One-Straw Revolutionary

Long, long ago, hip folks in the Beatles era were jabbering about Masanobu Fukuoka’s book, The One-Straw Revolution.  It explained how he grew healthy food via natural farming, a low budget, low impact approach.  On his farm in Japan, Fukuoka was growing grain, fruit, and vegetables without plowing, cultivating, chemicals, compost, fertilizer, fossil energy, erosion, pruning, or regular weeding.  He farmed like this for more than 25 years, and his yields were comparable to those at conventional farms.

The Japanese edition of his book was published in 1975, at a time when oil shocks had spurred interest in energy efficiency.  When the English version was published in 1978, it was an international smash hit, and Fukuoka became a celebrity.  Larry Korn was the book’s translator.  He’s a California lad who worked on Fukuoka’s farm for more than two years.  Now, in 2015, Korn has published One-Straw Revolutionary, which is the subject of this review.  It describes Fukuoka the man, and his philosophy, with glowing praise.

Korn detests conventional industrial farming, because it has so many drawbacks.  A bit less troublesome is organic farming done on an industrial scale.  At the positive end of the spectrum, he sees Fukuoka’s natural farming as very close to the ideal, both environmentally and philosophically.  A bit less wonderful than natural farming are permaculture and old-fashioned small-scale organic farming.

The ideal is something like the California Indians that were fondly described in M. Kat Anderson’s book, Tending the Wild.  They were wild hunter-gatherers who included wild plant seeds in their diet.  They devoted special care to the wild plant species that were important to their way of life.  Most folks would consider this to be mindful foraging — tending, not farming.

These Indians did not till the soil, and were not warlike.  Nobody owned the land.  There were no masters or servants.  There was no market system or tax collectors.  They had a time-proven method for living, and this knowledge was carefully passed from generation to generation.  The Indians were wild, free, and living sustainably — in the original meaning of the word.  When the Spanish invaders arrived, they saw these Indians as lazy, because they worked so little.

Fukuoka, on the other hand, resided in a densely populated industrial civilization, which was eagerly adapting American style industrial agriculture.  While the Indians foraged in a healthy wild ecosystem, Fukuoka worked on an ecosystem that had been heavily altered by centuries of agriculture.  He raised domesticated plants and animals.  Fukuoka was experimenting with radically unconventional methods, and had no traditions or mentors to guide him.

He practiced natural farming on one acre (0.4 ha) of grain field, and ten acres (4 ha) devoted to a mix of fruit trees and vegetables.  When Korn arrived in 1974, Fukuoka was assisted by five apprentices, who were not at all lazy, and rarely had a day off.  Cash had to be generated to purchase necessities and pay taxes, so surplus food had to be produced.  Food shipped off to cities carried away phosphorus, potassium, and other minerals that never returned to the farm’s soil.  Thus, his natural farming was quite different from California tending.

On the plus side, Fukuoka’s experiment benefitted from rich soil and generous rainfall — especially during the growing season.  Vegetables could be grown year round in the mild climate, and two crops of grain could be harvested each year.  On the down side, few succeeded in duplicating his success, even in Japan.  It took years to get the operation working, requiring extra servings of intuition and good luck.  Korn warned, “In most parts of North America and the world the specific method Mr. Fukuoka uses would be impractical.” 

In the natural farming mindset, the strategy should not be guided by intellect; nature should run the show.  Fukuoka talked to plants, asking them for guidance.  When he planted the orchard, he added a mixture of 100 types of seeds to wet clay, made seed balls, and tossed the balls on the land.  Seeds included grains, vegetables, flowers, clover, shrubs, and trees.  Nature decided what thrived and what didn’t.  Within a few years, a jungle of dense growth sorted itself out.  But sometimes nature gave him a dope slap.  In the early days, Fukuoka allowed nature to manage an existing orchard, and he was horrified to watch 400 trees die from insects and disease.

My work focuses on ecological sustainability, at a time when the original meaning of sustainability has largely been abandoned, and replaced by sparkly marketing hype.  I go on full alert when I see “sustainable agriculture.”  In my book, What is Sustainable, I took a look at what Korn calls “indigenous agriculture,” which is often imagined to be sustainable.

