Touching the Earth

  This past weekend I attended a transformative workshop in Natural Farming and Indigenous Microorganisms by a fellow former George Jones Farm Manager and good friend Aaron Englander that was at once revelatory and confirming. It was full of surprises but also completely common-sense and an extension of my own learning experience in relation to the land.

  In the coming days and weeks I plan on experimenting with the recipes taught at the workshop, and will likely follow up with some more practical posts on this topic of IMOs. If you have the chance to learn more about these IMO-oriented farming techniques, I would heartily recommend it. Aaron Englander is based out of New England. If you'd like more information on future workshops he may be teaching, you can contact him at aaron.englander@gmail.com.

"I Alone Am the Honored One:" I All One Am Honored

  Aaron's first foundational point was that all living things are one system. All life -- bacteria, fungi, plants, animals -- share eating, respiration, and waste as fundamental processes and accomplish these processes through each other. Thus what is healthful for one type of life is also fundamentally healthful for all others, and through this commonality life forms one system.

  In Buddhist tradition the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is said to have been born and to have immediately taken seven steps leaving blooming lotuses in each footfall, and then raised one hand up to the heavens and another down to the earth, saying "I alone am the Honored One." Who is this "I alone?" I think the answer is in this point about the commonality of all living things.

  In 2002 I was training as a horticulturist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and found myself amazed by a worm-bin outreach project in the Education department. I got to know Mary Appelhoff's (the patron saint of worms) crazy sense of humor through her seminal Worms Eat My Garbage. At the same time in my Soil Management course I learned the term "edaphon," meaning the soil as a totality of all the living organisms in it. Right at the beginning of my own training in plant ways, the ground beneath my feet was revealed to be a whole universe unto itself, or better yet a whole universe that is this universe, a coextension of all life.  There are bacteria who pass their whole lives high in the atmosphere whirling in the winds and clouds (see Olivia Judson's fascinating piece in the New York Times) and there are tube worms on the ocean floor and there we are in between. My own farming intuition long before I read anything by Masanobu Fukuoka or Wes Jackson or ever heard of permaculture was to be mindful of soil as more than substrate.

  During that same year of horticulture training I remember all too well mowing the lawn of the BBG's Rose Garden and having a baby rabbit run out from a bed right in front of my mower, probably startled by the noise of the engine. The blades scalped its head in half cutting right through the skull, the bright pink contents spilling out. Years later I was trained on a tractor by brush-hogging a fallow field in late summer. Like a giant lawn mower the tractor wound its way through the shoulder-high grasses while I watched grasshoppers and other insects, groundhogs and cats scurry out of the way at the last second and I remembered the rabbit I killed all those years before. I saw the ones who escaped the tractor that day, but how many didn't?

  And so when I work with the soil and when I have taught students about working the soil, I remember that poor rabbit and I remember the grasshoppers who flew out of the dry grass and the groundhog's sleek fur undulating away. As with a lawn mower and a brush-hog, so with a tiller. I tell my students to think of the soil as New York City, to consider all the energy flows and work that gets done in the concentrated space of a city block: the streets and hallways and elevators, the work spaces and the living spaces, the plumbing and the architecture. Now imagine Godzilla (or better yet these days, a tsunami or a nuclear disaster) coming along and flattening a stretch of that city. It will likely get rebuilt by the survivors left on the margins, but its economy will be severely compromised and it will take a long long time to return to its former vibrancy. Now imagine Godzilla making an annual visit and demolishing that same site over and over. This is tilling. Like the relentless scalping lawn-mower blade seared in my memory or the whirring blades of the brush-hog, the tiller passes through and destroys whole systems of life in a moment.

  Instead we use a broadfork to accomplish a less interventionist aerating and loosening of the soil. "Small and slow solutions" is one of David Holmgren's twelve permaculture principles, and the broadfork can represent a de-escalation of violence against the hidden (to our eyes) communities of the "edaphon." This is an economic decision, a recognition that it is in humans' own interest to minimize the damage to the soil's own economy so that it might continue to meet our needs. But in light of the recognition of the commonality of all life's needs and the unity of this system, might it not also be a moral decision?  I share kinship with the slain rabbit, with the escaping grasshoppers and groundhogs, with the grasses falling under the blade. We all breathe. We all breathe together. Who is this "I" and how is it "honored?"

Touching the Earth

  In 2002 using worms to create compost was revolutionary to me. It was a recognition of a connection to something so unconsidered and alien as an eyeless limbless worm in the ground. That same year I learned about fungal mycorrhizae and their symbiotic existence with over 90% of plants, extending plants' nutrient uptake through an "internet" of hyphae as Paul Stamets puts it in Mycelium Running. It brought home the fiction of separateness, that living things are really always living communities of mutual support.

