[Ccpg] BOOK/ DEEPLY ROOTED: UNCONVENTIONAL FARMERS IN THE AGE OF AGRIBUSINESS

[bob banner]

thanks Wes for posting this!!

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe at silcom.com 
> >
> Date: May 25, 2009 7:16:18 AM PDT
> To: sb-action at hopedance.net
> Subject: [sb-forum] [sb-news] [sb-action] BOOK/ DEEPLY ROOTED:  
> UNCONVENTIONAL FARMERS IN THE AGE OF AGRIBUSINESS
>
> http://www.lisamhamilton.com/book/DeeplyRooted.html
>
> The food revolution taking place in this country cannot be truly  
> successful without an agricultural revolution. We must inspire our  
> farmers and create millions more of them. The extraordinary farmers  
> Lisa Hamilton profiles in Deeply Rooted embody the future of  
> American agriculture.
> - Alice Waters
>
> In a time when agribusiness and the global economy are making the  
> rules, and when most people of the land are striving to be obedient,  
> these people have had the courage to use their own intelligence in  
> their own places. They have been appropriately rewarded for their  
> independence, and readers of this book will be rewarded also. As for  
> me, when I read of the Podoll family's thinking about local  
> adaptation and their effort 'to get the maximum from the minimum,' I  
> wanted to stand up and shout.
> - from a letter to the author by Wendell Berry
>
> A century of industrialization has left our food system riddled with  
> problems, yet for solutions we look to nutritionists and government  
> agencies, scientists and chefs. Lisa M. Hamilton asks: why not look  
> to the people who grow our food?
> In this narrative nonfiction book she tells three stories, of an  
> African-American dairyman in Texas who plays David to the Goliath of  
> agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico  
> struggling to restore agriculture as a pillar of his community; and  
> a modern pioneer family in North Dakota breeding new varieties of  
> plants to face the future's double threat: climate change and the  
> patenting of life forms. In unique ways, these "unconventional  
> farmers" reject the passive role that modern agriculture has  
> insisted they accept and instead reclaim their place as stewards of  
> the land and leaders within society.
> Threads of history and discussion weave through the tales, exploring  
> how farmers have been pushed to the margins of agriculture and how  
> that has led to the broken food system we grapple with today. These  
> unusual characters and their extraordinary stories make the case  
> that in order to repair the damage, we must bring farmers back to  
> the table.
>
> INTRODUCTION TO
> DEEPLY ROOTED:
> UNCONVENTIONAL FARMERS IN THE AGE OF AGRIBUSINESS
> (COUNTERPOINT, MAY 2009)
>
> Balfour, North Dakota
> Highway 84 cuts a diagonal line across central North Dakota, a  
> landscape of wheat. It's a lonely road, two lanes stringing together  
> a handful of farm towns small enough to come and go in the space of  
> a sentence. Velva. Voltaire. Bergen. Now Balfour. As I drive I'm  
> looking for something to eat but in vain, and not just because it's  
> Sunday morning. At Balfour there seems to be hope in the form of a  
> roadside café, in front of which a big sign calls TRUCK STOP. Closer  
> up, though, I see in the parking lot what has unintentionally become  
> a sad joke: three trucks "stopped" here years ago and now rusting  
> their way back into the earth. I'll bet the café has been closed for  
> twenty years.

>
> A few houses here are still lived in, but mostly Balfour appears to  
> be closed. Next to the café, a cottage has been swallowed up by the  
> bushes that once formed its hedge. Across the highway on the  
> railroad tracks sit eight empty cars, graffiti spreading across them  
> like cobwebs. Beside the tracks is a collection of abandoned  
> tractors. In the stillness, fluffy seed heads of Canada thistle  
> drift up and then down, tracing the soft curves of the air.
> What caught my eye, the reason I pulled over and got out of the car,  
> is an old, wood-shingled church. Built probably in the 1920s, it's a  
> strangely huge building: two stories inside with a third-story bell  
> tower, itself crowned with a steeple that reaches another fifteen  
> feet into the air. At the very top is a delicate wooden cross,  
> backlit by the sun. I soften my eyes to blur the massive building  
> back to some former grandeur. But as my focus returns, I see its  
> white paint peeling off like old skin, and weedy wormwood grown over  
> its path. I see on the building's front the words for sale spray- 
> painted in red beside a phone number with an area code from North  
> Carolina.

> As I stand looking at the silent church, a convoy of trucks surges  
> down the highway. According to the names on their cabs they normally  
> transport ag equipment, but today they're hauling out the carnival  
> from the state fair, which closed last night. Blowing down the road  
> comes a candy-colored coupon booth on its side in the back of a  
> flatbed, then a blue-and-lavender kiddie ride broken down to its  
> clanking pieces, then a grown-up ride in red, with flames down its  
> flanks and its outline marked by orange light bulbs. The colors  
> stream through town at fifty miles an hour.