California tending was far different from the intensive corn farming on the other side of the Rockies, which led to soil depletion, erosion, population growth, health problems, warfare, and temporary civilizations like Cahokia.  In his book Indians of North America, Harold E. Driver estimated that less than half of North America was inhabited by farmers, but 90 to 95 percent of Native Americans ate crop foods, indicating that farm country was densely populated.  In corn country, defensive palisades surrounded many villages.

In 2015, humankind is temporarily in extreme overshoot, as the cheap energy bubble glides toward its sunset years, and the climate change storms are moving in.  Obviously, feeding seven billion sustainably is impossible.  At the same time, highly unsustainable industrial farming cannot continue feeding billions indefinitely.  It’s essential that young folks have a good understanding of ecological sustainability, and our education system is doing a terrible job of informing them.

The California Indians provide an important example of a vital truth.  When voluntary self-restraint was used to keep population below carrying capacity, people could live sustainably in a wild ecosystem via nothing more complex than hunting and foraging.  They had no need for farming, with its many headaches, backaches, and heartaches.

Korn’s book got exciting near the end.  Farming was just one facet of Fukuoka’s dream.  As a young man, he attended an agriculture college, and then endured a dreary job as a plant inspector.  His mind overloaded, his health fell apart, and he nearly died.  In 1937, he had a beautiful vision, quit his job, and went back home to the farm. 

In his vision, he suddenly realized that all life was one, and sacred.  Nature was whole, healthy, and perfect — and nothing our ambitious intellects imagined could improve this harmonious unity in any way.  Humans do not exist in a realm outside of nature, no matter what our teachers tell us.  Heaven is where your feet are standing.

The world of 1937 was a filthy, crazy, overpopulated train wreck, and this was largely thanks to science, dogmas, and philosophies.  Intellect alienated us from our “big life” home.  Civilization had created a dysfunctional world that was far too complex.  The lives of most people were no longer intimately connected to the natural world.

In agriculture, the herd of experts insisted that plowing, pruning, cultivating, chemicals, and weeding were mandatory for success.  One after another, Fukuoka abandoned these required tasks, made some needed adjustments, and didn’t crash.  His farm got simpler and healthier.

No other animals harm themselves by pursuing science.  Fukuoka realized that people should be like birds.  “Birds don’t run around carefully preparing fields, planting seeds, and harvesting food.  They don’t create anything… they just receive what is there for them with a humble and grateful heart.”  Bingo!

How can we reorient to nature?  “For most of us, that process begins by unlearning most of the things we were taught when we were young.”  The healing process requires abandoning many, many beliefs and behaviors that our culture encourages.  We need to waste less, spend less, and earn less, take only what we need, and nothing more.  “Wearing simple clothing, eating simple food, and living a humble, ordinary life elevates the human spirit by bringing us closer to the source of life.”

Korn, Larry, One-Straw Revolutionary, Chelsea Green, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Professor David Montgomery’s book Dirt provides a fascinating discussion about an extremely precious substance that we can’t live without, but treat like dirt.  He begins with an intimate explanation of what dirt is, how it’s formed, and how it’s destroyed — in plain, simple English. 

Then, he proceeds to lead us on an around-the-world tour, spanning many centuries, to examine the various methods that societies have devised for mining their soils, and diminishing their future via agriculture.

The book is impressively thorough, and it’s likely to blow more than a few minds, but the voice is a bit soft.  A neutral tone is mandatory for textbooks, and this may encourage casual readers to be less concerned about the future than they should be.  Connect the dots.

From a human perspective, soil is a non-renewable resource, because new soil is created very slowly, a process often measured on a geological timeframe.  For example, the soils of the Mediterranean basin were largely destroyed by 2,000 years ago, and they remain wrecked today.  They are quite likely to remain wrecked for many, many thousands of years.  Much of the region that once fed millions is a desert today.

If smoking a single pack of cigarettes reliably caused a painful death by cancer within weeks, nobody would smoke, because it’s clearly not smart.  But cancer normally takes decades to become apparent, and by the time you learn about the tumor, it’s too late to make smart decisions.  Life does not have an undo button.

