It recently dawned on me that my life is currently mimicking a few of the broader structural trends within U.S. agriculture over the past 50 years or so. That is to say that in a small-scale, anecdotal, hokey kind of way, when you close up the farm and move to the city to pursue a graduate degree, you in turn are mirroring - and adding to - the continued loss of farms, trends of young farmer attrition, and more broadly contributing to the rural brain drain that for decades has precipitated the cultural and economic collapse of rural america. The consolidation of agricultural lands onto increasingly fewer and larger farms due to an aging farmer population that has no options of generational transfer - because the kids all moved to urban, semi-urban and peri-urban areas in the pursuit of jobs and materialistic comforts and haven't the ambitions of eking out an existence as their parents did and do - is just one spike on the morning star being used to beat the life out of a sustainable agricultural future.
Then think about the politics of it all, the terribly illogical inconsistency between what our government recommends we eat and what they encourage farmer's to grow, the revolving door between large agricultural businesses, government and lobbying interlocutors, and an ever-growing cultural malaise directed by oft-misguided priorities. Add to this a venerable russian nesting doll of causes and effects, some smoke, mirrors, and red herrings, and an impotent political structure run by people that lack the benevolence, ethics, and all too often intelligence necessary for governing, and you can start to assemble a lens through which to view the pressing needs for change.
I really can't go on, but thought I would break some of the silence recently embracing this corner of the inter-web.
A final note to anyone paying attention: everything above is an overwhelming oversimplification, replete with any actual justifications, data, or actual literary cohesiveness, but I'll save that for graded work.
And a poem by Wendell Berry:
The Farmer among the Tombs
I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,
their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,
the bones imprisoned under them.
Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!
Pry open the vaults and the coffins
so the dead may nourish their graves
and go free, their acres traversed all summer
by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.
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Additional, final note: anyone interested in pursuing a project to plant orchards on graveyards (I read somewhere that the roots will follow the bones of subterranean skeletons leaving the buried memorialized in a wooden cast of sorts, pretty cool), or more broadly an Initiative for Rural Weirding (although I suppose the previous call to interest could fit comfortably within the structure of this second)? I say this in half-jest.
