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By Root 998 0

and the standardbred horse-drawn buggy limits the distances we travel. This is basically what we need. This is what keeps our communities healthy.” It makes perfect sense, of course, that limiting territory size can yield dividends in appreciation for what one already has, and the ability to manage it without debt. The surprise is to find whole communities gracefully accepting such boundaries, inside a nation that seems allergic to limitations, priding itself instead on the freedom to go as far as we want, as fast as we can, and buy until we run out of money—or longer, if we have credit cards.

Farmers like Elsie and David are a link between the past and future. They’ve declined to participate in the modern century’s paradigm of agriculture—and of family life, for that matter, as they place high value on nonmaterial things like intergenerational family bonds, natural aesthetics, and the pleasures of shared work. By restraining their consumption and retaining skills from earlier generations of farmers, they are succeeding. When the present paradigm of extractive farming has run its course, I don’t foresee crowds of people signing up for the plain wardrobe. But I do foresee them needing guidance on sustainable agriculture.

I realized this several years ago when David and Elsie came to our county to give an organic dairy workshop, at the request of dairy farmers here who were looking for new answers. It was a discouraged lot who attended the meeting, most of them nearly bankrupt, who’d spent their careers following modern dairy methods to the letter: growth hormones, antibiotics, mechanization. David is a deeply modest man, but the irony of the situation could not have been lost on him. There sat a group of hardworking farmers who’d watched their animals, land, and accounts slide into ruin during the half-century since the USDA declared as its official policy, “Get big or get out.”

And there sat their teacher, a farmer who’d stayed small. Small enough, anyway, he would never have to move through his cornfield too quickly to study the soil, or hear the birds answer daylight with their song.

* * *

Organically Yours

BY CAMILLE

The word organic brings to my mind all the health food stores I’ve roamed through over the years, which seem to have the same aroma no matter how many miles lie between them: sweet, earthy hints of protein powder, bulk cereal, fresh fruit, and hemp. I guess the word means different things to different people. When applied to food (not a college sophomore’s most dreaded chemistry class), “organic” originally described a specific style of agriculture, but now it has come to imply a lifestyle, complete with magazines and brands of clothing. The word has sneaked onto a pretty loose-knit array of food labels too, tiptoeing from “100% organic” over to “contains organic ingredients.” Like overused slang, the term has been muddled by rising popularity. It’s true, for example, that cookies “made with organic cocoa” have no residue of chemical pesticides or additives in the chocolate powder, but that doesn’t vouch for the flour, milk, eggs, and spices that are also in each cookie.

Why should we care which ingredients, or how many, are organic? The reasons go beyond carcinogenic residues. Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled “conventional,” precisely because they’ve had to fight off predators themselves. Plants live hard lives. They don’t have to run around looking for food or building nests to raise their young, but they still have their worries. There’s no hiding from predators when you have roots in the ground, and leaves that require direct contact with sunlight. You’re stuck, right out in the open. Imagine the Lifetime Original movie: the helpless mother soy plant watching in agony, unable to speak or move, as a loathsome groundhog gobbles down her baby beans one at a time. Starting to tear up yet?

Next plant-kingdom heartache: there is no personal space for the garden vegetable. If you’re planted