...the good land is not given as a reward. It is made clear that the people chosen for this gift do not deserve it, for they are "a stiff-necked people" who have been wicked and faithless. To such a people such a gift can be given only as a moral predicament: having failed to deserve it beforehand, they must prove worthy of it afterwards; they must use it well, or they will not continue long in it.

Berry goes on in the essay to articulate an understanding of charity that does not end with human "neighbours," but extends to all of creation.

Charity is a theological virtue and is prompted, no doubt, by a theological emotion, but it is also a practical virtue because it must be practiced. The requirements of this complex charity cannot be fulfilled by smiling in abstract beneficence on our neighbors and on the scenery. It must come to acts, which must come from skills. Real charity calls for the study of agriculture, soil husbandry, engineering, architecture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, the making of monuments and pictures, songs and stories. It calls not just for skills but for the study and criticism of skills, because in all of them a choice must be made: they can be used either charitably or uncharitably... The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well - to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how - and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

We'll be planting potatoes soon in this good soil. They're already laid out and sprouting in the summer kitchen - Superiors for new potatoes; lots of Yukon Gold which should be the backbone of our restaurant trade this season; and German Butterball, which I don't know much about. The seed potatoes I got from my father are small, and I think they'll make a tasty early potato. The name is certainly appealling, unless it makes you think of overweight Bavarians.

Mark Trealout is a chef and farmer who has started a company called Kawartha Ecological Growers. He has developed relationships with a number of chefs in high-end restaurants in Toronto who want to serve ecologically and locally grown food. We are planting the potato field to serve this market as a way of getting our feet wet in commercial production. The possibility of this and other markets for local, organic produce growing and developing is encouraging.

Shifting gears a little...

Andrew posted the following comment on the April 24 entry:

henry - i'm finding myself more and more interested in sustainability. not only in the environmental/ecological sense, but also in an ecclesiological sense.

what makes a church community sustainable? what does sustainable preaching look like? what does sustainable mission look like?

any thoughts?

I apologise that I haven't been keeping on top of the comments very well lately. I think Berry might have answered part of your question, and I refer you to his work for a fuller treatment. I'm planning on picking up on the relationship between ecclesiological sustainability and cultural sustainability as a whole when I get back onto the sustainability theme here shortly (honest).

A definition of sustainability:

sustain: provide with the basic necessities required to support or preserve life livelihood, or existence; maintain or keep (an action or process) going continuously

sustainable: “Ecology” (esp. of development) that conserves an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources; that may be maintained, esp. at a particular level

- Oxford Canadian Dictionary

The concept was introduced in the late 1970s and was emphasized strongly in the ‘World Conservation Strategy,’ published in 1980 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme and the World Wildlife Fund (now the Worldwide Fund for Nature). "Our Common Future," published in 1983 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission), defined it as development that “seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future.”

- Oxford Concise Dictionary of Ecology

Generally speaking, sustainable activities use materials in continuous cycles. They use continuously reliable sources of energy and arise mainly from the qualities of being human (i.e. creativity, communication, spiritual and intellectual development). Non-sustainable activities require continual inputs of non-renewable resources, use renewable resources faster than their rate of renewal, cause cumulative degradation of the environment, require resources in quantities that undermine other people’s well-being, and lead to the extinction of other life forms and cultures.

One of the most elegant models of sustainability for me is the birch-bark canoe. Its materials were harvested in such a way that they did not damage the source. It was a method of transportation perfectly adapted to its environment, and it was 100% locally produced and biodegradable.

When the first white man arrived to North America, he looked out over the land and called it ‘a pristine, untouched wilderness.’ That’s got to be the greatest compliment that anybody could pay to Native people, who have lived here for thousands of years.

- Bill Mason, Waterwalker

As a culture, we are nowhere near this level of sustainability, even those of us who are paying a good deal of attention to the problem. It is helpful to me to think of sustainability as a continuum -- a goal to which we are advancing. In every situation we can ask ourselves, of several choices, which one is sustainable over the long term.