>
> Wind kicked up by the trucks sends the thistle seed-puffs reeling,  
> their slow dance suddenly plunging and pointed. Watching them, it  
> hits me that the truckers with their blurred faces are the only  
> humans I have seen since I pulled over to look at this place. Of  
> course I know that people live in Balfour; the census says there's a  
> population of twenty, at least as of the year 2000. This town is not  
> dead. What it is is empty. I get in my car and soon I leave, too.

>
> Balfour should be a surprise to no one. In fact, this emptiness is  
> what we've come to expect from farm towns. To those of us passing  
> through, this landscape is not supposed to be about people. It is  
> about wheat as far as the eye can see; or in Iowa, corn for miles on  
> end; or in Texas, such endless cotton that in fall the roadsides  
> turn white as if dusted with snow. We know that things used to be  
> different-that in 1950 there were 162 people living in Balfour; that  
> six days a week there were farmers in those fields and that on  
> Sunday mornings the church was so full that the building didn't seem  
> oversized at all.

>
> But we also know those days are gone. The way things work now, with  
> industrialization and consolidation and combines navigated by GPS,  
> agriculture doesn't really need people anymore-at least not like it  
> used to. As we have mathematized food production, we have reduced  
> its pieces to numbers and its processes to calculations; humans have  
> become mere inputs, useful only when applied efficiently in relation  
> to the outputs they create. Of all those people once filling the  
> church at Balfour, conventional agriculture needs only the handful  
> in the front row. The rest are fat to be trimmed.
>
> As a person who writes about agriculture, I spend a fair amount of  
> time in places that have grown quiet over the past fifty years.  
> Gibbon, Minnesota. Bluffton, Georgia. Unincorporated Fremont County,  
> Wyoming. My visits there are not fast-paced. Indeed, I pass most of  
> my time sitting: in the passenger seat of a truck, on the wheel well  
> of a tractor, on whatever flat space is free in the cab of a  
> combine. But as my hosts and I make slow revolutions around a field  
> or drive from one pasture to another, what happens is not dull. What  
> happens is we talk. Or, typically, they talk. On most days the  
> conversation lasts for hours.

>
> "They" are farmers and ranchers, though generally not those from the  
> front row of the church, that select few who remain in conventional  
> agriculture. These are the ones who were trimmed off long ago, or at  
> least by the industry's prescription, should have been. As we sit  
> and talk, the topics are sometimes technical, often political or  
> economic, and always, ultimately, philosophical. And personal. If we  
> start with a discussion of soil microbiology or a comparison of  
> turkey breeds, inevitably we end up in family, history, ecology,  
> faith, beauty, morality, and the fate of the world to come. For  
> them, all those things are linked.

>
> As they see it, agriculture is not an industry on the periphery of  
> modern civilization. It is a fundamental act that determines whether  
> we as a society will live or die. What binds these people is not a  
> particular farming method, but rather the conviction that as humans,  
> the contributions they make are essential. Conventional agriculture  
> doesn't need people for much more than to run the machines and carry  
> the debt, but these people refuse that lifeless role. To the work,  
> they bring their intellects and their consciences, their histories  
> and their concerns for the future. In quiet ways, in quiet places,  
> they have set about correcting the damage that has come from  
> believing agriculture could actually be reduced to numbers alone.  
> The first step: reclaim their place in the center of the equation.

> That Sunday morning in Balfour, after I left the abandoned church  
> but before I got back on the highway, I drove into what was left of  
> the town. Beyond a scattering of houses, I came to a building that  
> was newer but not new, non-descript except that its doors were wide  
> open. Outside were a few cars-cars that had arrived there that  
> morning, not two decades ago. It was the town's last working church.  
> Technically it was Lutheran, but the congregation was so small that  
> any person was welcome. What mattered was that they were there at  
> all, listening, talking, praying, and even singing.

>
> If the closed-down face of Balfour represents the disappearing human  
> role in agriculture, then this book is about the people in church  
> that Sunday morning. They are the faithful, the ones who believe,  
> despite everything society shows them, that what they are doing is  
> worth it-that it is vital. When their nation tells them this is the  
> way it is, and this is the way it has to be, they do not just fade  
> away. Instead, they talk, and they pray, and they sing at the top of  
> their lungs. To hell with what you've decided is convention, they  
> say. We are unconventional farmers.
>

__________________
Bob Banner
Publisher & Director

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