Gone to Seed

Lessons from crickets and sunflowers, and questions about scale and independence

For the better part of a decade, feral sunflowers have been a consistent presence on the land I inhabit– spread by striking finches and homely sparrows, they sprout along the edges of garden fences, make their way into our pastures, and shoot up among the fountain-like clumps of Eastern gama grass that speckle the poultry yard. As summer drags on, these stands of sunflowers grow rank, twisting their hairy stems and scratchy leaves as their heads, laden with oily seeds nod under their own weight, obscuring the detritus of human habitation– lost trowels, decayed scraps of cardboard, and the assorted discards of another season of toil. The earth grows dry, and so do the sunflowers, their desiccated leaves hanging gray, their pecked out heads de-petaled and brown, barren, skeletal. Through the thinning screen, a windblown middens of baling twine and bucket lids makes itself known.

It is late summer, and this farm has gone to seed. 

Crickets chirp in the shade. The tomato trellises buckle under the burden of fruit. I allow some to rot. Similarly, I bend forward, the laden vine of my body curling to heave buckets full of tomato cores and tops, the byproduct of food preservation, from the processing kitchen down to the waiting beaks of poultry. In jars and crocks we inter our winter provisions in great batches, and bring them home to the cobwebbed recesses of our larder. The cattle are good and fat, their unceasing mouths in constant rhythm with each bite of flowering prairie grass as they swish their tails at flies and allow a cooler wind to soothe the bites. 

Branching panicles of brown spikelets emerge from dense swards of Sorghastrum grass, their showy yellow stamens fluttering. The pendulous spirals of honey locust pods are ripening from a youthful green to a piebald mosaic of gold and cocoa. The pin oaks have begun dropping their acorns upon the floor of the draws, awaiting the nimble claws of squirrels and gaping beaks of turkeys down in the snakeroot. They tinkle and patter on the tin roofs of sheds and roll in rivulets from the broad tails of torn out fencerows. 

With dormancy and darkness on the horizon, the oaks and locusts and sunflowers and grasses must all muster their final investment into seed– survival and continuity made armored flesh. It takes a season’s worth of photosynthetic energy to make a seed, and then it is released into a world of predation, to hopefully find its way to receptive earth. We too do our best to manifest some seed in this penultimate push before harvest, to draw from our withering reserves, to stand up straight in the diminished sunlight and make another offer of hope in these lean, dry days.

I do my best to summon seeds of hope, but the first few must go to lease payments and feed bills and veterinary invoices. If I’ve retained much past that, it belongs to the children I help to raise, whom I must guide through a senseless age of climate breakdown, genocide, and bloated, teetering empire. After that, with what remains, we plant again. 

---

Evenings have been quite cool here, interspersed with hot afternoons. An orchestra of crickets sings to us through the crepuscule, and a chorus of cicadas hiss the reprise when the sun is high and unrestrained. The crickets in particular function as something of a thermometer, if one is willing to do the math. In a formula known as Dolbear’s Law, the number of chirps per minute is counted, and 40 is subtracted. This number is divided by 4, and then added to the number 50, resulting in the temperature in Fahrenheit. At least I think so… I failed a lot of remedial math classes. This equation works perfectly in conjunction with the Snowy Tree Cricket, and within a degree or so for the most common variety of field cricket. A less informative thermometer is offered by the cicada, which sings once the air temperature reaches 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Either way, modern thermometers, while less engaging, are a bit more foolproof, and lacking that, most of us know whether or not it’s hot or cold out. It is also noteworthy that Dolbear’s Law, as proposed by physicist Amos Dolbear in 1897, was not the first observation of this correlation between chirps and temperature– it was preceded by a report from Margarette Brooks 16 years earlier, for which she did not receive due credit. 

Why does Dolbear’s Law work? I couldn’t tell you, and I’ve had a hard time finding out. I suppose what makes it a law is some complex interplay of biological and physical reactions we are not privy to. And as a law, it doesn’t always work– at a certain point, when temperatures are too high or too low, the cricket is just dead, and the number of chirps per minute is zero. It would seem that laws of physics are a way for humans to imprint their understanding on the mysteries of our environment, and laws of state are contrived for human control. Laws of economics are presented as the former, but function as the latter. I just enjoyed the chirps, and wanted to know more. 

---

Finances on the farm are tighter than a gnat’s ass these days. They always are in late summer, but more so this year. You’d think I at least eat well, yet my belt has moved in another notch. My reserves –nutritional, physical, financial and spiritual– are pretty well burnt through, as is often the case in September. I feel less like those long-to-stand oaks and a bit more like the decrepit, storm-torn sunflowers, all lignin and about to run out of life-blood. The burden of abundance will yoke us again, with hundreds of pounds of fat and protein that will feed us and keep us breaking even, if I can muster the smiling and glad-handing necessary to market it in between the days of killing.

