Author: rickpace1

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Mary Berry in Conversation

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A video from December 2016:

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Mary Berry in Conversation

Some phrases:

With regard to our traditional energy economy…The party is over! (Wes)

With regard to our economy…we accept no limits…an economy built on explosives and toxins. (Wendell)

With regard to the local food movement…it has been going on for 40 years and the divide between urban and rural has grown greater. (Mary)

With regard to a future economy…Developing an economy as a way of taking proper care. (Wendell)

Lastly, Wendell had a very nice thought on ‘natural integrity’.

Agriculture’s Role in 21st Century American Social Reform

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In our partner meeting this morning we were having an interesting discussion on a recent New York Times article.

Why Rural America Voted for Trump

The author states his insight came from…

….a 2015 pre-caucus stop in Pella by J. C. Watts, a Baptist minister raised in the small town of Eufaula, Okla., who was a Republican congressman from 1995 to 2003, to begin to understand my neighbors — and most likely other rural Americans as well.

“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.

“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”

He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”

Watts’ statement, for me, was an odd construction.

Yes, many conservative religions believe in a fundamentally flawed human.

The generalization about Democrats was strange. Please let me know the religion that states we are born good and ‘create God’ (although I think a good bit of our societal interest in yoga practice is based upon a misconception about Eastern religions ‘creating God’…allowing American practitioners to interpret meditation as mind/body/spirit individualistic self-absorption).

The article goes on to discuss different conceptions of personal moral responsibility…or the lack of personal moral responsibility (blaming others for personal shortcomings).

Other than the article pointing out the author’s amazingly shallow knowledge of his neighbors, I found little insight.

What it did generate in our partner meeting was a discussion of Western religion’s preoccupation with good and bad, right and wrong.

There are certainly broad ‘truths’, and I admire certain conservative religious ministers/writers for their ability to sternly profess Biblical truths.

HOWEVER, we have a ‘hhhhuge’ social problem that results from our hyper-individualistic society. Professing Biblical truths (or for that manner any truths) meets resistance and belligerence with a selfish, thoughtless individualist.

We are not – in our present society – going to solve the enormous problem of thoughtlessness and personal amorality by ‘teaching the truth’.

Here is where agriculture becomes critical….we can use food, food preparation, nutrition as a ‘remedy’.

Two months ago I spent much of a day with the relatively new President of my undergraduate engineering school. For over 35 years I’ve been an alum agnostic…no involvement. Although I highly respected aspects of my undergraduate education I came to not respect the engineering ethic…so had never practiced engineering.

The meeting arose because I received an alumni magazine talking about the School’s interest in sustainability. A brief email exchange led me to campus.

I had wanted to talk about the ethic of the engineering curriculum, but found the President preoccupied with renovations to the Student Union and efforts to enhance the food program with both improved nutrition and a more green, sustainable operations plan.

It quickly became evident that he had determined that the most viable method to improve the ethic of the School was to improve the food program for students. I think it gave him a way to engage students, faculty, alumni, donors in an active discussion about ‘what the heck are we doing’ and ‘what the heck are we teaching’…without meeting the hyper-individualistic belligerence to ethical changes in the curriculum that arise from examining truths and repenting for past industrial engineering ‘sins’.

Agriculture and food are intellectual gateways to culture…and we sorely need a culture.

Sexual/Gender Identity and Agriculture

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Through some research and reading I’ve been doing on moral, ethical, and religious thought related to agriculture I have come across a number of discussions on sexual/gender identity…and a language system that is evolving to discuss sex in politics.

From a sexual human rights website:

Sexual orientation

An inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people.

Gender identity

One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.

Gender expression

External appearance of one’s gender identity, usually expressed through behavior, clothing, haircut or voice, and which may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being either masculine or feminine.

Transgender

An umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth. Being transgender does not imply any specific sexual orientation. Therefore, transgender people may identify as straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.

Gender dysphoria

Clinically significant distress caused when a person’s assigned birth gender is not the same as the one with which they identify. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the term – which replaces Gender Identity Disorder – “is intended to better characterize the experiences of affected children, adolescents, and adults.”

Citations of the term dysphoria in Google books database.

Dysphoria is a state of unease or general dissatisfaction with life.

