Tag Archives: agriculture

Unsettling

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. I was in high school in the 1970s, and at the time it seemed average Americans were beginning to recognize that pollution and overpopulation could be problematic, that maybe we needed to eat more natural and wholesome foods, and that establishing an Earth Day might help people turn focus toward the planet. Simultaneously, we had Earl Butz as Agriculture Secretary, a man who ended many New Deal programs to help “small” farmers and who encouraged large (eventually, corporate) farms. Butz appears several times in this book, and no wonder; he and Berry debated the topic in public and in print, and their thinking was almost diametrically opposed concerning the philosophy behind agriculture. Berry’s book is a social and philosophical argument that is only somewhat dated and really quite prescient, though he might come off as mildly curmudgeonly to today’s readers. Or maybe not so prescient. He was simply paying attention.

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Thus, Berry has made me think more deeply about my relationship with “my” property. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you may notice how often I consider weather, dirt, local animals, insects (especially invasive or non-native ones), plants, tree diseases, water–I’m no farmer, but I am a gardener and do feed myself at least partly from my own backyard. I take almost daily walks around the perimeter of our 6+ acres, poking around in the hedgerows, scanning the sky, looking down at walnuts and animal scat, watching for new buds or coloring leaves or bird nests or wildflowers. I worry over droughts and hailstorms and flooding. Climate change concerns me in very local and specific ways, not just in general.

One could say I’m at least trying to nurture the earth. I’ve made many mistakes along the way and done some damage that I’m learning how to rectify; I have also realized that I have to accept some changes, such as incursions by invasive species, because they are beyond my control. Through the almost 30 years we’ve lived on this land, I’ve tried to understand it better. After all, we built a house on it. The soil was hard-packed, acidic, overused from previous decades of corn-growing, full of stones, sumac, and asiatic rose bushes, a fallow field that hadn’t been planted or farmed in decades but didn’t necessarily need me to tend it. It wasn’t my family’s land, and I didn’t intend to end my days here; however, I figured if I was going to live on this spot, I had better do whatever tending and nurturing it might require.

Which is about the best I can do as far as a relationship with the land in which I dwell, and about the best any of us can do in any long-term relationship: try to understand it, get acquainted, do some research, make plenty of observations (maybe take notes), and nurture what seems to need special attention and care. The land has given me much more than I’ve ever given it. It’s offered shelter, beauty, an education, food, the companionship of animal life, cricket sounds, tree frog songs, firefly lights on long summer nights, open spaces for my children to play in, owl calls and fox kenning, the grace of leaping whitetails, dead-fall wood we can burn in winter, forest-bathing, hammock-swaying, inspiration for writing. The wonderful porch here, where I often sit to write in my journal, opens a view to the meadow out back. So many poems started on that porch, with that view…

That’s how the earth nurtures me. May I be somehow worthy of it.

photo by David Sloan 2020

Back in time

At Şanlıurfa in the Urfa region, a Kurdish area in eastern Turkey, we stayed two nights after our visit to two amazing, ancient monuments that are really out in the middle of nowhere: Mt Nemrut Dağ (the tomb of Antiochus I) and Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic site of the Stone Mound Culture, both Unesco World Heritage sites. I remember reading about the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in the early 1990s, when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavations there; the “buzz” at the time was that these megaliths mark the earliest temple or place of community worship ever recorded [ca. 9000 BC]. Since then, new discoveries unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, as well as discoveries of similar sites (such as Karahan Tepe, which we later visited) in the region, have somewhat altered Schmidt’s original speculations.

It appears now that people lived here at least part of the time, though until these discoveries, historians assumed humans in the pre-pottery Neolithic Era were hunter-gatherer nomads who did not build permanent structures. Our guide told us the current thinking is that the buildings here played some sort of role in preparing young men for adulthood–almost all of the reliefs and statuary portray male figures and male animals. But it is early yet to guess, and besides, we can never know for certain.