I spent several days in February cutting a new trail in our hardwood forest, harvesting trees that will serve us for stovewood next winter. The most sustainable way to pull felled trees out of the woods is with draft horses, and there are operations in this area that do use them for this purpose, including, but not limited to, our Amish neighbours.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the time, money, or barn space to invest in a team of draft horses for the small amount of logging we currently do. So I used our tractor. This makes us more dependent on fossil fuel consumption, but the biggest problem is that the tractor does not participate in the same cycle of material use and disposal that the horses do. At one point the hydraulic system on the tractor developed a leak, and I didn’t notice right away that this had happened. I had left a trail of hydraulic fluid on the snow behind me for quite a distance. This is not going to have a big impact on the health of the forest, but it will have some, whereas a birch-bark canoe or a team of draft horses, well-managed, can have no negative impact on an ecosystem because they participate entirely in the growth and decay cycle of materials and energy. There is no cumulative ecological degradation involved in their use.

This example, for me, begins to get at the fallacy of technological solutions to ecological problems or threats. Our faith in our technology and our own ability to limit our ecological impact without limiting our appetite has been shown consistently to fail. It is for this reason that I will never believe that oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can be pursued without compromising the viability of the ecosystems the refuge is intended to protect. We haven’t learned the lesson of the Titanic which is, really, the lesson of the tower of Babel. Our faith in our own ability to be god is entirely misplaced. Our infallible towers fall, our unsinkable ships sink, and our unspillable systems for transporting oil spill.

It is no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect – and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage… a man with a machine and inadequate culture… is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

- Wendell Berry, “Damage” What Are People For?

April 8; May 13; June 10; July 8; Aug 12; Sept 9; Oct 14

The August date coincides with the Practicing Resurrection conference we are co-hosting with *culture is not optional.

The open house dates will provide an opportunity, not just to see what we do here on a daily basis, but also to get involved in organic vegetable and grass-fed beef and poultry production. We will also be offering tours relating to every aspect of our attempts to live in a more ecologically and economically sustainable manner, including wind and solar-voltaic energy production; passive solar design and heating; forestry; and agriculture. Most importantly, we hope our open house dates, and especially the August conference, will serve as an invitation to relationship and restoration. Visiting Russet House Farm will involve sharing meals, meeting new friends, walks in the forest, and good campfire conversation.

If you live in Ontario, or are planning a visit to the area in the coming months, consider dropping in for a visit, either on one of the dates listed above or any time, if you contact us first to let us know you are coming. Feel free to e-mail me at hwbakker@hotmail.com for directions or to set up a visiting time.

I’ll be conducting a bit of a virtual tour on the blog over the next few weeks as an introduction to what we are doing here, as well as for interested people who will not be able to visit in the near future.

- William Faulkner, "Shingles for the Lord" quoted by Wendell Berry in an interview with Mindy Weinreb

“It is.” Those two little words at the end of that quote can be read in the fullest sense of the verb "to be." God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3 as "I am who I am." Thomas Cahill writes in "The Gifts of the Jews" that we can also read this name of God to mean, "I am who am," which is to say "I am all there is. All that is, is me." This reading is reinforced by the first chapter of John's gospel: "Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made." Annie Dillard, in "For the Time Being" (which title, by the way, can also be read as "For the Time, Being") makes a useful distinction between pantheism, the belief that God is everything or, more correctly, that everything is God, and panentheism: the belief that God is in everything and its being is dependent on him, although his being is in no way dependent on it.

When we work well, when we find our work to be good as God found his to be good, we participate through his grace in the act of divine creativity, of bringing into being. Our work, and the fruit of our work, "is" as God's work "is," as God "is." Bad work, work that is merely done for an end that is not related to the outcome of the work, for money or prestige or power, is merely destructive. It takes away from the world and its apparent gains are illusory. It can not create. Good, creative work and the desire and willingness to do it must be at the heart of any understanding of sustainability. This is the work suggested by the psalmist in Psalm 90, which happens to be "a prayer of Moses;" a prayer prayed in exile, out of a longing for home; a prayer prayed in the face of the grim reality of the shortness of our lives, and the futility of so much of our effort:

"establish the work of our hands for us -
yes, establish the work of our hands."

That’s all well and good for Mr. White, but for a while this winter we were having a heck of a time keeping a couple of calves inside of our fence. The problem is that snow, ice, and general dampness messes with the current, causing shorts and also insulating the calves from the ground, so that they feel next to nothing when they touch the wire. Our fence charger is also fairly old, and not particularly powerful as, for a number of years, it was only being asked to contain a couple of the kind of well-behaved cows Mr. White describes. An electric fencing system is really designed to work best in spring/summer/fall when cows are generally on pasture. This wouldn’t usually be a problem in winter, because once cows have learned to respect a fence, you can unplug it. The calves here are fall calves, however, and they had not learned a proper respect for fences prior to coming here for the winter.

