Background
Chickens allowed to be chickens... the best eggs of all, coming up!
The New Farmer School is an offshoot of Thompson Small Farm, a horse-powered initiative begun in 2007 by Andrea Thompson and Jonathan Wright with the goal of providing locally, sustainably produced food and an example of a human-scaled, alternative way of doing things.
Our original goal with the school was to help you learn what you need to learn to establish yourself in a symbiotic relationship with a piece of land, whatever your motives in doing so may be. We have narrowed this focus in recent years to re-familiarizing people with the working horse. Horses have been our allies for centuries and brought us to the threshold of the techno/industrial era. With the growing realization that our current techno/industrial model is utterly unsustainable and therefore doomed, we believe the horse to be perfectly poised to help us segue into a truly sustainable future replete with the hope, beauty, joy and right-livelihood our current model is systematically destroying.
Food Security
Along with food quality, there is a lot of valid concern these days about food security. As all things in life are fundamentally about energy equations, we can only achieve food security if we have energy security. And energy security means harnessing sustainable, renewable, locally available energy sources. Until we do so, we will have neither lasting energy, nor food security. This is the bottom line we all need to address.
Our original goal with the school was to help you learn what you need to learn to establish yourself in a symbiotic relationship with a piece of land, whatever your motives in doing so may be. We have narrowed this focus in recent years to re-familiarizing people with the working horse. Horses have been our allies for centuries and brought us to the threshold of the techno/industrial era. With the growing realization that our current techno/industrial model is utterly unsustainable and therefore doomed, we believe the horse to be perfectly poised to help us segue into a truly sustainable future replete with the hope, beauty, joy and right-livelihood our current model is systematically destroying.
Food Security
Along with food quality, there is a lot of valid concern these days about food security. As all things in life are fundamentally about energy equations, we can only achieve food security if we have energy security. And energy security means harnessing sustainable, renewable, locally available energy sources. Until we do so, we will have neither lasting energy, nor food security. This is the bottom line we all need to address.
Sustainability
Spinning yak fibre. photo: Laura Fetherstonhaugh
Sustainability is our goal on the land, for if we don't achieve this, we will fail, first as individual farms and ultimately as a civilization. Most of us understand this concept, but how many of us have a real, working grasp of what a sustainable world would truly look like based on facts and realities, as opposed to what we would prefer it to look like based on our desire for convenience and adherence to the familiar? Apparently not many, for "sustainability" has become one of the most abused terms in our lexicon today, little more than a persistent, recurring buzz aimed at forwarding some political or business agenda.
Some people say a truly sustainable human system only existed in the time before agriculture, when all humans were hunter-gatherers, that there has never been a sustainable agrarian model. If this is so - and we don't believe it is - then our work is truly cut out for us, as there is no way we are going to feed the people of this planet today as hunter-gatherers, even if the will to try existed. There are simply too many of us. We feed ourselves through agriculture, and we must continue to do so. And if we haven't before, it is even more important today that we strive towards a sustainable agrarian model. If we can manage this, many of our other problems here on earth will diminish in step.
Perhaps one good way of conjuring a realistic vision of what sustainable agrarianism looks like is to first gain some fundamental vision of what it doesn't look like. In order to help us do this, let's see if we can come up with some symbol in our minds, some icon that, to us today, more than any other, shouts "Farm!"
How about this one:
Some people say a truly sustainable human system only existed in the time before agriculture, when all humans were hunter-gatherers, that there has never been a sustainable agrarian model. If this is so - and we don't believe it is - then our work is truly cut out for us, as there is no way we are going to feed the people of this planet today as hunter-gatherers, even if the will to try existed. There are simply too many of us. We feed ourselves through agriculture, and we must continue to do so. And if we haven't before, it is even more important today that we strive towards a sustainable agrarian model. If we can manage this, many of our other problems here on earth will diminish in step.
Perhaps one good way of conjuring a realistic vision of what sustainable agrarianism looks like is to first gain some fundamental vision of what it doesn't look like. In order to help us do this, let's see if we can come up with some symbol in our minds, some icon that, to us today, more than any other, shouts "Farm!"
How about this one:
Romancing the Tractor
Yes, that's the one we'd choose too. Nevermind that no farmer who considers himself deserving of the term would be caught dead on such a tiny relic as the one in the picture today. It's still a tractor. It's a romantic image and it makes a person feel good to look at it. Where the old ones like this are paraded at country fairs, farmers will come from miles around in worship.
And this is ironic, as despite our positive associations with this machine, the truth is that there is no more potent image to symbolize the death of sustainable agriculture than this one. When the tractor became available to the majority of farmers, farming changed overnight from a culture to an industry. The problem being that in order to function as an industry, farmers now needed to be compensated on an industrial, rather than an agrarian payscale. Industrial systems, among other things, are very expensive. In order to pay for that tractor, the farmers needed to produce more, and in order to produce more, they needed more land, and in order to acquire more land, they needed to produce more still, and in order to farm the larger acreages on an industrial scale they then needed a larger tractor, and on and on it goes to this day, a cycle that will not and cannot produce a positive final outcome. Of course, land is finite, so larger farms meant less farmers, which meant the steady, relentless destruction of the rural human fabric as neighbor squeezed out neighbor. (The heydey of the Canadian prairie farm community for instance, the period during which this system was functioning well on most levels, lasted around a single generation - That's it. Compare that to tradtional farming in China enduring for 40 centuries.)
