Faith in the Land

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He's a successful rancher -- one who for years now has actually made money off his herd. But since he's not the type to poison prairie dogs, I figure he is resigned to call this 4,000 acres a loss. From what I can see, the Childress is hopeless.

And yet Mark looks on this pasture with soft eyes. He is a cowboy in the old-time sense, with massive hands and the kind of rough, dashing face that launches Western movies. His cowboy hat is battered, with sides that have curled over time. When Mark enters a building, he instinctively removes the hat, rests it before his heart for a second, then clutches it by his hip. Likewise, he meets problems with the integrity on which the cowboy archetype was built: not with the paranoia or victim mentality of many modern ranchers, but with a calm will to survive.

Looking over this frenzy of rodents, Mark laughs at the absurdity. But he's not daunted. "You can't see it now," he says, "but in June this will be covered in grass. It happens every spring, a little better each year."

I ask him if he has faith in the land.

"Well, yes," he says. "I guess that's it."

Having faith in the land is a concept that dissolved in the 20th century. A number of things are to blame. Mechanization decreased the value of a crop and drastically increased the amount a grower had to produce in order to survive; corporatization made that product ever less profitable by allowing a few large companies to control prices. When the land could not keep up with increased demands, it was said to have failed the farmer. This set the stage for the advent of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which played to farmers' fears. "Your land isn't strong enough to support you," the chemical salesmen whispered. "These tools will make up for what it lacks."

As faith eroded, so did the sense of exchange between farmer and earth. The land went from being a living partner to being a raw resource -- no more than a medium in which a person produces a crop. Agriculture became a business of pure extraction, and nature a series of impediments to overcome.

Though antagonism between grower and land seems almost inherent to farming today, it represents only a moment in the long history of agriculture. The partnership that it replaced had been the foundation (if not always the practice) of agriculture for over 10,000 years. In his essay "A Practical Harmony," Wendell Berry catalogs authors over two millennia advising agriculturalists to work in response to their land's unique qualities. The American horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey, writing in 1913, put it differently than the Roman poet Virgil had in 36 B.C., but the message was always the same: Learn from the land. Alexander Pope put it eloquently in 1731:"Let Nature never be forgot," he wrote. "Consult the Genius of the Place in All."

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