. It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure- lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature. Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his spurs- God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chin. And, after all, it is far finer to kill a strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of industry and politics.

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

The children crowded about the women in the houses. What we going to do Ma? Where we going to go? The women said, We don’t know, yet. Go out and play. But don’t go near your father. He might whale you if you go near him. And the women went on with the work, but all the time they watched the men squatting in the dust–perplexed and figuring. ... The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses. The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it–straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent that tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him–goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did now know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor–its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with its blades–not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders–twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gear, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, and had no connection to the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not love or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

What exactly she was thinking I never knew. Perhaps of the crop and the whole day’s stoking lost. Perhaps of the stranger who had come with his cornet for a day, and then as meaninglessly gone again. For she had been listening too, and she may have understood. A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once. (Cornet at Night)

all that the clearance of the German population achieved, as the Gorzów branch of the State Repatriation Office in Wielkopolska ruefully noted in retrospect, was to result in “all moveable German property in Gorzów becoming booty for Soviet soldiers,” as well as leaving the harvest of East Brandenburg to rot in the fields.59 Likewise, a disillusioned local branch secretary of the Communist Party complained that as soon as incoming Poles succeeded in licking an ex-German farm into shape the Red Army would turn up and expropriate it.

Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest

It was autumn in Bear Country, and the sights and the sounds of the season were all around. The leaves on the trees were turning orange, red, and gold. There was a nip in the air, and the sky was a brilliant blue. Flocks of geese flew overhead honking their way south for the winter. Out in his cornfield, Farmer Ben was up on his big red tractor harvesting his crop. Papa, Brother, and Sister Bear waved to him as they drove up the long drive to the farm. Papa was delivering some new furniture for Mrs. Ben. It was a fine new kitchen table and chairs. Ben climbed down from his tractor and went to meet them at the farmhouse. Papa and the cubs unloaded the table and chairs and carried them inside. Mrs. Ben was pleased.

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals.

vertical farms offer the clearest path toward ending hunger and malnutrition. These farms already have the ability to increase the amount of food grown per harvest by orders of magnitude and increase the number of possible harvests by factors of ten. They have the potential to produce all of this food while simultaneously requiring 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, 100 percent fewer pesticides, and nearly zero transportation costs.

Every morning and evening at Lakefield, the fruit bats would come and go from the trees near our campsite. During the day, you could hear them in the distance as they squabbled over territory. Each fruit bat wanted to jockey for the best position on a branch. But when evening came, as if by silent agreement, all the bats knew to fly off at the same time. Steve grabbed me and the kids one evening just at dusk, and we went out into the river to watch the bats. I would rank that night as one of the most incredible experiences of my life, right up there with catching crocs and swimming with manatees. Sitting at dusk with the kids in the boat, all of a sudden the trees came alive. The bats took flight, skimming over the water to delicately dip for a drink, flying directly over our heads. It was as if we had gone back in time and pterodactyls flew once again. It was such an awe-inspiring event that we all fell quiet, the children included. The water was absolutely still, like an inky mirror, almost like oil. Not a single fish jumped, not a croc moved. All we heard were the wings of these ancient mammals in the darkening sky. We lay quietly in the bottom of the boat, floating in the middle of this paradise. We knew that we were completely and totally safe. We were in a small dinghy in the middle of some of the most prolifically populated crocodile water, yet we were absolutely comfortable knowing that Steve was there with us. “One day, babe,” Steve said softly to me, “we’ll look back on wildlife harvesting projects and things like croc farming the same way we look back on slavery and cannibalism. It will be simply an unbelievable part of human history. We’ll get so beyond it that it will be something we will never, ever return to.” “We aren’t there yet,” I said. He sighed. “No, we aren’t.” I thought of the sign Steve had over his desk back home. It bore the word “warrior” and its definition: “One who is engaged in battle.” And it was a battle. It was a battle to protect fragile ecosystems like Lakefield from the wildlife perpetrators, from people who sought to kill anything that could turn a profit. These same people were out collecting croc eggs and safari-hunting crocodiles. They were working to legalize a whole host of illicit and destructive activities. They were lobbying to farm or export everything that moved, from these beautiful fruit bats we were watching, to magpie geese, turtles, and even whales.