It’s a similar story with societies that take up the dirty habit of agriculture, which is almost always fatal.  Once you get started, it’s nearly impossible to quit, because it’s unbelievably addictive.  Yet we continue to act like it’s a cool thing to do, because it’s a clever way to acquire trade trinkets and status, and all the other cool societies are doing it, too.  The disease often advances so slowly, over the course of generations, that nobody realizes the mistake.  But once the soil is ruined, it’s too late to become smart.  There is no wonder cure.  Game over.

Eventually, Montgomery’s world tour brings us to the United States, where the white invaders imported their dirty habit.  In Europe, many farmers were quite careful to do what they could to slow erosion, and improve fertility, using time-proven techniques, because starvation was the alternative.  American settlers promptly threw these prudent practices overboard, because they were time-consuming, and because there was an unbelievable supply of fertile soil that was readily available.  In the New World, dirt was a disposable commodity.

Settlers could get rich quick by raising tobacco and cotton.  A field of rich virgin soil could support three or four crops of tobacco, and then it would be abandoned.  It was cheaper to pack up, move on, and clear new fields than it was to manure the fields they had already cleared.  This careless attitude fueled an explosion of erosion and deforestation.  One gully near Macon, Georgia was 50 feet deep, 200 feet across, and 300 yards long.  Soil exhaustion was a primary driving force behind the westward expansion of the colonists.  Rape and run agriculture seems to have set the mold for the emerging American mindset.

In the twentieth century, when farmers bought millions of big, powerful machines, the 10,000 year war on soils mutated into a new and horrifying form.  Erosion rates skyrocketed to levels never before believed to be possible, leading to catastrophes like the Dust Bowl.  Montgomery says it like this: “Continued for generations, till-based agriculture will strip soil right off the land as it did in ancient Europe and the Middle East.  With current agricultural technology though, we can do it a lot faster.”

Here’s a line that made me jump: “Everything else — culture, art, and science — depends upon adequate agricultural production.”  Like air and water, food is essential for our survival.  Without food, our entire techno-wonderland turns into fairy dust and blows away.  We can’t live without it, but at the same time we are rapidly destroying what makes food possible — because profits today are more important than existence tomorrow.  Sorry kids!

On a bright note, Montgomery gives us a quick tour of Tikopia, a society on a tiny island that is one of the few exceptions to the rule.  They seem to have devised a sustainable form of agriculture that majors in agroforestry (food-producing trees).  They combined this with a draconian method for maintaining a sustainable population, which was far less painful and destabilizing than the effects of over breeding. 

Looking toward the future, Montgomery foresees a large number of serious problems.  Explosive population growth continues.  We are moving beyond the era of cheap and abundant energy, and this will continuously drive the price of everything upward.  Climate change is likely to deliver unwanted surprises.  Widespread destruction of soils continues, and simply converting to organic farming will not fix this.  Nor will no-till technology, which will eventually be forced into extinction by rising energy costs, or herbicide-resistant weeds.  We are running out of tricks for increasing productivity.  The end of the chemical fertilizer game is inevitable, and it will largely be replaced with recycled sewage — a priceless treasure that we are now throwing away via expensive, energy-guzzling treatment plants.

Our current system is simply not up to the task of feeding the world in the coming decades, because it’s a design that self-destructs.  We try to force the ecosystem to adapt to our food production technology, and this doesn’t work.  Instead, we need to make farming adapt to the needs of the ecosystem.  In short, we need a serious revolution in the way we do agriculture — a new philosophy that gives top priority to the health of the land, not to maximizing income by any means necessary.  How likely is this?  Don’t hold your breath.

The subject of this book centers on soil erosion.  In the good old days of muscle-powered organic agriculture, soil destruction took a thousand years to ruin a civilization, on average.  Industrial agriculture is much quicker.  It now keeps seven billion people alive by using soil to convert fossil energy into food.  But the clock is running out on cheap energy, and industrial agriculture has an expiration date.  This will give birth to a new agricultural revolution — the return to muscle-powered farming, on severely depleted soils, fertilized once again by nutrient-rich sewage.  Farm productivity will plummet.  We are close to peak food production now.

Montgomery, David R., Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007.

