The Folly of Cartography

...plus winter rye planting and unappealing, yet perfectly suitable crops

With little threat of rain these past few weeks, we’ve engaged in the tendency to leave things out. Every dawn I ward off the morning chill with a flannel, and by the time I’ve made it to the second half of my chores it ends up hung up on some fence somewhere as the cool night air is burnt off by the lower angled September sunrise. Mowing around a few trees in one of the chestnut plantings every morning, I hang up my scythe in a nearby walnut limb, to retrieve later. The hedge-handled hand sledge I use for setting portable fiberglass pig paddocks posts in the hard earth, some garden shears painted with a patina of oxidation, some hay flecked socks, a wad of cash, a trio of homely cushaw squashes, a bucket half full of cowpeas, these things and much more can be found strewn along a quarter mile stretch of pasture, prairie, woodland and homestead as our patterns of activity begin to retreat, slightly, from the zenith of summertime gardening, grazing, and growing.

Without rain and the native warm season grass advancing toward maturity, pasture growth has been slow. In June, the grazier has ample opportunities to correct overgrazing: with nearly four months of the growing season yet to unfurl, the roughed up patches and thin spots left by pastured livestock can recover, provided enough rain. In September, our options for reestablishing vegetation in time for soil destroying winter winds and erosive spring melt-off is annual rye, which is why I’ve been out casting broad handfuls of the stuff out in the run down portions of pasture and vacant garden beds, while simultaneously retrieving every shirt, sock, tool and bucket of beans I can remember the location of before our first bout of rain in a while settles in, we hope.

Rye (Secale cereale), is a reliable multi-purpose annual, at least here. So long as the temperature is above freezing, it will germinate, and young rye plants hold their green color and slowly photosynthesize throughout fall and winter, the roots exuding an allelopathic chemical that reduces the germination of competing seeds, keeping weeds out of the pasture or garden. 

It can be grazed or cut down as soilage for livestock, tilled in for a green manure, or left to ripen for grain. As a grain, and outside of the world of whiskey snobs (look y’all, it all hurts my body the same and exists for one reason only, might as well be cheap about it) rye doesn’t get much respect as a grain. Pliny the Elder, (the original mansplainer) said that it was, “a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation.” 

In places like Poland, they do not share Pliny’s view, and rye bread and fermented rye soup bases and drinks hold down a considerable portion of carbohydrates in a local and traditional diet. Also, averting starvation is definitely the point of growing food. While it’s fine to have a little razzle dazzle present at the table, I have noticed a correlation between tasty food items and rampant pestilence. 

We grow a lot of squash. Among the most pest-resistant varieties is the cushaw. A short row of cushaws can produce hundreds of pounds of mediocre fruit in a good year, and the plants are largely unperturbed by borers, squash bugs and their ilk. A nice sweet squash like a kabocha that everyone tells me to plant does not stand a chance under organic cultivation in our climate and region. The petty side of me (which is the larger part) loves to watch tasty crops fail. Cherokee Purple tomatoes are probably my favorite to eat. They have a complex sweet/umami thing going on, but as a crop they suffer from splitting, catfacing, blight and general rot. I’ve finally decided it isn’t worth it for us to have more than a couple few plants in our garden when there are perfectly acceptable heirlooms that do excel at growing here. (Really into Ozark Pink tomato this year.) Unfortunately I think there is a fair bit of pressure from hipster chefs and groups like Slow Food for small, sustainability focused farmers to raise impractical varieties for the taste, and associated money, smugness and superiority, but that’s another newsletter for after I get a bunch of produce sold. The point is that I don’t think candy-sweet squash and critically acclaimed tomatoes are going to lead the way to a sane, sovereign, and sustainable food system. We’re going to need to eat some rye, some cushaw, and probably some crow. Again, I think preserving heirloom/heritage genetics and traditional foodways is of vital importance; I just don’t think it is the path to getting people fed. For that we have turnips.

Feeding people still requires land. And in the dominant system, land is a commodity. I’ve been bumping up against the tendency to commodify land lately, and have found the process to be a challenge to my own worldview and identity. The place where I am now, Scotland County, Missouri would appear to have been territory of the Sac, Fox and Ioway people prior to colonization and extirpation, according to the limited information I can access. It would most likely have been hunting ground, occasionally visited for provisions, potentially altered by fire, but largely left to function without consistent human impact. My understanding of territory in this instance is different than our current concept of property, or certainly real estate, in the modern day and age. (Acknowledging, of course, that this is a tricky subject to make a definitive statement on, in part because very little of this history for my region remains or was ever recorded, and that the cultural memory of this time was largely erased by white settlement and the subsequent campaign of extirpation. What I think can be said is that indigenous people had complex and varied relationships with land that could include concepts of territory, access, and ownership depending on cultural and regional circumstances.)

A pretty sweet map of Civil War skirmishes in our area, courtesy of our local history museum.

