food basics

Someone reached out to us recently asking if we could help him develop a program for teaching city kids about good regenerative farming:

Hi, Ammon,

What an interesting set of questions!  We really appreciate what you are hoping to do for these children; sharing the basics about food provision and earth care are passions for us.  Let us see if we can help you a little here.

Few people today understand even the most basic aspects of farming, regenerative or otherwise.  We're accustomed to thinking of food as a commodity, and its presence or non-presence as a supply chain issue, its quality or lack of quality as a production issue.  That's because we have ceased to see the world as a living community, ourselves as living bodies enmeshed in it, and food as other living bodies.  We are accustomed to think as industrial beings, and thanks to long supply chains and processed foods we see food as an industrial product, not a natural one.  If we think about food growing, we think of food as being 'grown' by inputs plus machines.  

So the first thing we have to help people re-imagine is life.  

All life energy is sunlight.  All living matter is just sunlight, caught and reorganized in carbon forms, by the leaves of plants.  

So: food happens because plants photosynthesize.  

Ecosystems have indescribably complex patterns for catching, using, storing, and reconfiguring this sunlight, as things eat plants, things die, things in the soil eat the dead things, and more plants grow.  Natural ecosystems use everything, recycle everything, and preserve their rainfall in use by doing so.

The problem for people is, most of the things a natural ecosystem produces aren't food for humans.

So if they want to remain in a place long-term, humans have to figure out a way to get their food -- but without making a hash of the natural ecosystem services that are keeping the sunlight and rainfall harvest healthy.

The principal way we have of doing this -- getting our food from a community of plants that don't naturally produce a lot of people food -- is to partner with grazing animals that can turn those plants into proteins, fats, and sugars.

This is partly because we can milk those animals and drink the milk, make cheese with the milk, and so on, plus harvest some of the animals for meat -- but most significantly it is because these grazing animals improve the grasslands and fertilize them so they can grow things better every year.  Using the grasslands in the proper way, with properly grazed animals, makes them better.  And we can use some of this fertility to grow the plants we like to eat, like potatoes and corn and tomatoes, so that we have a wide variety of foods.  We can even use some of the milk so we can raise animals like chickens and pigs, who eat plants but also need animal proteins.  

And if we do all of this right, everybody has a place, and everyone eats -- people, farm animals, wild animals, all the plants, the soil -- and it all gets better while we do it.

Once we can get people to see this much, we can help them learn to see a piece of land not as a blank slate, but as a living community, one they might interact with respectfully, make suggestions to, partner with and learn from.  We can help people choose the proper ruminants to help in this partnership, and apply those ruminants to the living community in a way that gradually adjusts small aspects of the sunlight/rainfall capture and conversion, allowing for increase energy capture, provision for future event (like drought protection, flood protection, etc), and enriching the whole while making room in it for humans and their pet species (things like cows and tomatoes).

Our own book, The Independent Farmstead, is the only one we know of that takes just this approach.  There are other good books on grazing, but we don't know of any on the kid level.  We'd love to write one someday.

The biggest single mistake we see made in teaching good farming is to skip the first step, where we destroy the myth that food provisioning is an industrial act, a supply chain and technological act, and firmly establish an understanding of food, of all life, as a biological, environmental, meteorological, ongoing and communal event.  This is an event in which they take part, either without thought or even awareness, objects of a giant commercial/industrial enactment that stretches around the world, or in which they can be actors, conductors, friends of the living community, helping a little piece of land grow better and better each day.

Then we take them out to the pasture.

We hope this helps a little.  We'd love to hear how it goes.

Blessings,

Shawn and Beth