One day, babe,” Steve said softly to me, “we’ll look back on wildlife harvesting projects and things like croc farming the same way we look back on slavery and cannibalism. It will be simply an unbelievable part of human history. We’ll get so beyond it that it will be something we will never, ever return to.” “We aren’t there yet,” I said. He sighed. “No, we aren’t.” I thought of the sign Steve had over his desk back home. It bore the word “warrior” and its definition: “One who is engaged in battle.” And it was a battle. It was a battle to protect fragile ecosystems like Lakefield from the wildlife perpetrators, from people who sought to kill anything that could turn a profit. These same people were out collecting croc eggs and safari-hunting crocodiles. They were working to legalize a whole host of illicit and destructive activities. They were lobbying to farm or export everything that moved, from these beautiful fruit bats we were watching, to magpie geese, turtles, and even whales.

One day, babe,” Steve said softly to me, “we’ll look back on wildlife harvesting projects and things like croc farming the same way we look back on slavery and cannibalism. It will be simply an unbelievable part of human history. We’ll get so beyond it that it will be something we will never, ever return to.” “We aren’t there yet,” I said. He sighed. “No, we aren’t.” I thought of the sign Steve had over his desk back home. It bore the word “warrior” and its definition: “One who is engaged in battle.” And it was a battle.

For two full days we picked green beans out in the field, under the molten rays of the summer sun, rows and rows of beans. And the more rows I picked alongside Serafino, the madder I grew inside, thinking about those charityless, virtueless, and benevolentless shitheads who have spread about this glorious land a melodyless song, a giftless song that accuses the immigrant of stealing their lunches—when in fact they are picking, packing, and purveying them.* Millions of immigrant workers—men, women, and children—ignorant, poor, yet so ripe with hope and determination and humility, even while bent over at the waist, picking America’s crops, servicing America’s insatiable appetite, shouldering the heaviest and most dangerous loads, not so much for themselves, but for America, daily, joyously, like Whitman’s song: “A song for occupations! / In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find / the developments,

Locally, you should be able to find decent Medjool dates in Middle Eastern grocery stores and many natural foods markets, but for the too-moist-to-be-sold-commercially varieties, you’ll probably have to shop online. I have tried dates from most of the major online retailers and always go back to ordering from the Date People, a small farm in California. I am averse to commercial endorsements, but I’ve never tasted consistently better dates from any other source (although Black Sphinx dates from Phoenix come close!). Date People’s annual harvest comes in around my birthday in October, and I always splurge as a present to myself and get a big box to put in our freezer.

In terms of diet, humans have paid a high price for the pleasure of enjoying a yearly harvest feast.

Whereas in the United States, the domestic duck still waddles about in the shadow of the immensely popular chicken, in other parts of the world—especially Asia—ducks are just as important as chickens in the lives and diets of humans.

In the 1960s, the only Asians at Piedmont Hills were the children of Japanese farm workers who harvested flowers and citrus and cherries. In the early ’70s, the first large wave of Vietnamese refugees arrived. This wave was composed of elites—high-powered doctors and politicians who had the economic means to escape. At first, the PHHS community loved the new Vietnamese students because they came with expensive educations and intellectual parents. They had astounding test scores and brought academic standards way up. Then in the ’80s, the boat people arrived, poor and desperate refugees who escaped with the clothes on their backs and spent time in camps in Malaysia and the Philippines. About 880,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States between 1975 and 1997, many of them at Camp Pendleton in California. More than 180,000 Vietnamese people now live in San Jose—the biggest Vietnamese population in any city outside Vietnam. In the ’90s, a massive population of Chinese and South Asian immigrants bearing H-1B work visas arrived to take jobs as engineers in blossoming Silicon Valley. By 1998, a third of all scientists and engineers in the area had come from somewhere else. Around this time there was also a shortage of teachers and nurses in America, and so came the wave of Filipinos who emigrated to help care for our young and infirm.

