Weighted Efficiency

Yesterday’s post has me sounding like a lack-a-daisical worker, which is a) not my point and b) patently false. I’m trying to bring to light, Kingsolver style, the challenges that arise when someone trained for intelligentsia tries their hand at manual labor. I’ve found it both humbling and empowering; my employers have seemed bemused but ultimately satisfied.

Similarly, my relationship with the demi-gods of efficiency has been re-visited. Again, cultural mores strengthened by familial outlook hold a strong sway. My whole life, efficiency has been next to godliness, because who doesn’t want to get more done in less time? In college I felt that in tasks assumed, quantity was valued over quality, although the requisite sacrifices of health and sanity were epidemic. Given the costs, the rewards for efficiency long ago lost their shine. Farming offered me a much-needed chance to slow down and search for an alternative.

It was hard to let go: a nagging, judgmental attitude demanding more efficiency followed me from school to farm. Confusingly, my farmers, with their anti-industrial mind-set but also a business to run, needed yet also discouraged it. I did learn to let it rest. I found the value in taking more time: I noticed more, learned more, grew more engaged with the whole farm system. (I also probably worked more slowly than necessary.)

I’ve learned that it’s deeply valuable to commune with nature, and to respect a task by giving it time and full attention. But when I know that hungry people, thirsty animals, or simply a ticking clock await, an attitude of “let ‘em wait” doesn’t sit well with me. Yet I haven’t quite perfected the calculation of when to do something well and when to just get it done. With some things, I’m proud to have learned to do them well and fast. But there are still plenty of times when I have to choose, or just seek a happy (i.e. resigned) medium.

Mind and body!

I come from a fabulous family. Let’s everybody be clear about this. We’re smart and compassionate and place a high value on good communication. But we’re not perfect, and no family is – one such area being that we (most of us) do a majority of our living in our heads, at the expense of our bodies and sometimes even of our spirits. So while each member of my immediate family intellectually understands the importance of “exercising” and has found some suitable regular activity, we approach it perfunctorily, usually reluctantly, and almost always independently.

Given that, nothing in all my years of book-larnin’ had come close to preparing me for the physical lessons of farming. I don’t just mean learning how to work in the rain, cold, snow, heat, etc – those I accomplished with appropriate clothing and ordinary stubbornness. I’m talking about learning purposeful movement, how to work by drawing on the physical capabilities of my body rather than simply my powers of intellectual concentration. It’s certainly not a lesson I could have learned after a day, week, or month of farming – after two and a half years it’s only finally sinking in.

Old habits die hard – my brain, used to taking the lead, looks at a repetitive task like “weed” or “harvest” and more often than not checks out to daydream, and is very reluctant to be reined back in. So while I have learned to work with my body, distracted musing (I am ashamed to admit) keeps me from working as well as I could. When I can bring my thoughts back to my body I work smarter and more efficiently. Caffeine helps my focus, but I’m hoping that other non-chemical factors can too.

Living in one’s own body is a life-long journey. (Obviously). After many years of not acknowledging it, farming has affirmed the vitality of that journey for me.

Haying Season

“Hay, now.” I’ve spent two farming seasons on farms that keep livestock – sheep, cattle, and a horse at one, just cattle at the other. Sweethearts, all, but they do get hungry. Both places do the grass-fed thing (and for a lengthy and accessible discussion of raising cattle on grass vs. grain, see Omnivore’s Dilemma). As you may know, this means the rhythm of summer is moving cattle to fresh grass every few days. It sounds simple, but there’s a lot of work involved, in maintaining fences and monitoring how much grass there is and where. But summer work also means winter prep – haying - one of the most time-sensitive farm tasks.

The haying sequence, for all you city folk, is: mowing a grassy field, waiting a few days for the cut grass to dry out, driving over it and making bales, loading the bales onto a wagon and then storing them in a big, dry barn. The whole process takes about three days and, depending on the weather and field’s fertility, can be repeated two or three times in one growing season. The most crucial consideration is moisture: while dry grass will store in a mow for ages, wet grass will at best rot and at worst start a fire (rotting gives off heat).

So during haying season, farmers keep a close watch on the weather predictions, and when three days of sun and dry come around haying moves to the top of the to-do list. As with most farming tasks these days, there do exist machines that will do almost every step of the haying process, up to stacking the bales in the barn. But at the farms where I’ve worked, we’ve loaded and stacked bales on the wagon by hand. It’s hot, heavy work that can take out your lower back, but I find the concrete, finite nature of the task rewarding.

Human Ecology - part 4 home stretch!

So where do humans fit into that forest ecosystem? Well, we know humans were first hunter-gatherers. Compared to today’s norms, hunter-gatherers were few and short-lived, in part because food was scarce and difficult to come by.

Enter agriculture. People literally had more food to eat. Remember - in our “natural” forest ecosystem, the cycles of minerals and loops of life were relatively small. Fast-forward to the new global human ecosystem, dependent on agriculture, which moves biological material (food!) long distances to support billions of humans. The whole situation of 6.8 billion of us grew up so fast that the norms of nutrient cycling (and just about everything else) have dramatically shifted.

