Soil, Hunger, and Power

Provisioning for a dark season

Frost has returned to our rolling hills, and with it, the sweet stink of garden death– of ice-bruised sweet potato vines, limp, dark tendrils of defeated squash, and the slumping form of once proud pepper plants, buzzing with rot-eating flies. Shards of ice have formed on the leaf edge of elms and mulberries, and the dried down tops of prairie plants gone to seed wear crystalline halos in the blue-jay quiet. Acorns and walnuts tinkle out in the duff of distant, wooded draws and the sun makes brief visits in low arches around a world going darker each day.

In baskets, barrels, and boxes, the spoils of summer rest, half-ripened. We have taken food from the earth, and in a chicken-wire pen at the garden’s edge, a few fat ducks are strutting nervously, moments before they are to be killed. A few months from now, awaiting the widening arc of the sun, as early blossoms of cherry and pear burst forth and the bones of our birds molder in the thawing compost, I will anticipate the renewal of pressing seed to earth again. But for now, we take what we need.

For ceaseless months I have acted in an advisory role between the sun and the dirt. A facilitator of sorts. It has been exhausting, to lead negotiations between the two, but ultimately, isn’t that the nature of agriculture? At least a more conscientious agriculture… the sun gives, and the soil takes. And I am here to harvest the sun through stewardship and propagation, and give the earth what is due to the earth, distributing the surplus to those who need it. It is hard work, and sometimes the surplus is disappointingly commandeered by voles, or deer, or foxes. But what else would I do, merely consume?

The meaning of this work is much easier for me to find in moments like this where I can sift through my thoughts and string them together for you. It isn’t as obvious when I’m covered in shit and feathers and have had my hand inside a dozen ducks before lunch, nor is it obvious when I trade those ducks for legal US tender, which I then use to consume materials. But in the cold dimness of evening-time, when I sit with some meager bowl of this food I’ve raised, the meaning comes back again, I s’pose. After all, an adequate meal is no longer a guarantee for many of us in the affluent western world.

Scoured of mulch, the vines fed out to livestock, a gray garden bed harvested clean of sweet potatoes lies hungry in the howl of autumn wind. It collects a few desiccated leaves overnight, but it must be fed soon. We trudge from last year’s manure with wheelbarrows and lay down a deep mat of rich compost, settling it in with half a bucket of bloody dish-water from the duck harvest. The negotiation between sun and soil never ends. We never allow the soil to grow completely vacant of plant life… soon this bed will cradle sprouting garlic. Other beds will be planted to annual rye and winter vetch. Some will naturally become inhabited by dead nettle, henbit, and peppergrass. The bond is never to be broken– whether by means of blood spilled or seed sown or shit spread, the cycling of resources, of biotic energy, must not falter, in sun or total darkness.

On ever-waning down-pressure days, when the sun is missing and the air is thick with cold, gray vapor, the natural urge to retract, withdraw and conserve becomes present. I have been running some pigs out in an undermanaged tract of sloping, pioneer woodland, allowing them to snuffle through the duff of crumbling maple leaves and pin oak acorns. My objective is to carefully trample the brushy understory in order to expose the base of multi-flora rosebush, honeysuckle, and autumn olive to my axe. In order to complete this objective for the year, I would need to move them further afield for at least another month, but with the dark banner of autumn rains bleeding into the shadowy horizon, I begin to steer them, paddock by paddock, back to their winter shelter, nearer to home.

As the sun recedes, so do our activities– we collect the disparate and scattered inventory of farm tools that have made their way to far-off field edges. We herd the cows nearer. We gather sweet potatoes and squash and good, dry kindling in preparation for the dark and cold. It is work that tests my gradually aging body, but the privilege of land access is undeniable– my family will not starve or suffer malnourishment this winter, when others will. Make no mistake about it– austerity measures that threaten hunger against a domestic population is an act of civil siege warfare. One in eight Americans receive SNAP benefits, and I have no doubt that the people responsible for cutting them off from this form of food aid want these people to hurt, and do not care if this vulnerable part of the population lives or dies. In fact, much like other globalized examples of restricting food to certain populations, the people in power here most likely prefer death. We have heard their words, and seen their actions, and their cruelty is clear. And in the confines of my food-packed house, I don’t know what to do about it. At least not exactly.

