An Elemental Life

If you want to get in touch with life at its roots, life at an elemental level, there's nothing like a hundred acres of farmland (or raising small children!). The reality of the land is both more beautiful and less romantic than the world of ideas (where I usually live). The Farm resists idealization, the soil is resistant to theories. Land is always this specific land, and working the place always means working with this particular combination of the basic elements.

The ancients viewed the world as composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. That scheme turns out to be inadequate for purposes of physics and chemistry, but it's remarkably useful for capturing daily experience with the concrete specifics of life and work on the Farm.

Here's an example: when we got the Jeep or the Polaris stuck in the slippery rain-soaked mud, we wrestled with earth and water. To avoid those problems again, we need to work with the earth (soil) and the water and not against them. The messy details all come about from the way these ingredients interact!

And here's another example: we burned off about 20 acres of CRP grassland last week. It was an impressive interaction of fire and air! We were careful, well-manned, and well-equipped, and nothing bad happened: all the stuff that was supposed to burn did, and nothing that wasn't supposed to burn did! No injuries, no running around screaming in terror! All in all, a successful day. But here's the rub: we were "in control" only in a limited way. The direction and speed of the wind, and the heat and the speed of the fire, were more important for our success than our plan or our tools. A contrary wind could have cancelled the whole business, and fire in the wrong place would have turned it upside down.

To live and work happily with the Farm is a series of adjustments and accommodations, a dance of compromises between our human intentions and the elements we are given to work with. The elemental life of the Farm is a life in which we are not sovereign, not the masters of all we survey. We have to learn to live with only limited control.

Woods

"Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest."
(Wendell Berry)

Winter is a good time to think of the forest. The pace of life slows down enough that you can listen to the slow beat of the forest's heart. We realize that trees are our main crop: and this crop we harvest where we did not plant, and we plant what we will not see through to full maturity.

Most of the leaves are down, and you can see more clearly how the land lies, and how the trees stand on the landscape. The gullies are more severe in some places than I thought last summer. There are a lot of trees down, either cut by the previous owner or dead from disease or pests. It looks like the guy who used to own this land was thinning out the shagbark hickory, so we have several years' worth of solid firewood out there, if we are willing to do the work to drag it out and cut it up.

And as winter settles in around us, we are more dependent on the woods, because the main heat in the house is a wood-burning stove. A few nights with temperatures in single digits make you love good firewood, make you a connoisseur of the hard, round chunks that will burn hot and last for hours through the night. That shagbark hickory we've been cutting and splitting packs a big energy punch: roughly 25 or 30 million BTUs per cord.

But you cannot consume a forest forever, so winter is the time to plan how we will re-plant trees in the spring. The Missouri Department of Conservation offers bundles of bare-root seedlings (mostly native species well suited to our area) at very reasonable prices. We  put together an order which is a winter dream of our children’s (and grandchildren’s) forest, not ours.