July182009
This Cheese Tastes Like Civilization
When I said I was going to work on an organic farm for the summer, somebody asked, “Are you going to be one with nature?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I’m also going to find myself and achieve ultimate zen.”
That said, I now realize just how much farming—even organic farming—is not about being one with nature. It’s about tricking nature, bending it to do what you want. The cows on the farm are “free-range” and we don’t use any pesticides on the garden, but I keep being struck by how much at our wholly “organic” farm does not belong in nature. Some examples:
-I asked the farmer how often the chickens lay eggs. A good egg-layer will produce about 300 eggs a year, he said. What bird lays an egg almost every day? I wondered. Then I remembered—we bred them to do that.
-The farmer’s wife’s uncle, who visited last week, started telling us how the best tomatoes require “tobacco tea.” You get some of that pipe tobacco that’s pure leaves, he said, boil it, let it sit for a few days, put that on your tomatoes. The farmer countered this with descriptions of the “horse hooch juice” someone sells at the farmers market. Organic? Totally. Natural? Well…
-One day I picked an orange paint chip out of the compost I had just spread over a new row in the garden and showed it to the farmer.
“From the tractor bucket,” he said.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Think they use organic paint?”
The point is, no tractors in nature.
There’s really nothing “natural” about even the most organic farming practices. In “nature”, plants don’t grow in homogeneous rows and animals can’t depend on a constant supply of food. Every seed we put in the ground is the result of thousands of years of human cultivation. Farming is not about plucking the fruit of the earth’s bountiful harvest. It’s an art, really, a craft. Agriculture, after all, was the original form of culture.
