Tending By Hand

Last week, as Mom and Steve were making our twice-monthly Wisconsin delivery route, they passed through some farm country near Menomonie. It was a bright spring day, and the crews were out spreading manure. Hurry, close the windows of the van! Black, liquid spew shot out from a huge tanker truck, while other enclosed tractors ran behind with enormous disc rigs, cutting the excrement into the bare ground. Undoubtedly, corn or soybean plantings were soon to follow this mechanized parade.

While this is a common spring sighting in rural Wisconsin, it’s important to note that this is not what is or has to be in order to grow food. Manure that can be hauled in a tanker truck has come from a lagoon pit, which comes from a confined, factory style of animal agriculture. It has sat in an anaerobic environment (without oxygen), which is known to be toxic and dangerous. Recently, we read in our regional agriculture newspaper of a dairy farmer who fell into his lagoon pit and almost died! Farmers, unfortunately, do die from this each year.

This scale and style of operation is what has been touted as necessary to “feed the world,” and the high debts and loss of soulful land connection that has followed in its wake has led to a steep increase in farmer depression and suicide. This is why there is such a great need to shift focus to “feeding the community,” with smaller, iterative, artisan farms. This is the method we live each day and model on our own family farm.

We have no manure lagoon, no tanker truck or massive folding discs. We don’t even have a tractor with an enclosed cab! Instead, we have huge compost piles from cleaning out the deep winter bedding packs in the barns and coops. While many lagoon operations collect the liquid manure through slats in the floor of the barn, our animals enjoy the cushion of their wood shaving and straw bedding. When removed at cleaning time, this bedding serves as the critical carbon element in the composting process. This paired with occasional turning of the pile creates not a tarry sludge but a richly black, loamy humus that looks more like dirt cake and smells of the richness of the earth. There is no stink. There is no grossness to it at all.

There is something to be said, as well, for growing at a human scale, where the farmer still tends the land primarily by hand. Studies have shown that the microbes in healthy soil in contact with our skin alleviates depression. It’s hard to gain that bonus in a mechanized food growing methodology! Just yesterday, we dug the very last of our overwintering carrots, using garden forks to pull away the straw mulch and dig deeply into the cool soil below, popping up bright orange carrots and a whole host of happy earthworms. Even hand-sized mechanization like a tiller will destroy worm populations in your garden—essential, selfless workers that are critical to agricultural soil health.

When you think about feeding your community, rather than taking on the full burden of feeding the world, the matrix can shift from a crop mentality to a garden mentality. In a garden, we look at the interrelationship of plants, of creating a diverse, shifting, symphonic arrangement of growth and nourishment. The biomass of mulch becomes next season’s turned-in organic matter, improving aeration, water retention, and microbe health. Toads and frogs and friendly spiders and birds find shelter and food there. There is a beauty to it and a filling of the heart as the garden blooms and prospers. There is the treasure hunt of harvesting by hand. The land is renewed, not drained of life and energy.

When tending by hand, at the human scale, mouths are fed and souls are nourished. Plants, animals, and people are individuals, not statistical numbers. Relationships matter, and with direct relationships comes an increase in accountability. And, with that comes the foundations of trust.

Did we feel trust in the black spew being ground into the pulverized dirt on that delivery trip? No, we feared chemical and biological harm from the toxic way that factory farm animals are raised. Those confined animals also suffer from depression and anxiety due to the unnatural conditions. They too have been denied connection to the natural world—digging in the dirt, eating fresh grass, romping in the pasture. Such pastoral ideals are a distant dream, if a dream at all in these situations.

I want my food to have dug in the dirt, romped in the pasture, and sunk roots into compost-rich soils. I wanted my food to have been tended and respected. I want to make food and farming choices that support a community model, not a commodity model of growing and raising how we nourish each other. I want to see that option survive and thrive going forward.

Tending the land by hand, tending our relationships with each other—this is how we can transform the landscape. That landscape is all around us, but it is also within each of us, and both worlds need and deserve tending with care, compassion, and hope. Join me! See you down on the farm sometime.