I have to admit, grudgingly, that I admire the calves who are not willing to accept the limits that their elders have grown accustomed to. I do, however, (as the farmer in this equation) have a responsibility to try to keep the calves where I want them. A neighbour showed me how to set up a two wire system where the top wire is live and the bottom wire is dead, but connected to a steel post in the ground. When a calf sticks its head between the wires -- as they like to do right before they walk through them and tear up forty feet of fence -- they complete the connection between the live top wire and the grounded bottom wire. My neighbour also lent me a more powerful fence charger to help get the message through to the calves' learning centres which are, much like our own, in their ass.

It seems to have worked, because the fencer has been disconnected for the past week and the calves are still keeping their distance from the wire.

Now if we want to talk about a metaphorical piece of wire with no charge left in it, how about systematic theology...

“Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating” - Jane Goodall, Gary McAvoy & Gail Hudson. Warner Books, 2005.

Jane Goodall turns her attention to the place of food in our consumer culture in her latest book, co-written with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson. This is an extremely thorough treatment of the subject, beginning with Goodall’s observations on the role of food in chimpanzee social dynamics and the ecological and social impact poor food choices in the rest of the world have had on Africa. The co-authors cover topics from the history of food in human culture and current challenges we face such as chemical-dependent agriculture, genetic engineering, factory livestock farming, fast food and childhood obesity, the “looming water crisis,” and the corporatization of organic standards; to healthy and hopeful alternatives we as producers and consumers of food can embrace including understanding the difference between “deep” and “shallow” organic food, grass-fed meat, vegetarianism, protecting family farmers, and the importance of seasonal and local commerce. Many of the chapters end with sections titled “What You Can Do” and the book includes an extensive list of additional resources.

“Farmageddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology” - Brewster Kneen. New Society Publishers, 1999.

This book is for anyone who wants an in-depth discussion of the history and development of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Kneen provides an expert critique of the biotech industry as the empiricization of food and the reproductive principle itself. Kneen also provides an articulate, but limited, discussion of the Christian theology that underlies the modernist drive for technological “dominion” over nature. Highlights include a tongue-in-cheek “Farmageddon Lexicon,” a discussion of the science of GE (“genetic engineering” not “General Electric”), and solid recommendations for further reading.

“Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm” - David Mas Masumoto. Harper Collins, 1995.

In the early 1990s David Mas Masumoto, a California peach and grape farmer, almost tore up his remaining Sun Crest peach trees because there didn’t seem to be any place in the industrialized fruit industry for a delicious peach with no shelf life. “I have a recurring nightmare of cold-storage rooms lined with peaches that stay rock hard, the new science of fruit cryonics keeping peaches in suspended animation,” he writes. This book is a lyrical and passionate account of a year in the life of a farmer struggling to find a new way to farm, and a new market among those “who still appreciate the wonderful taste of a good peach.”

“Living at Nature's Pace: Farming & the American Dream” - Gene Logsdon. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000.

Wendell Berry writes in the foreword to this book “Gene’s best qualification is that he loves farming. Most people who have influenced and written about farming in our time have not loved it at all; they have held it in contempt.” A lifetime in agriculture informs this collection of essays on topics like the difference between the income of small family farmers and tenured university agricultural “experts,” and what it suggests about the health of our culture’s relationship with our food producers.

“Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm” - Nicola Smith with photographs by Geoff Hansen. The Lyons Press, 2004.

This is a very handsome book documenting a year in the life of Jennifer Megyesi and Kyle Jones’ small-scale organic farm in Vermont. The book celebrates the real joys of a rural lifestyle, without slipping into romantic clichés or pulling any punches about the economic realities, hard work, and sheer willpower involved in life on Fat Rooster Farm. The book also provides a fresh perspective on rural culture, as well as the ways the politics of agriculture play out in the lives of ordinary families.

“Closer to the Heart: A CFFO Vision for Farming” is also worth reading. You can find it in a pdf document on the Christian Farmers website.

Corner Post #421

__________
Elbert van Donkersgoed P. Ag. (Hon.) is the Strategic Policy Advisor of the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario, Canada. Corner Post is heard weekly on CFCO Chatham, CKNX Wingham and CHOK Sarnia, Ontario. Corner Post has a complimentary email subscriber list of more than 3,750 and is archived on the CFFO website: www.christianfarmers.org/index.html. CFFO is supported by 4,300 family farmers across Ontario.

