Earthworms will dance
When government gets between my lips and my stomach; I call that invasion of privacy!
In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.
The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.
Nobody walks well first, nobody writes well first and nobody cooks well first.
How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.
Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant, you're now eating food that's produced by this system.
Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.
If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly first.
It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly.
Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.
You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.
My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control.
You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility
Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices.
The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches you don't know who can stand on their own two feet.
A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.
I see myself today as Sitting Bull trying to bring a voice of Easternism, holism, community-based thinking to a very Western culture.
Everything I want to do is Illegal.
Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.
'Organic' doesn't mean what people think it means.
Remember, machines don't forgive.
If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.
