Seizing the Beans of Production
... or some thoughts while watching vultures over a soybean harvest
In starting up on the second part of my Great Replanting serial, I began to think about soybeans. 2,500 words later, I composed the following rant, which will be truncated for the next edition of that entirely free-to-read series, which is due in your inbox early next week. If you are not a financially supporting subscriber but you absolutely need this hot, bean-based narrative, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
The plow-gutted bottomlands of our watershed are smoking with plumes of loose earth and soybean chaff as combines creep and whine through the fine, bare soil. In a river-bottom previously forested from hill to hill with oaks and walnuts, sycamores and hickories, the commercial promise of commodity soybeans has replaced the meandering chaos of floods and silt deposits and wild seed dispersal and disturbance and decay with something a bit more controlled– the production of a widely valued multi-purpose crop which can be efficiently raised, harvested, and marketed. Well, maybe not that last part.