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By Root 1463 0

waste of time to stump out trees and make fields: much better plant among the trees. These ideas and a hundred others appeared on the verandahs, usually because of one farmer. My father for a time was that farmer. More accurate, I think, to see this character, wild, inventive, iconoclastic, less as a person than as an abiding layer or subsidiary personality in every farmer, for one never knew when some chance remark would bring it to the surface. ‘Oh, by the way, did you read in the Farmer’s Weekly that letter saying the way to stop flocks of guineafowl following the planters and eating up the seed as it falls is to perfume the seed-hoppers with garlic, or, better still, plant a clove of garlic with each maize seed?’ Expensive? Well, yes, but why be petty? What matters is the idea, the perfection of it, abolishing a problem with one majestic flash of the imagination.

Five of us set off on a walk around the farm, or to use the old manorial style, around the lands. I am going down on the lands, he is on the lands, she is on the lands but I’ll tell her when she gets back from the lands that…

Late afternoon. The sun is preparing to become a sunset. The birds’ conversation is still full of daytime concerns, but will soon change key into the minor mode, and what sounds like regret that the day is over. We leave behind in the house various growing children, a fiancée, her brothers, and an assortment of visitors and friends, as in a Russian novel.

We listen to the farmer, whose discourse is a lament for the way we use the world.

‘No, you don’t understand, if you want to understand agriculture you must look at everything differently. All farming is unnatural, it is an assault on Nature. The moment the first farmer put a spade into the earth it was the beginning of our war on Nature. And now we have reached the point where it is a race between Man and Nature. Who is going to win? I tell you who, it is Nature.’ We stand on a muddy track between fields of tobacco, smelling strong because of the rain that is lying in deep puddles along the ruts. ‘We fill fields full of just one plant, that isn’t Nature’s way, it is our way. Nature attacks with a disease or a bug. So we attack Nature with a chemical. Nature evolves the plant so it can deal with the chemical, or the bug mutates. We make another chemical. All these fields are soaked with chemicals. Last year we were spraying this field when the rain came down hard suddenly. We ran for it. The rain washed the poison down into the earth, there wasn’t time for it to get weak in the sun and the air. And now look.’ At the edge of the field was a twenty-yard area where the tobacco plants were stunted. ‘Poisoned. Sometimes you can see what we are doing with our poisons. That one was for eelworm. Do you want to see eelworm?’

We stumble about among plants that send up rank sweet fumes into our brains, tobacco, as seductive green as it is when dry and ready to smoke, and the farmer pulls up a deformed plant and stands holding it in both hands, looking down at it with respect, an enemy contained, not defeated. ‘Nature comes up with eelworm. We poison it. But a newly stumped-out field has no pests. You have a couple of years’ grace before the pests build up. We laugh at the African’s old way, stumping out a bit of land, using it, then moving on–they didn’t have the build-up of pests. Of course there isn’t land enough in the world now to farm like that. If we farmed like that in Zimbabwe everyone would starve.’

We walk on, listening, avoiding puddles. ‘It’s all a balance, and you have to understand that. We stake our claim–unnatural practices, plants we grow in fields of hundreds of acres, but Nature likes a mix. She takes a step forward–so do we, it’s a race. We have to be a step ahead all the time, but where is it going to end? I’ll tell you, we’re too damned clever by half and Nature is going to have the last word.’

Now on one side of the road is bush, real bush, and the farmer’s wife directs our attention to some orchids. We all step into the bush and admire the plants: there are several