To be added to the electronic distribution list of Corner Post send email to evd@christianfarmers.org with SUBSCRIBE as the message. To remove your name, send email with UNSUBSCRIBE as the message.

Still, the signs of spring's approach are beginning to be felt. We're past winter's mid-point and the days are getting noticeably longer. This past week Sylvia heard the clear, ringing call of a Prairie Horned Lark, one of the first migrants to return to the area. Our resident birds have also begun singing more as they reaffirm or establish pair bonds and their breeding season begins. We have started a few plants in the kitchen, and the first sprouts are beginning to emerge from the soil. Our greenhouse needs to be replaced, but that is a project that will have to wait until next year.

I've also been reading Edwin Way Teale's book "North with the Spring." It is the chronicle of a 17,000 mile journey he and his wife made in the late 1940s. They began in the Florida Everglades in mid-February and traveled gradually north, following the progress of the season in the eastern United States through March to June. It will be fun to read and think about spring advancing towards us while we enjoy the last weeks of snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, and snow-laden cedars, counting the signs that will mark spring's arrival. Crows and Canada Geese should be here soon.

The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances
up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends
mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood
of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of
us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see
only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances towards us
out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away into the north. We see all
phases of a single phase, all variations of this one chapter in the Odyssey of Spring.
My wife and I dreamed of knowing something of all phases, of seeing, firsthand, the
long northward flow of the season.

- Edwin Way Teale, "North with the Spring"

Sun Run Farm/Centre was also a good name, but we were looking for a name that was tied in a little more fully with the history of the farm. Renewable energy is obviously essential in any consideration of a sustainable lifestyle, but we didn't see the photo-voltaic (solar energy) system that provides us with much of our electricity as central to our mission or vision, as important as it is.

We feel the new name captures something of the continuity of community and identity in place that a sustainable culture should strive for. Our neighbour, Denton, is in his eighties, and his mother's family settled our farm in the eighteen-fifties. He is a living link to the beginning of the European presence on this land, and knows the entire history of the farm (as a farm) because it is partly also his history. In one of our first conversations he asked me how the Russet tree was doing because he remembered it from his childhood, when the farm was still owned by members of his extended family.

This morning I was walking up to the house from the woods as the sun was coming up. I paused by the northwest corner of the barn to admire the russet tree. It is certainly old, part of its trunk is dead and hollow, but there is life in its branches still, and it gives us good fruit. The wine we made from its apples last fall should almost be ready. In the dim morning light its dark shape was beautifully silhouetted against the rising reddish glow on the eastern horizon.

The American poet Gary Snyder has said that you need to live in a place for four hundred years before you can begin to live there respectfully. A lot of things come into perspective when you begin to think that way. My hope and my goal is that in four hundred years (maybe even less) people will be living a respectful creational relationship on Russet House Farm.

"My plan of study in the Master’s program in Canadian Studies at Trent University will consist of a combination of theoretical and applied research. I hope to articulate the beginnings of a holistic theory of culture rooted in story, memory, and appreciation of the unique bioregional characteristics of a particular place. I plan to explore historical understandings of the relationship between nature and culture, as well as current theory in the area of bioregionalism and develop a research project that will apply this theory to a study of the relationship between the agricultural environment and wilderness ecology in Victoria County.

The emphasis of my project will be on the developing practice of sustainable agriculture in this county, including, but not limited to, certified-organic farmland. Specific areas of interest could include the role of fencerows in the landscape and ecological health of these farms; wetland and woodlot management; strategies and concerns regarding avian flu in pastured poultry flocks; wildlife ecology and predator management; or the ecology of grass-based agriculture in permanent pasture systems.

My thinking in these areas has been shaped by contemporary writers such as Barry Lopez, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard. I am particularly interested in the ways in which their work relates to the holistic vision of human culture developed by the 18th century “counter-Cartesian” philosopher, Giambattista Vico."

We'll see where that gets me ;-)

I am considering this entry in this new year as a fresh start, as I have begun taking up more of my day-to-day activities and responsibilities over the last few weeks as the process of grieving has gradually been taking up less of my energy. To that end, I would like to reopen this blog with some general thoughts about sustainability in culture and agriculture as a way of articulating the context in which I see our work and our collective thinking process on and about the farm taking place.