Take nitrogen, for a start: it’s essential to building proteins in all living creatures. It enters our Cycle of Life when bacteria that live in nodules on the roots of legumes “fix” it – convert it from its inert atmospheric form to a bio-available form. Before the invention of agriculture, the global nitrogen budget was perhaps at equilibrium. But when people discovered we could benefit by planting more legumes, we planted more and more of them, and the annual global rate of nitrogen getting fixed rose accordingly. Humans shot an even bigger dose of nitrogen into the works when we discovered how to fix nitrogen chemically, in factories. Now, we ship bio-available nitrogen all over the world for people to put on crop fields. We’re so focused on getting more nitrogen to our crops that we overdose, and the excess washes downstream.

The species in the “natural” ecosystems, both land and aquatic, aren’t adapted to the new, higher levels of available nitrogen – see algae blooms and dead zones. Basically, the global nitrogen cycle is in flux – a lot is flowing downstream and very little ever makes it back up. This is typical for much of the nutrients that support human life: in “natural” ecosystems nutrients cycle round and round, while in our human ecosystem their path only goes one way.

Human Ecology: Part 3 (humans coming soon!)

So let’s go back to our “natural” forest and our Circle of Life and all. Quick chemistry review: carbon is The Building Block of Life, plants absorb it from the air and everything else gets their daily intake from either eating plants or eating things that eat plants. But we’re not pure carbon: among other things, living creatures also need small amounts of various minerals like magnesium, potassium, iron, phosphorous, etc, and these are found in the soil, and enter circulation in the food web via plants.

Before humans came along, the movement of these minerals was neither fast nor dramatic. If a beech tree absorbed a molecule of iron from the soil, that molecule might move, say, thirty feet in its path from soil to leaf and back to soil. The biggest exodus of minerals from the system was through runoff, when rain carried them downstream and away to the oceans. To some extent those minerals would be replaced in the ecosystem before they were sorely missed: at their source, from the slow dissolution of rocks in the soil. But overall, this all happened fairly slowly.

Now consider big animals: salmon, deer, migrating birds. Animals, among other things, are self-propelling packets of nutrition (see: hunting.) While carnivores derive direct benefit from animal flesh (nom nom nom), the greater ecosystem feels effects of their movement, too. Bird and bat droppings create phosphorus rich deposits where they roost; I’m sure North America’s buffalo and passenger pigeons had hefty impacts on the areas where they lived; and salmon bring nutrients from the ocean back upstream when they go to spawn. I don’t know about the other systems, but my understanding is that the salmon runs in particular are a rich source of nutrients that the upstream ecosystems have come to depend on.

My glitter frog lives, but won’t eat anything I give it. Harumph.

Human Ecology - part two of a few

So at heart I will perhaps always be a ten-year-old boy. I love squatting down and turning over rocks to see what’s living under them; I love going down to streams and peering at the fish and snails and so on. This evening at the grocery store something moved by my foot, which was not too uncommon on the farm during grasshopper season, but in a store in December surprised me. Somehow a tiny frog, smaller than my thumb, was lost on an expanse of white linoleum – and worse, it was covered in pink glitter. I brought him (her?) home with me, figuring that at worst I could give it a quieter, less glittery death than the floor of a grocery store would offer. Poor dear.

Anyway - food chains. Perfect for ten-year-olds who like frogs. Hawk eats snake eats mouse eats seeds. They fancied it up in college with talk of food webs, but it always seemed fairly straight-forward in the classroom. It wasn’t until I was working outside, with plants and animals, day in day out, that the magnitude and universality of this simple concept came home. I watched and managed cattle (grass-fed), and I learned how much land it really takes to grow enough grass to feed an organism as big as a cow (close to an acre per animals on my most recent farm). I tried to grow vegetables on sub-par soil, and I learned how vitally important soil health and quality are to vegetable production. And I found myself hungry and exhausted from growing food for humans, and yet was surrounded only by unappetizing trees and weeds and bugs. I learned, with all the diversity of life that springs up, how miraculous it is that humans have any food to eat at all.

This is all more than a little Pollen-esque. Bear with me. I'm going somewhere with it.

Human Ecology - in a couple parts

I keep my ecologist hat on most days. I think it’s a cool way to look at the world, perhaps even an invaluable way to look deeper into the nature of things. Like yesterday, I walked by a display case of men’s ties in many bright colors. Let’s pretend they were top-notch and made of silk. That silk came from silk worms; those worms lived and grew and matured and made silk because they were fed mulberry leaves. Those leaves were built from atmospheric carbon dioxide, full sunlight, water, and trace soil minerals, by a mulberry tree growing somewhere on this earth. Soil – leaves – worms – ties - those men’s ties contain the mineral profile and soil signature of some far-off plot of land. Oh, the mystery. And that was just from a moment of window-shopping.

Let’s make an assumption – don’t worry, we’ll question it later. Let’s apply the label “natural” to all non-human creatures. Let’s apply it also to those habitats in which obvious signs of human influence are absent. In other words, let’s call nature “natural” for a little while.

Imagine some natural world – I tend to picture forests, since the places where I live were once thickly forested and perhaps could be so again. I like to picture a healthy diversity of life: trees, bugs, birds, a bunch of small mammals, a few big mammals, herbs, shrubs, soil fungi, soil microorganisms. Rocks. Periodic rain. And then I look deeper – what’s it all made of? The plants are mostly carbon, having built themselves from the air and water and sunshine and some cocktail of soil minerals. All those other living creatures, however, aren’t lucky enough to have DIY bodies – they only grow if they eat.

Which brings me to the question I’m always asking: what is growing here, and what is it eating, and where is that coming from?

More tomorrow.