NOTE: If you find this subject interesting, the first edition of Topsoil and Civilization (1955) is available for free online as a PDF download.  It follows a parallel course, but provides a different banquet of information, while coming to similar conclusions:

http://www.soilandhealth.org/copyform.aspx?bookcode=010113

New Roots for Agriculture

Wes Jackson was born in Kansas farm country, in a place where his grandfather homesteaded.  The land of his birth was being destroyed by agriculture, and this drove him crazy.  Wes and his wife Dana created The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.  Their mission was to create sustainable agriculture, a noble 100-year project that he describes in New Roots for Agriculture.  This book is a great primer on farming — short, smart, and easy to read.

Our education system excels at graduating scholars who are blissfully ignorant about the food they eat.  Opponents of our truly horrid system for the mass production of meat, milk, and eggs often fail to recognize that our system for producing tofu, bean sprouts, and spinach is seriously defective as well.  Almost everything we eat has ecological costs far in excess of the price we are charged, and blissful ignorance keeps us marching down the wrong path.

Jackson has profound admiration for the Amish and Mennonites — America’s finest farmers — because they are religious about farming with exceptional care.  But their soil is not safe from normal hard rains, it washes away, too.  It’s heartbreaking.  No matter how hard you try, it fails.  It’s impossible to win when your primary tool is a plow (and no-till has its own serious drawbacks).

Jackson doesn’t restrict his scorn to modern stuff — agribusiness, pesticides, GM crops, the Green Revolution.  He condemns agriculture in its entirety.  It was a disaster 10,000 years ago, and it’s far, far worse today.  He has referred to it as an “accident,” but one that can be repaired.  We would be in far better shape today if we had continued dining on healthy wild foods, instead of shifting to growing crops on tilled fields.  He sees till agriculture as “a global disease” that is especially severe in the US, and “unless this disease is checked, the human race will wilt like any crop.”

Agriculture is a huge monster with a thousand heads, but it’s most terrible offense may be soil destruction, because it is largely irreparable.  Terrestrial life requires soil, and agriculture is tirelessly sending our finest soils to the bottom of the ocean.  It’s bad, and every farmer knows this.  Unfortunately, the system is designed to reward productivity, not ecosystem health.  Soil worshippers quickly go bankrupt.  Jackson is telling us nothing new, but he is shining a bright light on things that everyone should be thinking about at every mealtime.

There are a few exceptions to the rule.  In Japan and portions of northern Europe, agriculture has been relatively benign, because of unusual combinations of soil types, topography, and climate patterns — not superior farming techniques.  But almost everywhere else, it is a destructive process.  Note that neither of the two exceptions comes close to feeding their own populations.

Looking out his office window, Jackson can observe both heaven and hell — prairie and wheat field.  The prairie is beautifully adapted to the ecosystem, and suffers no erosion problems.  It actually builds healthy new soil.  The wheat field produces more calories per acre, but it is a soil mining operation, an extractive enterprise with no long term future.  Jackson’s core principle is that “no interest or value should be put above the health of the land.”  Let’s make that our planetary motto.

He believes that truly sustainable agriculture is possible.  Annual plants, like corn, wheat, and soy, need to be started from seed each year, which requires annual tilling, and results in significant soil erosion.  Perennial plants survive for a number of years.  Jackson recommends that we switch to perennials for grain production, because this would more closely resemble a prairie, and cause less erosion. 

In his plan, fields would contain a blend of different species of seed-bearing plants, not a monoculture of genetically identical plants.  The system would improve soil quality, maintain its own fertility, conserve water, have few problems with pests and diseases, require lower energy inputs, be more drought tolerant, and produce as much grain as conventional agriculture.  Because yields are highest in the first year, and then taper off, the prairie would have to be plowed and replanted periodically.  He estimates a five to ten year replant cycle.

It’s a radical idea that is much easier said than done.  To enable mechanical harvesting, the mix of species would have to ripen at the same time.  The mix would have to be fine-tuned for every microclimate and soil scenario.  The Land Institute is decades away from having a finished product, and there are no guarantees that it will ever reliably work as intended.  The Soviets had a similar idea back in the 1920’s.  They did decades of research, and then abandoned the project.  They claimed tremendous successes, but refused to show them to outsiders.