I think the best thing anyone with an interest in the relationship between culture and agriculture can do is read Wendell Berry’s classic book “The Unsettling of America,” as I did again recently. Berry articulates the tension between health and sickness in our culture as fundamentally a tension between a mentality of exploitation and nurture, not only between individuals or groups representing competing lobbying interests, but within the minds and hearts of each individual person. No one is exempt from accountability, in Berry’s view, for the damage we have done to the world through the exploitive attitude that permeates our culture. None of us can separate ourselves from this mentality entirely, because we are all products of our culture, and implicated in its abuses – even (or especially) if we attempt to remove ourselves from it. This is the failure of the back-to-the-land movement (or any movement) that seeks to set up an alternative to the culture we all participate in. Berry’s view is that anything less that a holistic vision for transforming all of life, from the literal grassroots up, participates in exploitation by abdicating responsibility for it. This is why the task of advocating for and encouraging cultural transformation has to start with the self. I don’t think it a coincidence, either, that this is the path of personal redemption. We must be doing everything we can do in our own life to transform it into the image of Christ in the world, before we presume to tell others what they must do. The work of personal transformation is never complete in a fallen world. This rule of evangelism also happens to be (again, I think, not coincidentally) the first rule of good storytelling: show, don’t tell. Let your audience draw their own conclusions from what they experience in the story.

The first issue of geez magazine quotes Aldous Huxley in this regard: “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is one’s self.” Geez also quotes the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr on this topic: “Sin, for Jesus, is not found in any kind of localization of evil outside or over there, where I can point to it, punish it, and try to change it. Sin, for Jesus, is itself the very act of accusing – whenever you try to expel and accuse… “Accusers” in various forms are the only people that Jesus himself accuses. (In fact, Satan means “the accuser.”)”

I have lately been developing an interest in the work of Norman Wirzba, chair of the philosophy department at Georgetown College in Kentucky. He is involved in articulating an agrarian approach to contemporary culture that is rooted in Wendell Berry’s work. Wirzba recently delivered a paper at a conference on globalization at Calvin College in Grand Rapids titled “Agrarianism After Modernity.” The paper opens with what I consider to be an excellent analysis of the destructive impulse in culture as a failure both to accept the free gift of grace, as well as a failure of the imagination. Wirzba writes:

Our rejection of grace, of its possibilities and demands, and our substituting for it the cheap satisfactions of consumer culture, is the practical demonstration (often more honest than our verbal piety) of a prior hesitancy or refusal to live out the ways of faith. In other words, our destruction of creation, and the undermining of human health and conviviality that are its inevitable correlate, raises the possibility that our religious faith may be little more than a deceptive play, however exalted or affirming, of words.

The manipulation of language for self-serving ends, whether it be the language of faith or of science is also an important theme in Berry. Wirzba goes on to describe our responsibility to enter into a relationship of grace with God and with creation in this way:

as Christians who are led by the Holy Spirit our task is nothing less than to share in the divine work of healing, reconciliation and celebration. Our most fundamental work is to bring a halt to those practices that disfigure creation and community or that prevent them from achieving their full potential.

Wirzba quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the implications of living out this task in the ordinary day-to-dayness of our lives:

"it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith … By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a person and a Christian.”

- Letters and Papers from Prison (ed. Eberhard Bethge, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1971) pp. 369-70.

Wirzba articulates the groundwork for an agrarian metanoia that offers a genuine sense of hope for our culture, and all of our relationships with land, food, fellow creatures and one another. It is my hope and goal that our farm and the people who visit it and live on it will develop and practice these “apprenticeships of being creatures.”

If we are to recover a sense for the costly grace that is God’s dedication to be with us, we must learn the daily, practical metanoia that is our turning toward the world and to each other, for it is here that God is at work… agrarian practices and responsibilities initiate us into the now lost art of being creatures. We cannot be authentic creatures so long as we despise the limits and possibilities of creation, or deny or degrade the biological, ecological, and social networks of relationship that permeate and bless our life together. What we need are to devise apprenticeships that lead us ever more deeply into the requirements of creaturely life, requirements of attention, patience, nurture, and protection. From these apprenticeships there will follow an honest humility and a grateful mind, a heart that celebrates the gifts of God that we are to each other.

I am involved in a couple of training programs this week on sustainable agriculture that are associated with the annual organic agriculture conference at the University of Guelph. I’m planning on exploring some of the big issues relating to sustainable agriculture that are in the air at the conference, as well as those of the more ordinary (metanoic) sort that we’re dealing with on the farm every day.