In agriculture, we look at land from a bird’s eye view, or more accurately, from the view of an orbiting satellite: a measurement existing in only two dimensions, expressed in acreage, or row feet. Ultimately, this measure includes a speculative dollar value. Extending into the third dimension, that of height or elevation, we can comprehend the canopy of trees and the roots and life held within the earth below: an under examined measurement in the modern ownership approach. 

Even within the confines of so-called “regenerative” agriculture, a commodified two-dimensional view of the landscape falls short in imagining the full potential of land as a means to sequester carbon. Graziers oriented towards promoting and enhancing photosynthetic function by merely considering pounds of forage per acre are not necessarily factoring in the three dimensional capabilities of trees on the landscape to increase photosynthetic surface, and hence soil carbon. In many instances, the regenerative approach is completely parallel with the status quo, only with the pursuit of a carbon yield instead of a crop yield. The lack of imagination comes down to the reductionist approach to land we bump against when individuals are managing so much of it that it has to be planned and conceived using satellite imagery instead of the cartography of lived experience.

Furthermore, considerations of the time dimension only enter as a factor of commodification: will this land increase in monetary value over time as residential/commercial sprawl encroaches on this rural area? We do have some examples of indigenous American maps. In some instances, distance and time are recorded as a similar measure: one line, representing the time it takes to traverse a landscape by walking, may be much longer than another. The longer line may be a shorter distance, but rougher terrain. Some maps contained stories, events, or information about climate. While less spatially accurate than our modern maps, they held a complexity of information that would be difficult to discern from a mere satellite view of the terrain that we can all access today. Going back to tree crops, we again note that the advantages of trees on the landscape are not apparent without considering them within the context of dimensional time. 

And so this past week I began the work of surveying a suitable location for a five acre chestnut orchard with some awareness of these shortcomings, or perhaps even trepidation. I am unsure whether or not I have covered our forming worker-owned agroforestry cooperative in the almanac much… I’ve held the intention of getting to the solutions part of land use, agriculture and community for some time now, but I guessI just enjoy working through (and complaining about) the problems too much. Maybe next year!  Anyhow, while an equity-based tree crops cooperative may seem like a genuinely altruistic and objectively “good” way to inhabit place, I could not help but note a nagging sense of guilt in the process of clearing, marking, and commodifying this particular planting site.

There was no tall grass for the wind to rustle out on the five acre ribbon of sloping prairie we set out to survey that morning, for it had been cut for hay two weeks prior. The bare strip, intercepted by steep undulating ditches full of sumac and the occasional thicket of autumn olive held a strange silence for this time of year, until we showed up with the chirping laser level and rumbling, crunching brush hog. Eight of us had hiked out to the site, marking elevations for the purpose of setting drip-lines and doing our best to work with and learn from the existing features; some sapling oak and persimmon, broad swaths of goldenrod and bergamot, the remnants of a turkey nest. We tromped around in the field, shouting directions, pacing off intervals, operating laser levels, mowing down blossoming prairie forbs, and pushing together burn piles of slashed scrub. Resplendent monarch butterflies alighted upon ironweed, and in the bustle of beeping equipment, quick math, and the placement of dozens of little wire and plastic pink flags, I uttered to no one in particular, “If you’re an indigenous hunter-gatherer and your hunting grounds look like this, your property taxes are about to go up.”

The wild places in our biome may have never really existed. The humans here have always had a role to play in their existence, and have been a critical link in the ecological chain, through the application of fire and hunting on up to the mapping, parceling, sale, and widespread disruption of Manifest Destiny. Even those of us who want to do good in our relationship with land can have a difficult time figuring out where to draw the line between the cartography of lived experience, and that of colonialism. In the relatively “progressive” spaces of permaculture and regenerative agriculture, the two-dimensional map, with its ownership-based boundaries and limited scope is the starting and ending point of how a project is designed. I am questioning how this satellite view of land, without the context of communities both human and non-human that inhabit it, and the stories written out in footpaths, deer-trails, stray bones and snakeskin and rotten, logged-out stumps, can ever suffice to inform our decision to interact with place. How can we responsibly become a part of the story we haven’t read?

I reckon that these trees we’re planting, at least some of them, will stand long after I’m gone. They’ll mark the spot where an attempt was made at a gentler form of agriculture, and I hope that whatever hands this space falls into will belong to someone who has the consideration to read what story this place tells. And if not, they’re nut trees, and between the squirrels and the blue jays, I have no doubt that this current story will only be an introduction.

Morally ambivalent and stocked with mediocre squash,

BB

Hey y’all- as a little reminder, you can find a detailed (but not elitist) guide to scything I’ve put a LOT of time into over at the Poor Proles substack. Andy and I even have a podcast coming out soon, and a second installment of that piece showing up soon, so be sure to check it out. I’m happy to provide my little guidebook in an easy to reference pdf / ebook form sometime later in the season when I’m less busy. Beyond that, thanks for reading, let me know what you think about maps and slow food elitism… I’m still figuring out what I think myself. Get your rye in!