Growing

“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. The second by Commerce which is generally cheating. The third by Agriculture, the only honest way. " Benjamin Franklin

True enough—but what he meant by Agriculture was a far cry from today’s Agribusiness monster. When the Titans of Industry saw that there was money to be made from mining the soil, they chased the family farmer off of most of it and created a new paradigm that defined agricultural production in terms of profit and loss, never factoring in the deep ecological knowledge that millennia of the Earth’s farmers had built up. Then, with almost all of the first world’s people reduced to servitude in businesses, banks, factories and fast-food feeding stations, the open land could be enchained without public comment to produce what the captive populations of cities had to have. There is still a strong farming, nurturing, cultivative instinct in many of us, so the Titans saw that more profit could be made by selling us garden tools in huge Churches of Materialism called Walmarts. And they realized that putative farmers and gardeners must have seeds so they acquired almost all of the family seed businesses that had thrived early in the previous century, in the process wiping out most of the genetic diversity of our hard-won, carefully-preserved agricultural heritage. Among the more Aware of us perhaps there is a consciousness of the harm done by monoculture and pesticides. but we still love those January tomatoes from Costco and it’s really just too much trouble to grow things like potatoes which are SO cheap at the grocery mega-store and does anyone no matter how green grow their own grain to make their bread?

But get off of I-5 in the Central Valley of California onto a secondary highway going any direction and you will drive for HOURS through flat black machine groomed fields of spinach, broccoli, lettuce . . . ten miles of spinach followed by eight of broccoli, etc. It takes a LOT of land to produce cheap food for the captive millions. It’s creepy. No people around save a few Hispanic fieldworkers one or two per mile, no houses—no one lives in this country. The only movement you are likely to see is a huge Cat pulling a 20-bottom plow off in the distance. This is not what Ben was talking about!

It’s almost Spring. Start a revolution. Plant a garden. Shake things up.