Jackson has some concerns about his vision.  The accident of agriculture began when we believed that we could cleverly control and manipulate nature.  And now, he’s attempting to correct the problem by using the same approach — controlling and manipulating nature.  That bothers him.  Sustainable agriculture must live in peace with the ecosystem, not replace the natural ecosystem with a chemical-soaked, soil-mining food factory.

This book was written over 30 years ago, when gas was 30 cents a gallon, and people thinking about Peak Oil numbered in the dozens.  In that era of innocence, you could still dream about plowing up the whole farm every five to ten years, and harvesting prairie-like grain fields with gas guzzling farm equipment.  Because Jackson’s plan requires the use of industrial machinery, it isn’t genuinely sustainable.  It can’t be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years, because it is dependent upon the existence of industrial civilization.

If you’re going to dream huge, magnificent, revolutionary dreams for a 100 year project, why not throw in radical population reduction, too?  An unsustainable population is, of course, completely unsustainable.  A much smaller herd would cause much less harm, and nothing is impossible when you’re dreaming. 

And why not dream of a cuisine where grains are not the foundation of the diet?  In another book, Jackson wrote that grains are core to the human evolutionary heritage.  Are they?  Many cultures throughout human history have done just fine with no grain foods at all.  Indeed, cultures that major in domesticated grains have a strong tendency to be over-crowded, belligerent, and suicidal.  Please help yourself to the nuts, berries, and grasshoppers. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about Richard Manning’s vision of returning corn country to tall grass prairie, ripping out the fences, moving in the buffalos, elk, and wolves, and turning our bakeries into steak houses.  God was in fine form when she created prairie ecosystems, they were an absolutely brilliant design.  Ripping these perfect ecosystems to pieces with moldboard plows, planting grain fields, and exterminating the thriving community of wildness was the opposite of intelligent.

In his 1987 book, Altars of Unhewn Stone, Jackson described a 6,400 acre prairie ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas that had never been plowed.  It supported 1,700 cattle during the grazing season, and it was mostly managed by a single cowboy.  Fertilizer was never used.  The use of fossil fuel was tiny.  Overgrazing was carefully avoided, and soil erosion was at normal levels for a healthy prairie.  If we replaced the cattle with buffalo, and gave them free range, would this be better for the land than perennial grains?  Could buffalo hunting be harmlessly performed for the next 2,000 years?

Jackson, Wes, New Roots for Agriculture, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1985. 

Against the Grain

Agriculture is one of humankind’s most troublesome experiments, and it is now hopelessly in debt.  It has borrowed soil, water, and energy that it can never repay, and never intended to repay — burning up tomorrow to feed today.  We know it, we keep doing it, and we have dark hallucinations about feeding billions more.  Agriculture has become civilization’s tar baby. 

Richard Manning is among my favorite writers.  He slings snappy lines like: “There is no such thing as sustainable agriculture.  It does not exist.”  Or, “The domestication of wheat was humankind’s greatest mistake.”  And he’s the opposite of a raving nutjob.  In his book, Against the Grain, he hoses off the thick crust of mythical balderdash and twaddle, and presents us with a clear-eyed history of agriculture, warts and all (especially the warts).  Everyone everywhere should read it, and more than once.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture came into existence in several different locations, independently.  These were lands having an abundant supply of wild foods.  The residents had no need to roam for their chow, so they settled down and built permanent homes and villages.  Over time, with the growing number of mouths, the food supply became strained, and this inspired a habit of seed planting.  As usual, nobody foresaw the unintended consequences of a brilliant new trick, and an innocent mistake ended up going viral and ravaging the entire planet.  Whoops!

Grains are potent foods, because they are rich in calories, and they can be stored for extended periods of time.  Herds of domesticated animals and granaries packed with hoarded seeds came to be perceived as private property, which led to the concept of wealth, and its dark shadow, poverty.  Wealth had a habit of snowballing, leading to elites having access to far more resources than the hordes of lowly grunts.

Countless legions of peasants and slaves spent their lives building colossal pyramids, temples, castles, cathedrals, and other monuments to the rich and powerful.  “What we are today — civilized, city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors — is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals.  The advent of farming re-formed humanity.”

Like mold on an orange, agriculture had a tendency to spread all over.  It tended not to “diffuse” from culture to culture, like cell phone technology.  More often it spread by “displacement” — swiping the lands of the indigenous people.  Evidence suggests that Indo-European farming tribes spread across Europe in a 300-year blitzkrieg, eliminating the salmon-eating wild folks.