Nothing against fishing, but we think the sales process is a lot more like farming. You prepare the soil; you plant seeds; you water, weed, nurture, and cultivate. In other words, follow through. Not every seed takes root; it may be only one seed in ten, or one in twenty. Which connections will bear fruit, and when? It depends; different relationships and situations take different amounts of time. Just as with the farmer’s partnership with the soil, sun, and seasons, the exact timing is not up to you. What is up to you is the quality of your follow-through. But know this: if you prepare the soil well and are careful in your cultivation, you will reap a harvest—silos full.

That nucleus of new believers constituted the seed for the future. They had been planted by the apostolic team, and were expected to result in continued fruitfulness. This was achieved as those believers lived such good lives among the pagans that truth was revealed. When people see the truth lived out, they want to hear what we have to say. And what they hear makes sense because of what they have seen. The relevance of the truth becomes undeniable. The new crop is harvested in due season, but the mode of farming, this time, is very different from that practiced by an apostolic team. It involves tilling the soil, planting, cultivating, watering, and finally harvesting.

Let’s take the example of Raju, who owns two acres of land near Madurai. In theory, he grows rice in the winter when the northeast monsoon brings rain, and once again in late summer, when the Mullaiperiyar dam opens and brings water from Kerala. Raju has two children; his daughter, having finished her tenth-standard examinations, is working in a nearby textile mill. His son, his pride and joy, is studying in school. Raju hopes he will be a mechanic, or even an engineer. When asked why he doesn’t want his children to take up farming, he laughs. The rains did not come in the summer, so the water was not sufficient to plant the summer crop. The winter temperatures were hotter than usual, and one big downpour close to harvest time, a month later than usual, destroyed half his crop. Only those with no other choice should pursue farming, he says. Indeed, one of the most tragic effects of climate change is the triple whammy on agriculture: rising temperatures cause falling yields, water shortages make the yields worse in rain-fed areas, and when the rain does fall, it packs a real punch and damages crops.

Four Farmers Once upon a time, there were four farmers who lived beside each other: Farmer Fraidy, Farmer Flaky, Farmer Fancy, and Farmer Focused. Out of all these Farmers, only Farmer Focused had a huge harvest every year. Fraidy, Flaky, and Fancy always had very tiny harvests. Let me tell you why. Farmer Fraidy Farmer Fraidy doesn't plant too many seeds. Why? He's filled with fear. He's afraid that the seeds won't grow. Or if they grow, they won't bear fruit. Or if they bear fruit, no one will buy the fruit. He imagines the worst scenario. He's paralyzed by the question, "What if?" Such as, "What if there's a storm that will destroy my crops? What if there's a bug infestation? What if there's an alien invasion?" He entertains his fears so much, he plants very little seeds. Because of that, he has very little harvest. Farmer Flaky On the other hand, Farmer Flaky plants a lot of seeds but he's distracted. He goofs off in the middle of the season. He spends a lot of time on Facebook. He plays video games. He watches all kinds of telenovelas—Filipino, Korean, Mexican, and Martian. He goes off to Hong Kong to eat xiao long bao. In short, he neglects the farm. Many of the crops don't grow. Farmer Fancy This guy farms in the wrong way. He chooses the wrong seed, tills the soil in the wrong way, and harvests them in the wrong way, too. When other farmers give him suggestions on how to improve, he doesn't listen. He's simply too proud. And that's why his harvest is very small. These three Farmers are connected to the first Success Principle from Proverbs.

The concept shares elements with the Seasteading movement, a libertarian group of mega-rich preppers intent on building independent floating cities on the high seas. The Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by anarcho-capitalist (and Google software engineer) Patri Friedman, with funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, to ‘establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems’. Some of the ideas they plan to use include harvesting calcium carbonate from seawater to create 3D-printed ‘artificial coral’ cities of upside-down skyscrapers – ‘seascrapers’ – powered by oceanic geothermal energy. Some of this energy will be used to draw nutrients from deeper waters to the surface to grow seaweeds in farms worked on by ‘the poorest billion people on earth’, welcomed because ‘floating societies will require refugees to survive economically’. These floating utopias will ‘liberate humanity from politicians’ while solving the planet’s big problems, it is claimed. For the more sceptical among us, this smells dystopian, rather.

