Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future

Deep Agroecology

Farms, Food, and Our Future

Steven McFadden

LIGHT AND SOUND PRESS

www.lightandsoundpress.com

Deep Agroecology:

Farms, Food, and Our Future

© 2019 by Steven McFadden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form, digital or printed, without the publisher’s written permission except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews, articles, and other media.

ISBN: 9781792309281

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019912060

Light and Sound Press

Lincoln, Nebraska

www.lightandsoundpress.com

Cover design: Angela Werneke, River Light Media, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Page design and layout: Cris Trautner and Aaron Vacin, Infusionmedia, Lincoln, Nebraska

For Elizabeth

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Right Names

Chapter 2 Industrial Farms and Food

Chapter 3 Elements of Agroecology

Chapter 4 Webs of Light and Life

Chapter 5 Elements of Deep Agroecology

Chapter 6 This Is the Holy Land

Chapter 7 Tierra Viva

Chapter 8 What Are Farms For?

Acknowledgments

Sources

About the Author

This is just the beginning of our work.

— Eduardo Rincón

Introduction

The way of life known as Western Civilization is on a death path… Our essential message to the world is a basic call to consciousness. The destruction of native cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet.

—Basic Call to Consciousness,

Haudenosaunee elders

Having heard the call to consciousness of our native relatives here in North America, I propose that deep agroecology can and must be among our intelligent and heartfelt responses. The union of native wisdom ways with the sophisticated, sustainable tools and techniques of Western civilization is a process that can—and necessarily must— lead to the renewal and elevation of all forms of life on this continent and planet. The ke to this union and renewal lies in the realm of farms and food. Deep agroecology is a concept intended to help turn that key, allowing us to enter more fully into the potentialities that lie within individuals and communities. It’s imperative that we do so.

I write for all, not just for farmers. The challenges we face are beyond the capacity of that small segment of our population, about 1 percent in North America. The challenges require us all to step up to higher, more inspired, and dramatically cleaner and stronger systems of tending the land and growing the food that sustains us. We must do it together. Farms are the foundation of our civilization. That civilization is fragmenting. In light of this reality, we must be about the work of building a new agrarian foundation. This is a high and urgent mission for the Americas and for the world.

I’m neither a farmer nor a scholar, but rather a journalist with a special interest in the health of the Earth and all which shares life upon it. In deep agroecology I see an essential story, a story that can inform the general public about the agricultural issues underlying so many of our current challenges and the creative, healing agroecological pathways people are establishing in response. With the theme of deep agroecology I hope to anchor those understandings more firmly throughout the Americas by showing how the deepest roots of our land can help support the agriculture that undergirds the whole of our culture.

Agrarian idealism has a long history, dating back many millennia in native communities around the globe, and in the West at least as far back as the Roman empire. The agrarian vision has been expressed eloquently in American letters through the writings of figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Victor Davis Hanson, Mary Hunter Austin, John Crowe Ransom, Barbara Kingsolver, and a great many others.

In 1915, for example, Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote The Holy Earth. Hyde had served as the dean of agriculture at Cornell University and eventually came to be known as the Father of Modern Horticulture. Like so many other people in the lineage of agrarian visionaries, he had a clear understanding of agriculture as the foundation for a spiritually elevated way of life, and he expressed that in his book. In that sense, the vision offered through the concept of deep agroecology is not new but rather my effort to report upon and thereby add fresh impetus to the ancient and honorable agrarian wisdom stream. We need that stream now more than ever before.

* *  *

My intention in writing Deep Agroecology is to explain to a general audience what agroecology already is and to embed the concepts and practices more purposefully in the public mind, while offering emphasis to a subtle dimension of it, a realm of critical mystery. Another reason for writing is to again make available, as many communicators have done through the millennia, a reminder that inspiriting yourself and then caring actively for the Earth, the sustenance we derive from it, and the communities we are part of, is a high, noble, and heroic calling. It’s especially gallant at this juncture of time and circumstance.

Our entire relationship to the Earth and our specific environments is being challenged. Agroecology and deep agroecology are intelligent, sophisticated, practical, and effective ways to meet and transcend those challenges, establishing a clean, healthy foundation on the Earth for the next evolutionary step of humanity. We can respond wisely and decisively to the chaos in our climate and culture, for the present and for the future. Toward that end, this book assembles a chorus of voices and a pastiche of related and relevant facts, experiences, ideas, and ideals. Together they describe a whole: the vibrant agroecological vision that is arising in the Americas and around the world, a vision that merits clarification and amplification. That’s another facet of my intention for Deep Agroecology.

Agroecology is a concept that has been refined in recent decades, developed, and made ready for wide global implementation. It’s new territory for many, but natural territory. Farmers cannot enter this territory successfully alone, though. They must be accompanied in various purposeful ways by the communities and households who receive their bounty and who take it into their bodies.

Although to date the term has not been widely used or understood in America, agroecology has become a buzzword and a leading edge concept internationally. The basic idea, the spirit of agroecology, is an approach to farming and food that is clean, sustainable, humane, egalitarian, and just, rooted in ecology, other sciences, and indigenous knowledge. The concepts and approaches of agroecology can mean many things, though some who claim the term use practices that diverge from the spirit. Our precarious circumstances call upon us to engage and to clarify the term agroecology so that its principles and practices hold true and helpful meaning. To meet the daunting challenges of our era, we must actively employ this knowledge with high dedication and skill.