Paleontologists study old artifacts.  Examining hunter-gatherer skeletons is brutally boring, because these people tended to be remarkably healthy.  The bones of farming people are far more interesting.  Grain eaters commonly suffered from tooth decay, bone deformities, malnutrition, osteomyelitis, periostitis, intestinal parasites, malaria, yaws, syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, anemia, rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults, retarded childhood growth, and short stature among adults. 

Hunter-gatherers consumed a wide variety of foods, consequently they were well nourished.  In farming villages, poverty was common, and the common diet majored in grain, the cheapest source of calories.  The poor in England often lived on bread and water, period.  They almost never tasted meat, and milk and cheese were rare luxuries.  The Irish poor lived on oat porridge.  Later, the poor of England and Ireland switched to potatoes, an even cheaper food.

In twentieth century America, government farm policies drove most small subsistence farms into extinction.  Big farmers, with big farms and big machines, got big subsidy checks for growing commodity crops, like corn.  We now produce vast quantities of extremely cheap grain.  Some of the surplus is exported to other nations, some is made into livestock feed, some is converted into processed foods.  The inspiration for writing his book came suddenly, when Manning returned from a trip abroad, and was astonished to observe vast herds of obese Americans.  Oh my God!  Why? 

Through the wonders of food science technology, we are now able to extract the complex carbs in corn, and convert them into simple carbs — sugar.  Sugar is the calorie from hell, because it is rapidly metabolized by the body, like spraying gasoline on a fire.  Mother Nature includes generous amounts of fiber in fruits and berries, and this slows the rate at which sugar is released to the body.  But there is zero fiber in a cheap 40 ounce soda fountain soft drink, and an immense dose of corn sugar.  It seems like most processed foods now contain added sugar.

Michael Pollan’s fabulous books encourage readers to have serious doubts about industrial agriculture and processed foods.  Manning probes deeper.  He leaves us perceiving the entire history of agriculture in a new and vividly unflattering manner.  It’s an extremely important issue, and one that’s long overdue for thorough critical analysis.

At this point in the game, we can’t painlessly abandon agriculture, and return to sustainability, so we’ve placed most of our bets on impossible techno miracles (God forbid!).  This century is going to provide many powerful lessons on the foolishness of living like stylish Madoffs on stolen resources.  As the end of cheap energy deflates the global economy, the shrinking herd will eventually reach a point where we actually can abandon agriculture painlessly.  It would be very satisfying to finally break out of our ancient habit of repeating the same old mistakes over and over.  Will we kick the habit and joyfully celebrate the extinction of tilling?  Hey, this is what big brains are for — learning.

Not surprisingly, at the end of this book, Manning does not provide a cheap, quick, simple solution.  He does not foresee a smooth, managed transition to a sustainable future — it’s going to be a mess.  He recommends shifting toward foods from perennial plants, like fruits, nuts, and berries — and replacing grain-fed meat with grass-fed.  And, of course, nothing close to seven billion people can fit into a happy sustainable future.  The healing process will be a vast undertaking: “Not back to the garden, back to the wild.”

Manning, Richard, Against the Grain — How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization, North Point Press, New York, 2004.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3436277221231822913#

Richard Manning on agriculture.  This is a 60 minute video of a Manning lecture at the University of Montana in 2008. 

Tending the Wild

“Nature really misses us,” laments M. Kat Anderson.  “We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that’s the reason why they’re going away.”  Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home.  It’s an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability.

In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency.  They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young — whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony.

When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil.  Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization’s elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty.

In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was “filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries.” 

The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money:  forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets.  Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants.  There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was “inexhaustible,” and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste. 

There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages.  In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City.  They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging — without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease.  The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar.  The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi — wanderers — homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures.   

The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land.  They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods.  They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives — the plant and animal communities upon which they depended. 

Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals.  Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn’t lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate.  California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem.

Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food.  They’re rich in oils, calories, and protein.  They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years.  The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance.  A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains. 

The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways — pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds.  Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded.  The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology.  They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to digging bulbs, corms, and tubers, and planting small tobacco gardens. 

Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture.  A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants.  This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon. 

California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem.  So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region.  They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization.  They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves.  They were not warlike societies.  Their ecosystems were clean and healthy.  They lived like real human beings — wild, free, and happy.

Tending the Wild is an important book.  It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well.  This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater.

M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild — Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.

Tree Crops

Joseph Russell Smith (1874-1966) was a geography professor who grew up in the chestnut forests of Virginia.  His book Tree Crops was originally published in 1929.  Smith wrote it because he was horrified by the soil destruction caused by regularly tilling cropland — and hillside tilling drove him completely out of his mind, because it permanently destroyed good land at a much faster rate.  Everyone knew this, but they kept doing it anyway, because they were cursed with a short-term mindset.

Tilling was a common practice in those days (and it’s still popular today).  Farmers tilled because their daddies tilled, and their grandpas tilled, and their great-grandpas tilled in the old country.  It was a powerful dirty habit that was nearly impossible to quit, until the land died — and it provided no long-term benefits!  With great exasperation, Smith exclaimed: “Corn, the killer of continents, is one of the worst enemies of the human future!”

Old World crops like wheat, barley, rye, and oats provided a dense ground cover that slowed the rate of soil erosion a bit.  New World crops like corn, potatoes, cotton, and tobacco were row crops that left the tilled soil exposed, and more vulnerable to erosion.  In America, thunderstorms were common, producing downpours that were rare in Europe.  Heavy rains filled the streams with lost topsoil.  In the Cotton Belt, Smith saw erosion gullies that were 150 feet deep.  Oklahoma was ruined with stunning speed.  We were destroying land that could have fed millions.  An Old World saying sums it up: “After the man the desert.”  In the legends of our ancient wild ancestors, the First Commandment is: “Thou shalt not till.”

Joseph was a brilliant visionary, and one day he received an illuminating revelation.  If you wanted to stop the destruction of soils caused by tilling, quit tilling!  Live in a different way!  Create a cuisine that majors in nutritious soil-friendly foods.  Smith envisioned two-story farms: tree crops on the sloped land, and pastures for livestock below, both perennial.  Farmers could abandon tilling forever, and pass the land on to future generations in a healthier condition.  Imagine that.

Farmers scratched their heads when they heard this idea, and were more than a little perplexed and befuddled.  Agroforestry wasn’t a mainstream tradition in European American agriculture.  The required knowledgebase didn’t exist, so Smith researched it and wrote it down.  His book is mostly a scrapbook of correspondence.  Smith sent letters to hundreds of experts on tree crops, and then assembled their responses into a book.  He created an amazing collection of information, including recommendations for agroforestry in other climates and continents.

Hogs won’t touch corn if there are acorns to eat, and oaks can produce more calories per acre than grain, when done right.  A top quality pecan tree can drop nearly a ton of nuts per year.  Hickory nuts can be smashed and boiled to produce hickory oil.  Pistachios fetch a high price and have a long shelf life.  Many types of pines produce nuts.  The honey locust is a drought hearty US native that will grow where corn or cotton grows, and animals love the beans.  The sugar maple produces sugar.  Persimmons are enjoyed by man and beast.  Pigs and chickens love mulberries.  And don’t forget walnuts, beechnuts, almonds, cherry pits, soapnuts, holly, ginko, pawpaw, horse chestnut, osage orange, privet, wattle, wild plums, and choke cherries.  The list goes on and on.

Trees can produce high quality foods, and they can be grown on slopes too steep to plow.  Once the trees are established, little labor is needed until harvest time.  Tree crops can be much more productive than mere pastures or forests.  They typically suffer less from dry spells than field crops.  Over time, they can actually build new topsoil.  Like any crop, trees are vulnerable to pests, diseases, fire, and extreme weather.  Like any crop, tree crops are not 100 percent dependable, year after year, so monocultures are not a wise choice.  The Second Commandment is: “Thou shalt encourage diversity.”

