The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [76]
Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.
Each of the biological processes at work in a forest or prairie could have its analog on a farm: Animals could feed on plant wastes as they do in the wild; in turn their wastes could feed the soil; mulches could protect bare soil in the same way leaf litter in a forest does; the compost pile, acting like the lively layer of decomposition beneath the leaf litter, could create humus. Even the diseases and insects would perform the salutary function they do in nature: to eliminate the weakest plants and animals, which he predicted would be far fewer in number once the system was operating properly. For Howard, insects and diseases—the bane of industrial agriculture—are simply “nature’s censors,” useful to the farmer for “pointing out unsuitable varieties and methods of farming inappropriate to the locality.” On a healthy farm pests would be no more prevalent than in a healthy wood or pasture, which should be agriculture’s standard. Howard was thus bidding farmers to regard their farms less like machines than living organisms.
The notion of imitating whole natural systems stands in stark opposition to reductionist science, which works by breaking such systems down into their component parts in order to understand how they work and then manipulating them—one variable at a time. In this sense, Howard’s concept of organic agriculture is premodern, arguably even antiscientific: He’s telling us we don’t need to understand how humus works or what compost does in order to make good use of it. Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don’t know—even a sense of mystery—keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets.
A charge often leveled against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There’s some truth to this indictment, if that is what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. In Howard’s conception, the philosophy of mimicking natural processes precedes the science of understanding them. The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he’s put in play—that the ducks and fish are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.
The philosophy underlying Howard’s conception of organic agriculture is a variety of pragmatism, of course, the school of thought that is willing to call “true” whatever works. Charles Darwin taught us that a kind of pragmatism—he called it natural selection—is at the very heart of nature, guiding evolution: What works is what survives. This is why Howard spent so much time studying peasant agricultural systems in India and elsewhere: The best ones survived as long as they did because they brought food forth from the same ground year after year without depleting the soil.
In Howard’s agronomy, science is mostly a tool for describing