  Like embracing worms and vermiculture as a workforce and a technology as partners in the act of composting, and like embracing mycorrhizae as a fact of the lifeways of plants and their production, and like embracing the broadfork over the tiller as a way of protecting the life of the soil, this workshop simply pushed the envelope of consideration a little further. In Worms Eat My Garbage, Mary Appelhoff has a delightful cartoon of a board meeting of soil decomposers. Her book and the vermiculture movement it spawned focused on the worms at the table. This workshop simply reminded us all that all the invisible members at the table should also be kept in consideration, cultivated, and embraced as partners in life. Ultimately, all that the Natural Farming workshop pointed to was to stay awake to all facets of the edaphon, to not forget any element in the system of breathing life.

  Like raising worms in a bin in a basement or a cupboard, the workshop taught a series of recipes for cultivating the microorganisms indigenous to one's area. It's important to note the "indigenous" aspect of this, that we are already thoroughly and intimately enmeshed in a weave of life right here and now. It doesn't need to be brought from anywhere else: it's already here. The EarthStoreHouse this blog is named for is right here, the door always open. Using simple ingredients like grain and sugar and alcohol to coax and cultivate collections of these indigenous microorganisms (IMOs), we get to know the life already present in our lives and amplify it into a mixture ultimately used to "seed" life back into the soil, the ground of our lives. (Last year at the Jones Farm my goal with our aerated compost tea program was just this, to "sow life" into the fields. In a larger way it was also my mission at the farm and continues in my present education work not just to grow vegetables, but to grow farmers, to not just sow crop seeds but culture seeds as well.)  It is no surprise that at each step in the amplification process, the flourishing bacteria, molds, and fungus smelled sweet and appetizing. Whiffs of miso, scents of baking bread, the sweet spiciness of curing meats. In so many ways we've come to forget that it is the eating of our microscopic kin that allows us to eat.

  Through all the processes for cultivating IMOs, contact with the ground is considered important. Not only does it allow for proper breathing of the mixtures (as opposed to some non-porous surface), but more fundamentally it maintains the connection of these IMOs to their home. When the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, on the eve of his enlightenment, he dropped one hand and touched it to the ground, asking the earth to bear witness to his awakening. Revelatory as the concept of the "edaphon" was to me, it also has its limitations. It implies that the edaphon is a world apart from our own, a universe underground. In light of the workshop, the Buddha's touching of the earth reminds me that I am not separate from the edaphon. There is not one world above ground and another below but one "alone" to be honored. We honor it when we know that we not only touch the ground but that the converse is also true, that the earth touches us.

Groundwork:  Stepping As The Earth

 
  During the workshop we talked about a number of "groundworks" that could enhance the IMOs' abilities to help other organisms flourish.  The recipes, ranging from creating a "lunchbox" of cooked rice to invite the IMOs to take up residence to mixing IMO cultures into wheat bran to fermenting weeds in brown sugar, all aimed to greet the IMOs already present and exponentially multiply their beneficial presence.  On the one hand this can be seen as purely utilitarian, as yet another technology of humans to further their own ends -- in this case eating -- through the greater yields that can come from a vibrant soil.  Yet on the other hand, I would return to this image of the EarthStoreHouse that has been so potent for me in my own farming practice, and see in it the collapsing of above and below ground, our world and the soil world,  into the impossibly intricate interconnected system of giving and receiving, of invitation and acceptance.

  We place our bundle of rice in the compost pile and invite the life that is already here supporting us to take up residence so we might nurture it.  Whether we do so or not, this life is there and functioning.  The fields hum with their vibrancy underfoot, the duff of the woodland churns with them already.  And we too hum and churn in the system whether we know it or not.  This Natural Farming approach simply offers us the chance to make a conscious awake choice to join in the "groundwork" that is always underway.  In a previous post, "Who is this farmer?," this is the point I was trying to make but could not quite articulate.  Whether I farm here or there, whether I farm or not at all, "farming" has gone on, is going on, and will always be going on.  Who is this farmer?  Who is this "I alone am the Honored One?" 

  One of my favorite galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art houses a number of large Buddhist statues.  On one side of the room are the stern and self-contained arhats, or lohans, disciples of the Buddha who sit steadfast in meditation.  On the other side are richly adorned and quietly smiling bodhisattvas, some of whom (like the one pictured above from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) are stepping out of meditation and back into the world.  This stepping into the earth is stepping into the Honored One farmer's muck boots, stepping into the groundwork of bacteria, fungi, and molds, of worms and moles, of bent backs and dirty hands.  Not merely stepping on the earth or even into the earth but stepping as the earth.