Come the Revolution

Archive for March, 2009

A few months back I read an amazing book. It’s called Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll. The reading is relatively dense, but it’s filled with history and an expert analysis of the conversations of the earlier half of the 19th Century with regard to improving soils through on-farm natural means versus taking what one could from a plot. Essentially the entire book is about manure either directly or indirectly. I realize this won’t excite so many people (and of those it would, Freud or Kraft-Ebbing would have had quite a bit of fun with you).

Since the time of Washington, if not before, there have been serious, voiced concerns of the lessening fertility of American soils. Without fertile soil, tilled in perpetuity, argued many men of that time through today, civilization loses its footing. Many farmers of the time “prefer[ed] to rethink agriculture rather than remake their world on the frontier” where the soils were more fertile.

“At the center of these concerns stood a pile of dung. Unattractive and strange to the uninitialized but a stern monument to those who knew its ways, dung held great power. If improvement and all that it stood for had a single symbol, it was this—the steaming excrement that completed a circle in the land large enough to enclose the riches of rural life, strong enough to make the farm equal in strength to the changes taking place in the upstart sectors of the post-1812 economy. If the farm would stand with manufacturing or against it, one thing was certain: it would have to make manure. And to those who claimed that the glory of the United States lay in the West and that the unceasing exploitation of soil would result in a prosperous nation, the dunghill argued otherwise. Onto this single hot and aromatic structure improvers heaped all their hopes and goals: a permanent rural society, the leadership of responsible elites, a countryside distinguished for its beauty and neatness, the application of reason to artifice, and various desires for integration or isolation from the wider world all of it seemed possible when dung got mixed up with soil. The dunghill seemed to offer a way out of the paradox of a declining environment that would provide the raw material for an economic revival. At the moment they realized that agriculture had resulted in widespread degradation, farmers all over Atlantic America came to believe that the same soil could bear a great deal of economic and political weight.”

How could you argue with that?

Larding the Lean Earth has led to a few more books on my bookshelf (albeit mostly temporarily from the public library) about manure and humanure or night soil (the polite names for human feces when it becomes productive waste). They have all been interesting, but none as historically significant and humbling as Larding the Lean Earth. In the hopes that I will write about all of them, consider this Poop Post 1.

…Ain’t we got fun?

I am in debt. Quite a bit of it, actually. Cian has debt, too. And we’re not alone: Generation Debt author Anya Kamenetz wrote in 2007 that two thirds of undergrads have an average of $19,300 in educational debt, and undergrads in their final year carry an additional $2,800 in credit card debt. My educational debt puts that figure to shame, and the only reason I’m out of credit card debt is because last year I put every spare penny towards paying off the $7,000 I racked up over the course of my undergraduate career and the year that followed.

Having such serious debt puts limits on the opportunities we can take advantage of. As he weeded through ads in search of farm apprentices this winter, Cian automatically disregarded close to 75% of them — not because of their location or practices, but because their stipend wouldn’t even come close to covering our expenses. We completely understand that small farms can’t always afford to pay as much as they’d like to, and the truth is that there are people (people with trust funds) who can afford to live on a $200 monthly stipend and who will snap up those positions. I’d like to say that I don’t resent those people, but that would big a big ol’ lie. I resent the hell out of those people.

(We also realize that we’re incredibly privileged, and that we’re choosing to work in a sector that doesn’t pay well. Not everyone can choose to leave one job for another that pays less — and in this economy, not many sane people would.)

So anyway, it would be easy to whine and sulk and be bitter over our financial situation. I know it would be easy, because I’ve done it. A lot. But I’m pretty sure it would be healthier to view the circumstances as an opportunity to get creative about money. I have to admit that I got excited last week when I glanced at our Safeway receipt and found that we’d saved almost 50% on basic pantry-stocking items. We also leveraged a family connection to land a free couch for our new place, and Cian found another major piece of furniture on Craigslist for way below what we’d pay anywhere else. My mechanically-inclined Dad is working his connections to find us an affordable, reliable car for our move to the boonies. Working on a farm will help to stretch our food budget, and so will having a larger kitchen in which to store sale items and bulk foods. And there are half a dozen ways for two enterprising young people like ourselves to earn a few extra bucks.

In the end, we were lucky to find a farm that’s a great fit for us. It’s in the zone we want to farm in, it’s well diversified, and several of the growers’ former apprentices are now running other farms. But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t for the fact that this farm offers employees a living wage. With that stipend, if we defer our loans, we could probably break even without changing our already frugal spending habits. I’m hopeful that with a little creativity and forethought, we can avoid the we’re-broke blues — and who knows, maybe we’ll even come out on top.

Photo by Sun Dazed.