Faith in the Land

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In the Childress, the thick grasses that follow will conceal predators, who eventually will taper the prairie dog population to healthy numbers. With less rodent disturbance, more grass will grow and less topsoil will erode. When rain falls, less will run off and more will be absorbed (a critical advantage in this land that receives only 14 inches of annual precipitation). That increased water supply will enable the repopulation of more complex plant species, most importantly the native bunch grasses.

These plants meet Mark's holistic goal of increasing the land's diversity; in fact, as the cornerstone of the prairie ecosystem, they are harbingers of success. The grasses also meet his practical goal: Being the Plains' most nutritious and reliable feed, they grant Mark fat cattle, which means he can pay his bills and stay in business -- instead of turning the Childress over to another short-term thinker.

In the suburbs of Boston, where I grew up, there was no reason to value a place. Our street and its anonymous homes were no different from the neighboring streets and their houses. The local park was dangerous and neglected. When a strip mall rose beside it, nobody said a word.

So why would we have cared about where our food came from, what kind of landscape it encouraged? We didn't even notice the one we lived in. Food was judged for its value, defined simply as quantity divided by price.

Today, consumers are redefining what makes food valuable, particularly by choosing food that is grown without chemicals. But this distinction is perhaps not distinct enough; after all, many large corporate organic farms practice the same kind of pure extraction as their nonorganic counterparts. When we determine value, we should consider also what partnership the grower has with the land, and in that, what kind of place the food represents.

My mind turns again to the suburbs, but this time to the town of Kouda, outside Hiroshima. Above the noisy main road there, in an anonymous duplex, lives a woman named Yuko Tanabe. She works on her family's orchard, which, like most in Japan, is squeezed between several others on a scrap of the country's scant farmland. The family gets by with a tiny farm for two reasons: They push the land hard with pesticides (per acre, Japan sprays six times as much as the United States), and shoppers pay great sums for the flawless products that result. The system makes the family dependent -- on chemicals, on consumers with rigid expectations -- but it keeps them in business.

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