The concept of deep agroecology—and the challenge to write a book about it—was presented to me several years ago by Chuck Francis, professor of agronomy, agroecology, crop rotations, and farming systems at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). One early September morning in 2012 I was tending to the front yard of our home at the time, not far from UNL’s East Campus. I was standing with a rake in my hands, pruning shears belted to my hips, sizing up the work that needed to be done. That’s when Chuck came by on his bike, pedaling his way to East Campus, as he did routinely. He stopped to chat. In the midst of our conversation, he offered me what I’ve come to think of as a kind of Zen koan, or perhaps I should call it an ag koan. A koan is a proposition intended to provoke questioning, contemplation, and eventually (perhaps) enlightenment.

Have you ever given any thought to writing a book about deep agroecology? Professor Francis asked. Now that was an arresting question. Never heard of such a thing. What is deep agroecology? And if I knew what it was, what could I possibly say about it that would amount to a worthwhile contribution? I’ve needed to live with Chuck’s ag koan for about seven years to get beyond a glimmer. From the steadily intensifying conviction that I might learn something of value and then communicate it, the idea of this book germinated.

In my conception, deep agroecology is our next natural, intelligent, and necessary evolutionary step. Deep agroecology arises from recognition that the way we farm the land will determine the destiny of life on the Earth. As a philosophy and an approach, deep agroecology strives to marry the subtle spiritual realities of human beings and planet Earth into a balanced relationship with the gross physical realities of farms, technology, food, and flesh. Deep agroecology is a philosophical guide to survival, with intimations of destiny and activation of our spiritual potential as individual human beings who are among the collective inhabitants of our Earth.

Deep agroecology might also be thought of as spiritually intelligent agriculture. By that I do not necessarily mean religiously smart agriculture. In my understanding, spirit far transcends the boundaries of our human devised religious systems for attempting to give it expression. The religions of the world are not the spirit of the world, rather they are some of the conduits and vessels.

Having said that, it’s important to acknowledge that many religious institutions are creatively practicing their faith by working steadily and progressively to pioneer farm and food systems that are just and sustainable. In this manner they are among those communities and institutions expressing the leading edge of what I am calling deep agroecology, and they are worthy of honor and support.

For the purposes of this book, I want to reach beyond the institutional level, to embrace all respectful forms for approaching mystery, no matter the label attached to the form. Readers will note that I’ve chosen to express the concept of mystery as a common noun. To capitalize the word as a proper noun would ratify a false distinction between spirit, mystery, and the rocks, trees, cows, corn, beans, and human beings who populate the world. All dwell amid an interwoven unified field. For deep agroecology, this is an intrinsic understanding.

My intention for this book is that it helps inspire and coalesce efforts to establish an agrarian foundation for spiritual activation. Nothing less will do. The single-minded materialist view and mode of thinking is inadequate to the challenges we face, and often toxic or counterproductive to evolution. Expressions of deep agroecology are an essential evolutionary step for all the peoples of the Americas—South, Central, and North— as well as for all the world.

In my life I’ve walked long miles on both agrarian and native pathways and have had the opportunity to form many friendships and learn great lessons. This book is an opportunity for me to bring those pathways to a dynamic crossroads. The cultures that have streamed onto North America have never fully connected with respect to the rootstock cultures that have been on this continent (Turtle Island) for 18,000 years or more. It’s past time for that to change. My hope is that the agrarian crossroads depicted in this book will support the development of that relationship.

Planetary deterioration confronts us all. We are all challenged to respond intelligently and effectively as we see the deserts relentlessly growing, the poles melting, the seas rising, and climate chaos delivering blows near and far. The farming systems that yield our food not only affect our health through diet but also through the environment. Farms may serve either as engines of pollution or as oases of radiant environmental health. Those healing oases around the globe are being established through agroecology.

Over the last 40 years, I’ve witnessed the increasing mechanization, chemicalization, genetic manipulation, industrialization, and corporate consolidation of the culture that produces the food we all eat—agriculture. I came to feel that I must sound a voice in counterpoint, a voice for a higher, more spiritually sustaining system for our land, for our farmers, for our food, and for our culture.

This book was not produced under the illusion that I know more or that I possess acumen beyond what our academies and the pioneers of ecology, deep ecology, and agroecology have already gained in experience, knowledge, and wisdom. Nor have I the arrogance to imagine I possess more than a glimpse of native wisdom ways or that I love the land any more deeply than the farmers who cultivate it. I know only enough to have gained respect and appreciation for all the pathways of wisdom now available.

A principal goal of this book is in fact to help educate the general public about these many pathways of knowledge and practice and to encourage active engagement. I see places where these knowings may be intentionally and beneficially joined for the present and the future at a cultural crossroads. The philosophical and practical rootstocks of the Americas can anchor and inform the sophisticated, sustainable, clean, and radiant technologies arising out of the multitude of cultures that have come to the Americas from around the world.

* * *

Delivered to the United Nations in 1977, The Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World remains acutely relevant. The message of the address was later published in book form, Basic Call to Consciousness, with chapters titled Thoughts of Peace: Our Strategy for Survival and Spiritualism: The Highest Form of Political Consciousness.

In their address the elders said, The commodification of nature: land, water, and air, casts everything in a different light, a light that is not healthy and cannot sustain over generations… The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation, and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support Life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things which support the sacred web of Life….

Many of the native elders whom I’ve known and conversed with over the years encourage people to cultivate