But there are cisterns, a system that distributed water through tunnels, containers that have traces of grains and, yes, beer. Back to the argument of which came first to humans: Bread or beer. My money is on beer. *

But to back up a few hours–first, we rose at 5 am so that we could take the circuitous drive up the mountainside to Nemrut Dağ, a relatively youthful site built around 60 BC, presumably by Antiochus I, who was connecting a slew of peoples and cultures together in a kind of Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian-etc. aggregation in a move toward empire at a time of Roman ascendancy. Commagene is the Romanized name used for this ancient region, which was a merger of Persian and Hellenic areas once Alexander the Great’s empire had disintegrated. Antiochus married a Cappadocian princess and had big plans, but his empire did not last long after his death; by 29 BC, his sons had died or been executed.

The path we walked up to get to the tumulus, 6:45am; my photo

And then over time, this huge tomb monument was forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1880s. The region feels deserted and surreal, and the climb up to the tumulus–though there is now a partially paved path–is long, the wind swirling around, full of dust. My sunhat blew off my head even though I had a neck strap. I guess that was my offering to the ancient king.

What an astonishing place it is, especially at dawn, and despite a fair but not overwhelming number of tourists.

~

Monuments are a step toward writing: they tell stories, written in stone with picture images, because the stories we tell or sing with our human voices don’t leave much of a record for cultures other than our own. I found myself wondering what the poets of these ancient places said or sang, and how their language sounded, and whether I would feel exhilarated or moved by those lays had I been there.

And at Göbekli Tepe, when I learned about the cisterns that contained beer, I thought of a poem I’d written some years ago after visiting a Mesopotamian exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. So with a bit of awe and a bit of tongue in cheek, I’ll post it here. [It initially appeared in Mezzo Cammin.]

~

*Porter, Stout, & Mesopotamian Deity

Sisters, let us raise a glass
to agriculture, to dark brew
made possible by wooden hoes,
by seed-gatherers: me and you,
our aunts, foremothers, those
who stayed, patient, and grew
grains, diverted rain, winnowed,
boiled, fermented mash, who
certainly invented ale. For we
descend from goddess Ninkasi
who nourished babies through
breast milk fortified by beer
and whose forgotten virtue
we revive, consuming her.

~~

Thanks to copyright-free photos from Pexels since my own photos are snapshots taken with an out of date cell phone.

Gleaning

Glean.

I love this word and its related agricultural cohort, winnow.

Driving to work this morning, I ended up behind a gleaner moving from one soybean field to another situated slightly south on the same road. The link below, thanks to Flickr, takes you to a nice photo of a soybean gleaner at work.

Photo of a gleaner.

Glean: to gather grain or other produce left by reapers. Or, to gather information or material bit by bit.

Winnow: to remove (as chaff) by a current of air. Or, to get rid of, remove (as of something unwanted); to sift or separate. [Merriam-Webster].

Wonderful words for writers, useful as metaphorical or concrete actions, these terms have etymological roots going back to that ancient and particularly human business–agriculture. Lately, I’ve been working on revising some poems, and winnowing is part of that process.

I’ve also been helping my parents to “downsize” as they move from the house they’ve lived in for years into a much smaller apartment. Significant winnowing was involved in several aspects of the word: we got rid of, we sifted through, and we separated. We did a bit more vacuuming than allowing currents of air to sweep away the dust that lingered in the closets, however.

But we also gleaned. Or, shall I speak for myself here--I gleaned. Sorting through books and photo albums and drawers full of things we feel we should save for some reason offers a means of gathering information bit by bit. What for my parents was likely a review of life was, occasionally, revelatory for my siblings and me.

(Etymological aside: review and revelatory have different sources, the latter being much older).

My father’s sermon file and his school ribbons for elocution or winning debates and the books he just couldn’t bear to part with vs. the books he reluctantly let go–these are gleanings.

My mother’s elementary school report cards, her childhood drawings of Japanese ladies with parasols (I never knew she used to draw), faded photos of the high school trip to Washington D.C., the prom invitation, the letters we wrote from college–also gleanings.

From these gleanings I have reaped more than I expected.

So we reap and then we glean and then we winnow and, from that winnowing, we glean again and reap again. Sounds like what I do in my garden annually. Sounds like what the farmer does every year, too, though these days the reaping and gleaning, and much of the winnowing, are done in one go with a very large piece of farm equipment…such as the one which slowed me on my commute to work this morning and which led to this digression.