Trauma Farm (11 page)
Today’s walkabout set me counting, as it has done on other occasions. Despite our vigilance, there are several dozen introduced noxious weeds on the land that arrived before us. They’d come in via the wind, bird droppings, the fur of wild animals. Then there were the other introductions— mine. The pecans, the bananas, the artichokes, the hawthorn, the dogs, the chickens, the domestic sheep—the list seems endless. Even the colourful willows. Who knows how many alien insects and fungi and introduced diseases lurked invisibly around me?
The Global Invasive Species Database list is chilling: giant African snails, Asian tiger mosquitoes, the crazy yellow ant, Eurasian milfoil, blue crabs, a crayfish plague, walking catfish. What a roll call of monstrous species! With a growing horror my thoughts return to the potentially dangerous material I have introduced. I consider myself an ecologist, yet surrounding me, on what had been wild land only a hundred years ago, is an increasingly alien landscape, and I am the most dangerous alien invader of all.
E
NTERING THE MOON GATE
, I see Sharon is already headfirst in the flower bed, tossing onto the lawn behind her a growing pile of thinnings, trimmings, weeds, dog bones, and surprising bits of detritus from the entrance walkway, discarded by guests and puppies, who seem equally casual about what they chuck. Sharon looks cute from my perspective, face first under the camellia, butt in the air, hurling the rejects into the pile, but I refrain from wit because I know she’s in her own world when she’s weeding. Even Bella, the puppy, gives her a wide berth, and returns only when Sharon waters everything and Bella has her chance to play her favourite game with the hose, chasing water and never catching it, as Sharon joyfully uses the jet of water to lead her into some impressive acrobatics.
My earliest memory comes out of the ground. Was it my first day of school? I’m scooping up mud and pea gravel outside the classroom window where my teacher is watching with horror. I whip around and hurl the mess at the bullies taunting me. Then I am hauled into the principal’s office while the bullies move on to a new victim, and the kindly principal informs me there are better things I can do with earth than throw it around.
My next teacher of the uses for soil was a Japanese farmer in the delta of the Fraser River—perhaps the most fertile farmland in Canada, forged from a temperate climate and millions of years of river silt. The old farmer and my father were negotiating the price for several tons of potatoes that my father would sell door to door. More to distract me than for any other reason, the farmer nodded to my father and said, “Tell the boy to take a cabbage home.”
I was gone—a pygmy among the rows of Goliath heads. These cabbages were so large they seemed as tall as I was. I can’t remember my age. I was always a little child. I yarded on a monster head I could barely get my arms around. The roots were deep. I punched my tiny fist into the earth. Elbow deep, my fingers clutching the narrowing root, I yarded again and it snapped underground. I rolled backwards underneath a cabbage as big as a medicine ball, and it was just that—a medicine ball—the gift of a memory of when the ground was rich and a Japanese farmer had the talent to put more into the earth than he took. I lugged my prize to the truck while my father and the farmer watched, bemused. Fifty years later, I wonder how many children would prize a cabbage.
Today that farm grows apartments. The town councils of the delta committed one of the largest transgressions against nature in Canada by paving that lush earth, justifying their crime with the need for a tax base and income for their friends in the business community; yet the tax base is probably worse now than it was fifty years ago because of the infrastructure all the development required. When I look back on that lost farm, and its black, good earth, I recognize that’s where I found my roots.
Roots need their nurture. Mine were watered by my Italian grandfather’s garden. In Vancouver he used to follow the horses of the milk wagon with a bucket and a shovel, treating the manure like the treasure it was. Once, manure was gold for the garden, composted in small piles and recycled back into the land, but when we shifted to industrial farming the unnatural volume converted manure into toxic waste. Modern industrial farms produce three tons of manure for every North American. That’s a lot of shit condensed into so few factories.
Afterwards, Grandfather moved to the country, and his garden expanded by a couple of acres. Not long ago I realized I’d spent my adult years attempting to recreate his garden. There was no front lawn, only paths between flower beds. His gladioli won fat ribbons at the local fairs. Out back there was a strip of lawn large enough for bocce games and for laying out tables for Sunday dinners alfresco. Beyond were the garden rows, the raspberries fat and sweet, the plum and apple trees.
IN A GARDEN YOU
learn the value of time. Weeding, like farming, is never accomplished. It’s an activity, not a result, so a good gardener learns not to fret about finishing a job. It’s all in the doing. Otherwise, the quack grass will drive you insane. After a while you learn to go into the “zone” and just work. Beautiful work. You work until your mind runs free. There’s a Ch’an (Zen) story about the monk who was hoeing all day. The dinner gong sounded suddenly, and the monk threw down his hoe, laughed, and happily strode off to the temple. “That’s it!” exclaimed his ancient master. Enlightenment. The glorious complexity of rural life soon teaches us how to think simply—when you listen to it. Dinner becomes dinner. Dirt becomes dirt.
