While recently shoveling aged horse manure around the berry vines on my small organic farm to fertilize them, which gives me great pleasure, I thought about what I have learned about the community of the land by farming over the last two decades. For example, I noticed how spreading brown gold--to which I add the green manure of decaying plants--utilizes waste to transform plants and help them grow. The animal-plant communal connection is essential to life.

“The Life of the Mind” is the motto of the University of Chicago, where I studied. It was a good book-based education. But after a couple of decades teaching college, I realized that something was missing. So I left full-time teaching, bought rural land, and established a farm outside Sebastopol in Northern California. I want to communicate some of the things I have learned from agri-culture--the basis of culture and community. “You are what you eat,” as the saying goes...