I also find that there is an increasing amount of academic writing redefining the meaning of gender. Traditionally, gender has been described as the state of being male or female…in essence a direct link to human sexual biology. Currently, you can find discussions of the definition of gender that are extensive and take the position that gender is a social construct.

I grew up spending a great deal of time in horse country Kentucky. Long before dysphoria came into use folks have been ‘genetically modifying’ horses (and many other animals) to suit their human needs/desires/social constructs.

Agriculture has also genetically modified seeds to an enormous extent to suit their human needs/desires/social constructs.

How do we, as a society and a community, evolve ethically, morally, and religiously given our current willingness to profoundly alter the biological characteristics of plants, animals, and ourselves?

How can we know with any certainty what we are creating?

How do we evaluate the risks we are taking?

Do we know with certainty that we are not creating catastrophic biological conditions for Earth?

Tilth Association

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David DeFrancesco just sent an interesting note about the term ’tilth’ and the northwest Tilth Association.

First of all, tilth gets us ‘along the path’ to renewing the cultural nature of agriculture.

From the Tilth Association website:
The people who started the Tilth Association first met on July 1st, 1974, at a symposium in Spokane entitled “Agriculture for a Small Planet.” One of the featured panelists was Kentucky farmer, poet and writer Wendell Berry, who spoke forcefully about the culture of agriculture. 

In his speech Berry described the loss of the traditional farm economy and the destruction of rural communities. He was blunt in detailing the impending collapse of rural America, and he linked the “drastic decline in the farm population” with “the growth of a vast, uprooted, dependent and unhappy urban population.”

“Our urban and rural problems have largely caused each other,” he said. “My point is that food is a cultural, not a technological product. A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its destruction invites calamity.”

“If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility of strong agricultural communities, we will lose it altogether. And then” he concluded, “we will not only invoke calamity, we will deserve it.”

The ‘now complete’ moral and economic collapse of rural America and the traditional middle class has been starkly evident in the recent American election.

How morally and religiously responsible people act to restore what has collapsed will set the course of Earth.

A Small Vegetable Operation in Western Massachusetts with Horse Power

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NPR Article

An interesting article on a vegetable farm at a small scale using work horses.

Some comments that David DeFrancesco and I will elaborate in future posts:

  1. It is our experience that there are carefully made pieces of equipment that can enhance production and environmental health without damage or externalized problems created by the making of the equipment…much of the equipment is not American in design or manufacture.
  2. Scale of farm is critical to viable economies…so they are struggling at a small scale even though highly productive…and even though they work long hours.
  3. It seems they have become very integral to the community with the CSA…wonderful and loving.
  4. I wonder what harvest/picking tools they use?…It is back-killing work. I would quibble with the article in that both writing and photography leave out the ‘hard stuff’.

Note the picture of the family – the parents and children. They remind me of past Kentucky farm relatives and friends in their leanness and spirit.

Order of Existence

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Over the past few years my colleagues and I have drawn from our own experiences, research materials, knowledge of other colleagues/acquaintances – as well as life and farming intuition – to develop what we first titled ‘ A Handbook for Agro-ecological Practices on Specialty Farms’.

In a larger context (over the past 20 years) we’ve worked with colleagues, farmers, scientist, economist, etc. to provide tools and methods to evaluate land and land use. Those methods and tools, primarily scientific and technical, have been designed to allow a more conscious and comprehensive ethic for land use decisions.

The interest in our work has been narrow and limited…..and I think there are numerous cultural conditions which explain the limited interest.

Since July of this year, I see our past work in a much different light. Recent political, economic, and personal events have changed my perception. Those events have also given the work a more compelling validity.

As a young person, my father had a printing and small publishing business. His typesetter, Joseph Dickson, spent a good bit of his life working on a volume based upon his belief that the Book of Revelations was – at its heart – a farmer’s almanac.

Ever since that experience I have  often interpreted the Gospels as metaphors for nature (and the workings of nature).

I have come to see our agro-ecological work as a very particular ‘order of existence’.

Our work is an ethical set of behaviors and practices within a specific societal situation (our community).

We have worked diligently toward defined, justified beliefs – rather than opinion.

The knowledge we derive cannot be generalized. It is location specific.