OUR PLANET IS A
soil-creation machine. All the elements come from galaxies created at the advent of time, far away and long ago. When I first read William Bryant Logan’s
Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth,
and his reference to all life on earth as “the dust of ruined stars,” I suddenly understood how big the issue of dirt was. It made me think of the rock singer Roger Daltrey, an obsessive gardener who, ruminating on an epic, ongoing garden project, remarked wisely, “Nothing lasts forever. Nothing,” he said. “We’re just pushing dirt around.” More or less—like your average beetle or earthworm.
We took up the cause with great gusto at the farm, and between Sharon’s unrelenting devotion to the flower and vegetable beds, my tendency toward megaprojects, and our clan of inherited young friends and helpers, we moved a lot of dirt.
VOLCANOES SPEWED GREAT CLOUDS
of dispersed particles, which mixed with the oxygen in the air, then precipitated upon the planet. Wind and freezing rain crumbled the rocks heaved up from the planet’s molten core. After several million years the stone-dust of the earth broke into its chemical basics, and the first compost hesitantly formed in the organic broth of what Darwin suggested was some “warm little pond”—out of the muck and into the slime of birth. Decomposition and composition. Existence is the child of death. I’m convinced the decomposers outnumber the creators. Once the plant world began, the compost supply increased rampantly, along with the rich underground civilizations that now inhabit the soil that breeds us. We are the garden, and we are healthiest when we live in it. Farm children are the least susceptible to the immune diseases crippling modern urban society.
Yet when was the last time you saw a bug on produce from a supermarket? Imagine the chemicals and the pesticides needed to keep those millions of beetles and trillions of other creatures out of your food. We’re no longer eating bugs; we’re eating the chemicals that kill the bugs. They’re in our air, our soil, our bodies—swimming through the cellular universe of our blood. About 125,000 tons of toxic chemicals were used in the First World War. The results were so horrifying that finally, in 1993, the United Nations outlawed their use in warfare. Yet 500 million tons of chemical poisons were dumped on North American soil in 2001 alone. The noxious insects don’t show any sign of surrendering. If anything, they are increasing, while the good and the beautiful are dying all around us.
All life is born in the alchemy of earth, some creatures in impressive quantities. A possibly apocryphal story claims that when the eminent evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what evolution had taught him about God, he speculated that God “must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.” There are over 350,000 varieties of beetles on the planet. Yet they are merely one of millions of creatures thriving upon the dirt under our feet. However, nature actually isn’t especially fond of beetles—it prefers composting, and beetles are merely one of its tools. When I dip my hand into the soil of our garden, I am scooping up trillions of micro-organisms. There is more biomass beneath than above ground. This provides rich feed for plants, which have evolved innovative root systems for utilizing its nutrients. An intrepid agrologist with time on his hands teased apart the mazy roots of a single rye grass. Finishing his calculations, he concluded that this lone plant had more than 6,800 miles of root and root hair.
Our small farm, like every other small farm, is built upon the empire of the underground. When I hold my handful of dirt in front of me I can only wonder at the processes that took millions of years to make the flesh of that hand out of the earth. And the earth my hand is holding? The most diverse ecosystem of them all. Fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, mites, microarthropods, amoebas, flagellates, classes and subclasses of each other, maybe a fat earthworm or an ugly (to a gardener) cutworm. Then a tiny beetle rushes out of the dirt and skips off a finger, back to its source.
Farming is all earth, or at least real farming is. The factory farms, ignoring ecology, are attempting to create nutritious soil with basic chemicals and minerals, and maybe a few squirts of liquid manure that fools the farmer more than the soil. Life is about relationships, and the closer the relationships between the land and our belly, the better the food. This is the task Sharon and I set for ourselves from the beginning, building a circular relationship with our soil, feeding on its products and feeding it more in return. We have our differences, of course. I tend toward philosophy. I see systems. Sharon sees weeds and stalks them with an unrelenting single-mindedness.
At Trauma Farm our fastidious horse, LaBarisha, politely craps in the same general area each day, providing manure. The sheep waste hay, pulling it recklessly from the racks in their sheds and shitting on it. This provides another excellent compost. Mixed livestock is part of a real farm’s complex structure. The animals produce manure, fibre, feathers or down, hides, meat or dairy products, eggs, labour for the fields, management of grazing land, and thus protection against fire. As the proportion of livestock on a mixed farm diminishes, small farms lose their most important element—that circularity.
Earth is the great decomposer. Here before me, in this handful of soil, I’m witnessing the creation of life. I don’t want to spray it or poison it, because to work with soil is to praise and nurture it. Real science, real culture, real understanding goes so much deeper than the narrow, linear, reductionist methodology of the factory farm. Our planet has always been polycultural. That’s why the permaculture movement is becoming popular—these are gardeners who believe in creating self-sustaining environments centred on perennial plants rather than the annuals that have become the mainstay of gardens and cultivated farms.