Been a long seven weeks. Like, really long. Long as my hair.
That can happen in Wisconsin, in spring. We’ve been hammered last five years, late season frosts, snows, even in May, and as much as global warming is a term, we are living in a place where uncertainty rules weather.
But … season length this spring has been multiplied. Really deepened. As when interpreting Covid graphs, searing a socially-distant world into consciousness at a logo-rhythmic scale. And, like everyone, Wisconsin is tired of indoors.
So, we go outdoors and work.
At farming.
Second most organic farms in the nation, after California, which is like saying, “We second, after the largest organic farming ‘country’ in the world.”
We got corn. We got beans. We got cows. We got a lot of farms, but there is nothing we got more than grass. In farming terms: pastures. I endeavored to explain this all last fall. If you don’t know anything about regenerative farming, go back and read that first. You late to the party.
Pastures do a lot of things, ninety-nine per cent of them good. Pastures build soil, provide bio-diversity, prevent runoff, increase water infiltration, hold nutrients and minerals, sequester carbon, store food energy on the land, and create habitat. The only drawback is: the immediate monetary return on pasture, on the upside, is known and considered limited. But, and take a look at the list in this paragraph: pastures do the land — and climate — a wealth of good and as well, provide farmers a positive financial return. That’s a fuckin’ lot.
You just aren’t going to get rich on pasture.
In the same vein, one other positive: the downside monetary loss to managing pastures is also limited.
Which can’t be said of corn and beans. Compare just the downsides of what happens in the corn and bean system: obscene amounts of tillage that release carbon, purchase of synthetic chemicals, herbicides and fertility, at the farmer’s expense, disruption of the soil microbial network, creating runoff and soil loss, releasing toxic chemicals into watersheds, burning fossil fuel at every turn, producing completely useless industrial products that benefit large corporations and not local farmers or communities. Tell me when to stop.
Oh, did I forget to mention that crop farming has been on a downward spiral financially for the last six years? Bankruptcies up. Suicides up. Average farmer’s age up.
Covid been bad? Yeah, it is. Worst thing I’ve seen over six decades. Small sample for sure.
But reality is, what is now slowly accumulating across this continent every spring, every growing season, every harvest, is going to create something even worse. A lot worse. Bigger scale, more implacable, fewer options for human redemption, or any kind of government response.
It is my thesis that land use, especially commodity crop-farming (i.e. corn and beans), is a bigger driver of excess carbon in the atmosphere than any other industry. I’m going to stand on that, I’m going to stomp on that, because farming not only includes fossil fuel consumption -- necessary in my view to feed many millions -- but also incorporates degredation of landscape function, AKA, the inability to cycle carbon and nutrients into the soil profile, which is a raping of soil health,literally, a pandemic abuse of our most basic resource: soil, which if you haven’t looked into it, is pretty much the lynch pin of civilization and always has been.
When humans lose their soil function, they go extinct in that particular place.
Anyway, don’t want to get too far “out there” on farming, soil health, climate change, economic policy, corporate domination of the farm sector: don’t want to say too much about that right now. People are suffering. Times is hard.
What I want Kossers to understand is: Pastures come back green.
IN A REALLY BIG WAY.
When you most need grass, when animals are hungry, when you are fuckin’ end of your rope, when it’s May and there ain’t no leaf on a tree, and there is literally no where to go and nothing to do: Pastures come back green. And you can sure as hell count on that!
When every corn and bean farmer in your county is scratching the ground, hoping that commodity prices, for the first time in a decade, experience some kind of miracle bounce, bailing them out of unmanageable debts, unfathomable loans and unlimited under-investment, all lorded over by the biggest corporate barons in America. When these guys are out there beating their head against the wall, tilling, plowing, rolling… When hope becomes a plan, and “dust storms” suddenly appear on a windy day in the middle of Wisconsin -- ever heard of dust storms in a healthy eco-system? — these guys are out there, all night if need be, burning diesel and wrecking the collective eco-system we call North America.
And it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the commodity farming system, producing commodities like ethanol when you are already a net petroleum exporter, is about the dumbest thing we can do. Look at the “meat plants” closing across the heartland like contagion. Really, because of it. Producing cheap meat, from unhealthy animals, who are raised in concentration camps and fed the worst food ever raised by human beings: GMO soy and corn. And that’s the mainstay or our food system?
Yeah, America has cheap food, but it’s bad food, and it gets awful expensive when you add in treating diseases we get from eating it. And now, diseases we get from processing it.
As we enter the food shortage part of this pandemic, if you want to figure out how to get meat, real meat, contact your local Wisconsin organic farmer. We got it in spades. Grass fed. Pastured. Humane animal treatment. Wholesome product, raised where the animals know the sounds of other animals, living outdoors eating grass. And, frankly, delicious.
We need to get back to supporting people, families really, on the land, caring for their place of home. Once we wipe out that basis for the American heartland, we might as well be Soviet Russia, living on collective farms, using industrial machinery and not giving a damn about nothing in terms of a future.
Be woke. Get your food sourcing on.
You want a better planet for kids? You tell them this: as hard as things been across this great land, the land that Woody Guthrie sang for and praised the people that work it, the good, the bad and the ugly of our long history of settlement and eradication of people living here, the exploitation, the subjugation and erstwhile emancipation, the damming and drilling and demarcating of earth, and with all the death, despair and distancing of God’s year 2020, there’s one sure thing — near as I can tell, the only thing sure in this part of the world: pastures come back green.
Every spring.
No matter what.
And that allows the daring, the scruffy, the ones with a plan, the fool-hardy, the brave, the strong and ones who want a future for kids to get out there, raise animals, create fertility, cycle it through their production systems and generally raise a lot of food. Good food for once. Food that builds immune systems because it comes from a healthy soil network. Turns out the immune system is pretty damn important.
Need something to count on during hard days, these unending weeks where nothing changes?
Pastures come back green.
It’s the basis.
And that means we can feed and tend livestock, grow soil, build habitat and work with Nature for once instead of trying to jam her onto a corporate balance sheet.
Be safe out there. But be smart dammit.