The methods for deriving the behaviors and practices, however, could be used in any location. The resulting ‘order of existence’ will vary dramatically based upon local conditions. There will also be certain practice truths that will remain relevant to diverse locations.

Our work is both agricultural and religious. It respects Berry’s Solving for Pattern in Agriculture. It holds possibilities for rural communities.

Knowledge Informing Affection

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I’ve been doing research, readings, and some meetings in search of an approach that respects scientific knowledge, knowledge development, historical agricultural intuition, agro-ecology…and affection, love, and reasonable compassion.

It has been driven out of a dissatisfaction with much of current industrial agriculture as well as some current agricultural jargon…. organic, sustainable, bio-dynamic, resilience, externalities….. and a few other terms I find troublesome cliches.

Also, I simply don’t like ‘fancy’ language.

A few of the previous weblog posts begin to address this concern.

Recently I’ve concentrated on a few sources/conversations that begin to identify a path:

  1. The writings and sermons of Dr. Russell Moore, whom I’ve previously mentioned…and, by extension, the Bible.
  2. Review of past writings by Wendell Berry…particularly Life is a Miracle.
  3. Conversations and an exchange of writings with the new President of my undergraduate engineering school concerning the engineering curriculum and engineering ethics….and the straightforward recognition that perhaps the best method to improve an ‘industrial’ engineering curriculum is through the student’s food services.
  4. Some research in the fields of psychiatry and psychology.

Three comments:

  1. Scientific knowledge, although extremely important, is severely limited.
  2. Love and affection are sound pillars for human action.
  3. Humans are deeply flawed moral beings.

An agriculture based upon ‘knowledge informing affection’…and acknowledging that science, truth, data, etc. are best utilized as information for affection…seems worth pursuing.

Playing the Long Game of Cultural Renewal

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I first became aware of Dr. Russell Moore two months ago….saw a link to a speech he gave in October titled Can the Religious Right be Saved?

He is Southern Baptist and holds the position of ethicist…President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

It was a bit before the Presidential Election and I was morally appalled at the discourse of our Presidential candidates. I also was appalled by seeing evangelicals and other religious conservatives actively supporting (and apologizing for) morally reprehensible behavior.

The speech was about 45 minutes and – by the end – I was riveted to every word. He was knowledgeable, intelligent, caring. He also spoke to my beliefs about culture and character.

His speech contained the following vision on the future institutional needs of religions:

It will mean institutions that have the vision, and the financial resources, to play a long game of cultural renewal, rather than allowing themselves to be driven by the populist passions of the moment. More than that, it will mean a religious conservatism that sees the Church as more important than the state, the conscience as more important than the culture, and one that knows the difference between the temporal and the eternal. We will make mistakes. We will need course corrections. We must remind ourselves that we are not inquisitors but missionaries, that we can be Americans best when we are not Americans first.

I hope my work is about genuine behavior – specifically in care of the land, preparation of food, and awareness of nutrition. It also represents a long game.

I am interested in small, direct, neighborly economic development.

I believe farm and food enterprises represent the most integral economic connections between land/people/living things.

I agree with Dr. Moore’s vision.

In the form he eloquently defines, I do not see the culture and character transformation as limited to conservative religions.

Lucille and Livestock

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Due to ‘circumstances beyond my control’ I am, beginning about a month ago, the sole caregiver for a wonderful dog.

Lucille is a mix of Irish Setter and Poodle. She is 10 years old (and we’ve been together since she was a puppy).

She is beautiful…with a lovely personality….a great companion.

I’ve been bringing her to the office …which she seems to enjoy…as she continues to make new friends.

She has been a wonderful gift…and a privilege to care for her.

When you search Google for livestock a definition pops up:

farm animals regarded as an asset

I grew up on the edge of farm country in Kentucky. I was a city kid (mostly) but spent time with dogs and farm animals as a child.

…never as a child did I see a farm animal as a commodity. Food, yes. Financially valuable, yes.

But not a commodity.

Did not matter if it was the goofy chicken or the super smart herding dog, they were our companions.

My great grandfather on mother’s side and my grandfather had a large truck farm – with pigs and chickens. They slaughtered animals with names and personalities…and prayed the Bible at dinner to mourn the dead and give gratitude for the food.

It was simple,  small,  dignified, and lovely.

Just like Lucille.