Smith witnessed the blight epidemic that wiped out virtually all of the American chestnuts, rapidly killing millions of trees.  He personally lost 25 acres of chestnuts.  The blight fungus came to America on chestnut trees imported from Asia.  Knowing this, it’s shocking that Smith advocated travelling the world in search of better varieties of trees, to bring home and experiment with.  Hey, Japanese walnuts!  And the USDA helped him!  The Third Commandment is: “Thou shalt leave Japanese organisms in Japan.”

Smith was a tree-loving zealot who was on a mission from God, and he promoted his great ideas with great enthusiasm.  But the world did not leap to attention, change its ways, and promptly end soil erosion as we know it.  Farmers are almost as conservative as popes, and they are not fans of radical change — especially ideas that tie up land for decades before producing the first penny.  Joseph was heartbroken: “The longer I live, the more amazed I become at the lack of constructive imagination, the lack of sheer curiosity, the desire to know.”  It’s not easy being a brilliant visionary.

Smith's grand vision was reasonable, rational, and ecologically far superior to growing organic crops on tilled fields.  Tree crops remain an important subject for the dreams of those who do not robotically march in lockstep with the status quo hordes.  Planting America’s hills with tree crops would be an immense task, creating many jobs, and providing benefits for generations.  Why don’t we do it?  The Fourth Commandment is “Thou shalt live in a manner that is beneficial to the generations yet-to-be-born.”

Smith, Joseph Russell, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, Island Press, Covelo, California, 1987.  Originally published in 1929.  Free download of the scanned book is [HERE].

Farmers of Forty Centuries

In 1909, F. H. King visited farm country in China, Japan, and Korea.  He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and the Chief of Soil Management at the U. S. Department of Agriculture.  The purpose of his visit was to learn how the farmers of Asia produced so much food per acre, and the techniques that allowed some regions to be farmed continuously for 4,000 years.  He published Farmers of Forty Centuries in 1911, which documented his findings.

The book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world of low-tech organic farming that was performed with maximum efficiency.  Almost all of the work was performed by human muscle power, and all of the fertilizer came from nutrient recycling — no guano or mineral fertilizers were used.  King observed long daily caravans of peasants pulling handcarts from town to farms, each loaded with 60 gallons of fresh sewage.  Manure and crop residues were carefully gathered and composted.  Weeds and bugs were picked by hand.

Because food production was extremely labor-intensive, most of the population was rural.  The labor was back-breaking, seven days a week.  Following many generations of population growth, the farms were postage stamp sized.  It was not uncommon for ten people and a few animals to be fed from a two or three acre farm.  In lucky times, everyone had something to eat.  In bad years, people starved.  There were no safety nets.  Everyone lived on the razor’s edge.  The surrounding region was stripped clean of everything wild.  The land was under the total domination of agriculture, and every year its health declined.

King, the agriculture wonk, was fascinated by how hard the people worked, and how much grain per acre they produced.  He was not an advocate of workers’ rights.  He reported that the farm folks seemed to be happy and content.  He was eager to bring this system home to America, to provide a significant boost to farm productivity.

King was not an ecologist.  He did not mourn the loss of what these lands had once been — the forests, the grasslands, the wetlands, the fish, the birds, the deer.  He was observing a system that was completely maxed out, approaching the brink of collapse.  Long-lived farming systems have a pattern.  They practice an unsustainable mode of farming until chronic problems emerge, or a new technology becomes available, and then change their ways — to another unsustainable mode of farming, and then another, and then another, until the land is permanently ruined.

Today, the land is worked with machinery and chemotherapy: herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, chemical fertilizers.  Many of the rural folks have moved to town to make cell phones and running shoes.  Much of the former cropland in China has been abandoned, because of serious erosion problems and urban sprawl.  And now, the end of the era of cheap and abundant energy is approaching, and it’s time to start building shit wagons again.

The way of life that King observed is very likely similar to how we will be living in the coming decades, and the rest of the world, too.  He presents us with a time-proven model of how to live when fossil fuels, farm chemicals, and traction animals are not available.  This is not a model of sustainable agriculture.  Yes, it’s absolutely organic, but organic agriculture is almost never sustainable, in the genuine sense of that term.  On the plus side, it’s far less wasteful, polluting, and destructive than organic agriculture practiced on an industrial scale.

King, Franklin Hiram, Farmers of Forty Centuries — Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, Jonathan Cape Limited, London, 1911.  The full contents of this book can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.