Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
Creatures of the Future
We are creatures of the future. Hope keeps us moving forward. It keeps us living for another day, making plans, and looking for results that make lives better.
But the future needs the present and the past for grounding. The last 80 years provides an ominous grounding for hope in farming. Since the 1970s, when then Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” proclamation laid the policy groundwork for the consolidation of farmland in the U.S., many farms have “got out” while few have “got big”. The course of agriculture has been bound to a destruction ethos. Bigger machinery, more chemicals, and less reliance on human labor through technology has brought us to our current predicament.
Less than 2% of the U.S. population is involved in farming and the average age of the remaining farmers is 58 years. Only 4% of U.S. farmland grows food for direct human consumption.
So why hope? Why continue producing food and improving soil for less than minimum wage? For what future?
The past and present, grounding as they are for hope, cannot predict any future. They can only teach. We use the knowledge gained here in the present to prepare for the future.
Today’s action is all we have to leave in the past. If we care for our neighbors, we eschew the destruction ethos and feed them like family. If we value human labor and skill and the meaning of useful fulfilling work for our community, we keep our reliance on technology to a minimum. If we rely on youth for help and vision, we help the average age of the farmer drop, and the percentage of folks involved in agriculture rise.
I think that the most important thing about the past, present, and future is soil. We are soil. From it we are made and to it we return. It calls to us when we are without regular contact, and needs our care to care for us.
So let’s care for soil, encourage our youth, and nourish our neighbors. The present can be delicious, even in the future.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Quill’s Endians are members of Halcyon Grange and publish a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and generously permit us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.