The country will starve, not next year, but this winter, unless a few of us act and act fast. There are no grain reserves left anywhere. With Nebraska gone, Oklahoma wrecked, North Dakota abandoned, Kansas barely subsisting—there isn’t going to be any wheat this winter, not for the city of New York nor for any Eastern city. Minnesota is our last granary. They’ve had two bad years in succession, but they have a bumper crop this fall—and they have to be able to harvest it. Have you had a chance to take a look at the condition of the farm-equipment industry? They’re not big enough, any of them, to keep a staff of efficient gangsters in Washington or to pay percentages to pull-peddlers. So they haven’t been getting many allocations of materials. Two-thirds of them have shut down and the rest are about to. And farms are perishing all over the country—for lack of tools. You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They’ve been spending more time fixing old tractors that can’t be fixed than plowing their fields. I don’t know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don’t know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.” There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men—and she knew what motive was still holding him to his job. “Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest. I’ve been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment. On credit. They’ve been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out. Selling it in the same way—illegally and on credit. But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I. Charity, hell! We’re helping producers—and what tenacious producers!—not lousy, mooching ‘consumers.’ We’re giving loans, not alms. We’re supporting ability, not need. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!

The last footfall dies into silence. The stillness tingles with the aftermath of noise. All around stand the new cornstacks, unfamiliar shadows, ramparts thrown up suddenly round the yard. An owl detaches itself silently from the darkness of a beam, swoops down into the moonlight and away, now white against a shadow, now black against the moon. A mouse scuttles somewhere in the straw. The gaunt shape of a binder stands in the corner, angular as a skeleton under its cloth. Its work is over until next year.

Yet even before agriculture was fully organized, people across the world – from Japan to Finland and the Americas – were raising monumental structures that were both sacred and social. The temples acted as calendars linked to celestial bodies, and people possibly just gathered there to celebrate successful harvests, then returned to their hunting-foraging life. In south-east Türkiye, at Göbekli Tepe, structures that looked like temples, pillars topped with sculpted foxes, snakes and scorpions, were built by hunter-gatherers who did not yet farm yet already shared religious rites.

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota. An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket. In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night. Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smoldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt; they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

Koch Agriculture first branched out into the beef business, and it did so in a way that gave it control from the ranch to the butcher’s counter. Koch bought cattle feedlots. Then it developed its own retail brand of beef called Spring Creek Ranch. Dean Watson oversaw a team that worked to develop a system of “identity preservation” that would allow the company to track each cow during its lifespan, allowing it over time to select which cattle had the best-tasting meat. Koch held blind taste tests of the beef it raised. Watson claimed to win nine out of ten times. Then Koch studied the grain and feed industries that supplied its feedlots. Watson worked with experts to study European farming methods because wheat farmers in Ukraine were far better at raising more grain on each acre of land than American farmers were. The Europeans had less acreage to work with, forcing them to be more efficient, and Koch learned how to replicate their methods. Koch bought a stake in a genetic engineering company to breed superyielding corn. Koch Agriculture extended into the milling and flour businesses as well. It experimented with building “micro” mills that would be nimbler than the giant mills operated by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. Koch worked with a start-up company that developed a “pixie dust” spray preservative that could be applied to pizza crusts, making crusts that did not need to be refrigerated. It experimented with making ethanol gasoline and corn oil. There were more abstract initiatives. Koch launched an effort to sell rain insurance to farmers who had no way to offset the risk of heavy rains. To do that, Koch hired a team of PhD statisticians to write formulas that correlated corn harvests with rain events, figuring out what a rain insurance policy should cost. At the same time, Koch’s commodity traders were buying contracts for corn and soybeans, learning more every day about those markets.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman and Ostap founded an organization called OWK. They handcrafted leaflets with thick pencils and distributed them across the city, sticking them to doors and walls. When an OGPU agent of Afros confronted Roman, he boldly stated, "I serve the revolution, comrade. What about you?" Later, Afros and Zhuk summoned the brothers to a commandeered house in the village square. There, Zhuk questioned if Roman wanted to be sent to Murmansk, which Roman refused. He argued that no kulaks were left in Ispas after the severe purge six weeks earlier. Therefore, they decided to form a group open to everyone, planning its first meeting for the next week. OWK, standing for 'Organization without Kulaks,' was envisioned by Roman as a collective for the non-wealthy farmers of Ispas. He believed that maintaining class struggle among Ukrainian farmers was difficult, as the categories changed with each harvest. Given the recent bad harvest and the absence of kulaks, Roman was unsure how to continue the class conflict as Zhuk had outlined. Nonetheless, he reassured Zhuk with a friendly smile about their commitment to removing the last anti-communist elements, thus establishing OWK. Jock insisted that true commitment meant joining collectivization. Roman recognized the inefficiency of small farms and was open to discussing it further, alluding to important details about the Lazar family's land.

