Rose Bowl here we come!

This weekend Wholesome Harvest entered its first float in the "Colo Days" parade. Colo is a town of 700 people and like most other small towns in Iowa, once a year it has a local festival. The weekend events bring us together with outdoor activities and communal meals.

The activities this year included "outhouse races" with teams of four pushing outhouses on wheels through obstacle courses and a pig wrestling contest. I sat in the back bleachers at the pig wrestling event, hoping to stay clean, but in the end I was still splashed with what we will optimistically call "mud."

Big thanks to the Wholesome Harvest farm kids that rode on the float. Most floats throw candy. We wouldn't do that!!!! Instead, we passed out packets of vegetable and flower seeds. People liked that. Our float was called "It's fun to grow and eat local food" to tie in with the parade's theme this year, "It's fun to play in Colo."

The Real Green Revolution

Some really interesting studies out. . .

The popular wisdom is that the introduction of chemically intensive farming was a "green revolution" that would feed more people and aid farmers. However data shows that the successful marketing of herbicides to farmers does not increase their profits. . .or their yields.

The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture recently released the results of their "Long-Term Agricultural Research" (LTAR) experiments. They found in Iowa that organic production increases yields and builds soil quality. By the fourth year in an organic crop rotation, they found that organic corn and soybean yields rose above conventionally gown fields. The improving performance in the organic plots is attributed to soil quality improvements that resulted form the organic certified land stewardship techniques. Thre was more soil organic matter, enhanced microbial activity in more diverse communities of organisms, and reduced soil acidity.

To further support these results, an unrelated study cited in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science" published on June 12 projects that pesticides and other soil contaminants are reducing crop yields by about one third because of impaired nitrogen fixation and plant signaling. The most widely used persticide in the US--glyphosate-- or "Roundup" is known to be directly toxic to a number of soil microorganisms, including some responsible for nitrogen fixation.

So much for chemical companies solving world hunger.

Farming as art

After the wonderful dinner on Saturday with a group of friends, my host asked me whether farming is an art. Being an artist who lives on a farm, I had a hard time initially answering his question. I mulled it over and formed this opinion:

Art is a compulsion, an involuntary process, like retching. Artists are compelled into their work like a pregnant woman is compelled to start a full term labor until the delivery of a new creation. Organic farming is not art.

The organic farmers whom I know enter into their work voluntarily and knowingly, like ecological missionaries. Farming (when not soldiering against the natural system) is a voluntary testimony of faith, an act of daily worship and submission to God’s natural system. The net result is not a new creation, but the stewardship of creation.

The artists whom I know channel something inside that must come out. The farmers in contrast orient themselves willingly to larger forces that flow around them symbiotically. Both farmers and artists become great by the degree of their compliance and humility in the process.