To speak of those laws of economics, I cannot offer you a tested equation, but here’s a little insight. Tumult, war, climate and pandemic shock have all combined to create instability in the agricultural inputs market. The purse strings get a little tighter, and farms have to find ways to scratch away a little more at the bottom line. “Consumers” (please, can we just call them people who need to eat?) feel pinched at the checkout, and in an industry where the smallest producers have the slightest margins, things go belly up, unless you happen to be a small farm that is propped up with some other income stream, at which point the farm becomes an inefficient real-estate investment. Even as the various system shocks that blow up input prices wear off, we don’t see them return to earlier prices… a symptom of greed. I don’t personally see the small farm thing sticking for much longer. I believe the “eat local” days too, could be chirping their last.

I cannot design an algorithm to explain it, but we know the world needs to eat, that arable land for agriculture is a diminishing resource threatened by climate change, conflict and extraction, and that to have access to it confers a certain privilege that we should not squander. A person like myself can put in 80 hour unpaid work weeks at peak season, and at market time find nothing to trim in order to remain competitive. Perhaps the small-farm dream was an offering to keep us complacent instead of responsive to corporate agri-dustrial extraction of land and capital. Like Dolbear’s law, I don’t really understand it, and how could I? I’m just a simple farm boy, my concerns lie with the dirt and the cows, not markets and futures.

On the surface, the Homestead Act of 1862 sought to even the playing field between expansive, slavery-fueled Southern farm barons and independent small holders, granting easeful access to the general population (so long as they met certain demographic criteria) to land, specifically plots of about 160 acres. In those times, this amount of land would have been enough to allow a degree of self-sufficiency, but not upward mobility. It also led to further dispossession of indigenous land, which could then be sold back to its inhabitants over a decade later under the Indian Homestead Act of 1875, under relinquishment of tribal rights and identities. But other than that, it was nominally intended to even the playing field.

As homesteading settlers flooded the great plains and tilled up millennia of prairie earth, a myth of independence took hold among the severed roots and the plowed under culture and ecology. A pacifying fairy tale that through grit, tenacity, and toil, the meek would inherit the earth, all the while dispossessing the other, less familiar meek denizens of it. A lot of us today scoff at the fat cats that run big ag, and take pride in our independence. But with each small farmer that burns out, and each small farm that goes belly up, they aren’t paying enough attention to our work to even shrug.

The Homestead Act ultimately paved the way for the very conglomeration it allegedly sought to reduce. The unprecedented transfer of this public domain land to private ownership enabled larger interests to eventually buy it up, 160 acres at a time, as technology shifted towards labor efficiency, and prior policies and ideals upholding “the small farmer” withered to become little more than political lip service while corporations extracted the bulk of state largess. But whether or not we understand them, this economy has rules.

---

The turkeys have flown their fence again. I’m way behind on pasture moves, and so as long as they stay out of trouble, I let them do their own thing for a few hours midday. Inevitably, I will have to take the puppy and a long stick and herd them back to their paddock until I am able to move their wagon along. This farm has gone to seed, and turkeys love seeds. They strip the heads from grasses, nip at the prickly tick clover, but once they find their way into the tangled, drooping sunflowers, they become ungovernable.

With a fifty-pound puppy tied to my belt and a nine-foot oak rod I will stomp my way into the weather-worn stand of sunflowers as the turkeys glean the shining black seeds, and I will shake my stick awkwardly, the bristling stems grasping at my jeans and scratching my arms. It happens every day, sometimes twice or three times. With an audience, I could do more to demystify the myth of the toilsome and tenacious independent farmer while performing this clown act than I ever could by writing this damned almanac. Instead, with the dog leash wrapped around the prickling stalks, my hat knocked askew, my shoulders festooned with dead petals, I thrash alone. If unbound by the laws of economics, would I continue on like this? Probably. I like it some days, I like the relationships I’ve built with dirt, and turkeys, and even sunflowers. But bound by economics, similarly to how I’m bound in tough vegetation, there are rules to play by. I hate to admit it, but the survival of this project may ultimately come down to the relationships I can build with people.

Damaged and tired and burnt out as they appear, the sunflowers do have something going for them– a mutual system of support, their roots woven together on the dirt’s surface, their sticky limbs entwined. In the decade I’ve been staying afloat in this project, they’ve found a foothold, and made major advances, on account of their mutualized survival. They are gritty and tenacious, yes, but not independent, and I’d venture to bet they may just outlast me here. They’ve gone to seed, and plenty of it. I see them now, from the window I write from, quivering from the darting beaks of house sparrows, a little worse for the wear, but largely unperturbed in the satisfaction that somewhere, along the garden fence or further afield in the pasture, some of those seeds will find the gift of home in some little plot of dirt, side by side.