The future of farming isn't just about growing food—it's about growing a mindset that nurtures the future, one harvest at a time.

Ukraine, March 1929 Roman founded an organization called OWK. He and Ostap made leaflets with their own hands, with the help of thick pencils, and distributed them all over the city, nailing them to doors and walls. When one of Afros' OGPO men stopped him on the street and asked about his actions, Roman replied, "I serve the revolution, comrade. And what are you doing?" The brothers were brought before Afros and Zhuk in the house they had confiscated in the village square. Zhuk asked if Roman wanted to be taken to Murmansk. Roman said no. He explained that apparently there were no kulaks left in Ispes after the concentrated purge six weeks ago. Therefore, Roman And Ostap decided to form an organization that anyone can join, and they are holding the first assembly next week. The organization is called OWK, the acronym for 'Organization without Kulaks'. "I even used the abominable Russian word, out of national solidarity with you and your friends, Comrade Zhuk," Roman said. "It is an organization of non-wealthy farmers, a definition that applies to the entire population that remained in Ispas. It is difficult to continue to maintain in Ukraine the class war between the successful farmer and the less successful farmer, in part because the classification changes from harvest to harvest. Kulak Mouser is the bane of the current harvest. And because the harvest was so bad and despite your laudable efforts, of course, there don't seem to be any kulaks left in our village. So we don't know exactly how to conduct the class war about which you spoke so eloquently a few weeks ago." Her novel to Jouk has a friendly smile. "We are deeply committed to purging the last of the anti-communist elements. And therefore - OW-K. "If you're serious, you'll participate in collectivization," said Jock. "I understand your point about the inefficiency of the small-scale farm, comrade," Roman said. "I am attentive to her. But listen to me until the end. The land of the Lazar family is far from the other farms, and it is impossible to connect it to them easily and create the collectivization, savings and cooperation that you strive for. So this is my proposal: my family and I will agree to meet your quota without collectivization. Let's show you how we work - with your help, maybe lend us a steel plow that expresses our new understanding and partnership? I'm sure it will work much better than our old wooden plows, and we'll do the rest. We will plow our land now, we will plant your wheat in August. We will work tirelessly for the cause and bring you the grain you demand. We will not give and we will not bargain.” "And in return?" "Nothing," Roman said. "In return we will continue to fatten horses and cows in peace." "You intend to pay other people to work in your wheat fields, Comrade Lazar?" asked Zhuk in a smooth voice. "Of course not," said Roman. "I know that even if I only have three horses, and I only pay two people to work for me, it means that I am a fat and lazy kulak, lower than a human pig. Then, as a founding member of OWK, I will have to destroy myself. So the answer is no. I will not pay anyone to work for me. Every person who passes through the fields will work for free, and that is the duty of all Ukrainians, right? As you told us we have to do to be counted for true patriots.

farm-to-table focuses on those singular tomatoes and carrots without considering the entire harvest. It

The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence. God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good.

I trust in the slow and natural process of learning to love and be loved by another person. I'd be lying if I said [my healthy relationship] was as exciting as the unhealthy relationships I'd had in the past. It wasn't. But I'd lost the taste for drama. The backside of Hollywood passion is disappointment and loneliness-- and more often than not, resentment and cynicism about the nature of love itself. My healthy relationship was more of a symphony than a pop song. Don't get me wrong. Love is wonderful and our season of getting to know each other was the harvest of a long season of farming. But true intimacy is just like that: it's the food you grow from well-tilled ground. And like most things good for us, it's an acquired taste.