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INTRODUCTION
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12!
Introduction
ago a quarter of the population of the United States
lived on, and made its living from, a small farm.
Our grandparents were among these, people who
grew their own food and a few cash crops and did
other jobsplowed the county roads, helped
neighbors butcherto make a little cash so they
could buy what they couldnt grow. They didnt get
rich, but they lived a long time, enjoyed hearty good
health, and they ate really well.
Their children, however, took the fast track to
the city and a university education. We, their
grandchildren, knew the old homestead as a mecca
visited all too seldom and all too briefly, a place
where bobcats haunted dusty pine woods strung
with spiderwebs, and white-faced cows stood
chewing cuds and swishing tails beside ponds the
color of clay tile. The small, thin-floored houses
smelled magically of sulphur matches and stove
gas, sweaty water pipes, dust, talcum powder, and
divine cooking. A dappled pony was kept especially
for grandchildren, on which we were set three at a
time to hold on as well as we could while being led
tamely around the yard, at which we shivered with
the visceral terror of the city person encountering a
Large Animal. To leave the farm at the end of a
visit and go back to the city was to mourn with
prematurely mature mourning, the soul-wrenching
sorrow of mortals evicted from Paradise.
But eventually the Old Folks got older. With all
the kids in the city, there was no one left at home to
help with the work, and in time the demands of the
farm just got to be too much. We cant do this
anymore, they said to one another. You cant do
this anymore, their children assured them. And
we, their grandchildren, heard, It cant be done.
Perhaps it was in this way that the myth first
arose, the myth that says you cant farm anymore. Its
an interesting myth, as myths go, because it is one
that is brand-new with the present age. It has never
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A Different Model
16!
Introduction
farming, all of which were derivative of one basic
assumption: that the sun is the source of bioenergy
for this planet. Animals and plantsincluding
humanslive because the sun shines. The success
commercial and ecologicalof these writers farming endeavors was attributable, directly or indirectly,
to their recognition of this fact. Pastured meat chickens, all-grass beef, and four-season vegetable harvest
are all constructions resting on one constant: the
successful farmer is the one who makes the best use
of his sunlight. Reading these authors, we knew for
certain that the redistribution of petro-produced,
livestock-converted nutrients into which we had
entered with such gusto was not, as we had suspected, real farming. The sun, rather than our expensive
feeds of questionable provenance, should be the
power source for our farm. But how?
The answer was grass: the permaculture, present
in enormous communities over 40 percent of the
planets land mass, which can collect our quotidian
solar energythe sunlight falling on our farm
every dayso that cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and
poultry can harvest their dinners. Even more: in the
digestive system of a dairy animal, that sunlight can
become protein, fat, and lactose, nutrients supremely available not only for human food, but in such
quantities as to make it possible to supplement practically every animal and operation on the farm. The
puzzle was coming together: grass, the solar collector; ruminants, the converters; joined by chickens
and pigs as batteries, self-reproducing storage units
of surplus solar energy. Here at last was the secret of
Grandfathers farm, that Mecca of good food,
strong, hard-working men and women, and unquestioned food security: grass management. Otherwise
known as intensive rotational grazing.
We took our lesson out in the fields and put it to
work, and we watched our little farm come to life.
As our ruminants moved over the pasture in
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Disclaimer
Farmingmodern industrial imitations notwithstandingseems to us to be as much art as science,
and to entail more commitment than either. Like
marriage, it is affected by details that are peculiar to
the individuals involvedpeople, animals, plants,
time, and placeand, while similarities between
farms are many, hard-and-fast rules are few. The
best farmers we know or have read make the fewest
claims for their knowledge: I dont really know
how to do it right, I just do the best I can, as one
veteran grazier in our area often says. Allan Savory,
founder of the Savory Institute and father of Holistic Resource Management, avoids the term teach
as applied to his many workshops, preferring words
like demonstrate, share, and equip.
We, with our few poor years of experience,
cannot teach anyone how to grass farm, not teach
in the sense we learned in school, like explaining
algebra. Nature s math, in any case, isnt like
elementary mathematics: where 1 + 1 = 2 in arithmetic, in nature it is just as likely to equal 3, when
the first two are a bull and a cow; or one, if one of
the addends is a sheep and the other a coyote. Nor
are we here to tell you How We Succeed and So Can
whereby the farm is not a staging ground for assembling nutrients, but a font from which nutrients
originate, when basic elements are assembled in the
leaves of green growing things, consumed by herbivores, and converted into generous quantities of
high-quality proteins and fats. This is the theme of
a flourishing biodiversity, each species of plant or
animal feeding and being fed, assisting and receiving assistance from the rest, and all, ultimately, fed
by the sun.
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Introduction
No longer are we without personal recourse from
a food production system that implicates even the
unwilling in a widespread destruction of ecosystems. We can ransom food and agriculture on a
small, individual scale, shifting our personal nutrient consumption to fresh, whole, local, responsibly
grown foodsfood produced with todays sunlight
instead of fossil fuels. The careful, attentive
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