I have many young trees, in pots and nursery beds, that could help to feed future generations, if only they could find their way to a plot of soil some hypothetical commoners might access. I have seeds and tools and some experience and motivation to improve and increase the food security of my immediate community, but outside of the broad-scale implementation of a functioning utopian society, the vulnerable people in this world will not gain an equitable level of self-determination, or even survival, without access to land. Some have suggested that political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but I would argue that true power is derived from the ability to hold and share arable soil. Do not forget that our current administration is headed by a man who, above all other things, is a real-estate baron.

It took very few years, and incredible violence, to dispossess America’s original inhabitants of broad swathes of this continent, and it has taken even less time and only economic violence for a handful of multi-national corporations and wealthy individuals to do the same in the last half-century. While enough gun barrels pointed in the opposite-of-traditional direction might be a(n improbable) strategy for shifting political power, it is not the source.

I began to seriously consider the necessity of land access during the 2008 financial crisis, but only understood it then in more selfish terms. I believed then that the key to my future freedom and well-being was directly tied to the control and production of my own resources. It turns out, that’s only half-true. I believed then, and still believe, that if I can provide my own food, I don’t need to take part in systems of control. But without a wider community of support, without a higher level of interdependence, without a commons, we aren’t free, only isolated and vulnerable, no different than the one in eight Americans facing a hungry November. Cloistered security is no security at all without community stability, or a safety net.

If we’re outgunned anyway, how do we hold ground? How do we gain it? As I horde the meager resources my closest people and I will need for the coming cold, I’ve given this some thought, and would shakily conclude that seizing power will require that everyday people get good at organizing themselves and each other, and that they quickly learn to share their own surpluses for the common good. If some of us have extra food, and others have extra land, and others have extra money or time or skills or nothing at all, pockets of sovereign, interdependent power can sprout up over time. Land trust models are one example of how resource-sharing can become highly organized, but they are dependent on non-profit corporations for their legal existence, and non-profits are potentially vulnerable in the current environment– now that the executive branch has declared anti-capitalism a thought crime, publicly committing to egalitarianism is a possible risk. Still, re-learning how to share (something human beings have done since before we were human beings) is probably a safer bet than getting into a stand-off with militarized federal partisans over “your” resources.

The gun-metal gray banner of clouds which darken the horizon have finally erupted in a slow, cold, infrequent rain, like the atmosphere is holding back tears. It weeps for ten minutes, then fades into little more than a heavy dew, and flocks of house sparrows flit out from beneath wet hedge leaves to strip down the dwindling stocks of foxtail seed that poke through the rank, dead garden. Once the foxtail and sunflower and the chicory has all been stripped clean of its nourishment, I’ll do what I do every year and fill up bird-feeders with purchased seeds. I’ve never had a considerable excess of money in my life, but any disposable income I’ve generated seems to go into seed in one form or the other. I like to watch birds, even trash birds like house sparrows, get fluffy and shiny and fat off my surplus during the cold season.

Soon, real rains will come, according to the forecast at least. I work to move my pigs to higher ground– and nearer to their winter shelter. I use a heavy mallet to pound the fiberglass fence-posts for their next paddocks into the hard, dry clay. After coaxing the hogs onward to their new paddock with a bucketful of surplus pumpkin, I watch them snort through the weedy duff for acorns– they snap and growl at each other at first, but with adequate space they fill their stomachs a bit, and eventually cuddle against the cold in the embrace of a spreading cedar. It’s amazing how warm and caring they become for one another once they’re fully fed.

The spiral of waning solar collection grows tighter as we move from feeding the soil to feeding ourselves. Where once the sun fed the soil, I now provision our survival, by taking from the soil in times when the sun is ungiving. But I’m hoping that the ground will grow soft enough before it freezes so that my planting shovel might place the hungry roots of my little trees into this earth which ceaselessly gives and takes. And I’m also hoping that these trees will be found and cared for by the people who will need them. But if not, perhaps they’ll at least offer shelter to some fat trash-birds.

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