Quantity of food became the imperative objective over quality of food in a bid to keep the farm solvent, which was just as well in a way, as it is not possible to produce quality food through an industrial process, any more than it's possible to properly husband the land with this model. So traditional husbandry of the land and animals went out the window, too. And here we are today, at the point where not only have we long ceased to farm properly, but where most farmers today couldn't do it right if they wanted to. The economics of the tractor put the farmer in the positiion of an athlete competing in an event where steroid use was rampant. If you wanted to compete, you were left with no choice. Get big or get out! This spelled the near-death not only of our our crop and animal diversity, but of our once vast agricultural knowledge base as well. It has been said that today's generations of farmers have replaced this knowledge with expertise, as one author put it, in bank-loans, chemicals, and heavy equipment operation. Can they be blamed? Absolutely not. They were simply adapting to forces that were unforseeable in their impact and seemingly beyond their control. Yet farmers still live on the brink as a group, still look to take advantage of the plight of failing families on neighboring farms, still need bigger, faster, newer machinery. Recognizing no other economically viable options, they subject their animals to mass cruelty, and produce an increasingly inferior product while destroying the soil and watersheds thanks to an addiction to chemicals, another prerequiste of the industrial system. Enter Monsanto, Cargill et al... This situation is not something any farmer could anticipate, and certainly not what they were wishing for. It's been a great era for the implement and chemical corporations, yet the plight of the farmer contunues. But it's not just limited to the farmer. It is everyone's plight.
All thanks to the tractor, the poster child for a doomed system of production. The image above, then, is what unsustainable agriculture looks like in a nutshell. Farming with a tractor with no intention of exploring alternatives, and speaking in the same breath of sustainability, then, is a failure to make the final, logical, cognitive leap. We've made steady progress in the past couple decades with regards to our views of modern food production, but we've stalled out at the point of embracing this basic understanding where the farm power-source is concerned. "Organic" is not so organic if there are tractors involved in the process. It's time to make that leap of understanding, to accelerate our progress as farmers, and as a civilization.
To help keep all this in perspective, remember that at one time not so long ago there were doctors advising patients that smoking was good for you. We've done a fair job of making amends for this. We now need to do the same where the tractor and what it represents is concerned as we did with the cigarette. In the meantime, keep in mind that the current system is going to go away. Our job now is to get to work on something wonderful to replace it with.
And this is ironic, as despite our positive associations with this machine, the truth is that there is no more potent image to symbolize the death of sustainable agriculture than this one. When the tractor became available to the majority of farmers, farming changed overnight from a culture to an industry. The problem being that in order to function as an industry, farmers now needed to be compensated on an industrial, rather than an agrarian payscale. Industrial systems, among other things, are very expensive. In order to pay for that tractor, the farmers needed to produce more, and in order to produce more, they needed more land, and in order to acquire more land, they needed to produce more still, and in order to farm the larger acreages on an industrial scale they then needed a larger tractor, and on and on it goes to this day, a cycle that will not and cannot produce a positive final outcome. Of course, land is finite, so larger farms meant less farmers, which meant the steady, relentless destruction of the rural human fabric as neighbor squeezed out neighbor. (The heydey of the Canadian prairie farm community for instance, the period during which this system was functioning well on most levels, lasted around a single generation - That's it. Compare that to tradtional farming in China enduring for 40 centuries.)
Quantity of food became the imperative objective over quality of food in a bid to keep the farm solvent, which was just as well in a way, as it is not possible to produce quality food through an industrial process, any more than it's possible to properly husband the land with this model. So traditional husbandry of the land and animals went out the window, too. And here we are today, at the point where not only have we long ceased to farm properly, but where most farmers today couldn't do it right if they wanted to. The economics of the tractor put the farmer in the positiion of an athlete competing in an event where steroid use was rampant. If you wanted to compete, you were left with no choice. Get big or get out! This spelled the near-death not only of our our crop and animal diversity, but of our once vast agricultural knowledge base as well. It has been said that today's generations of farmers have replaced this knowledge with expertise, as one author put it, in bank-loans, chemicals, and heavy equipment operation. Can they be blamed? Absolutely not. They were simply adapting to forces that were unforseeable in their impact and seemingly beyond their control. Yet farmers still live on the brink as a group, still look to take advantage of the plight of failing families on neighboring farms, still need bigger, faster, newer machinery. Recognizing no other economically viable options, they subject their animals to mass cruelty, and produce an increasingly inferior product while destroying the soil and watersheds thanks to an addiction to chemicals, another prerequiste of the industrial system. Enter Monsanto, Cargill et al... This situation is not something any farmer could anticipate, and certainly not what they were wishing for. It's been a great era for the implement and chemical corporations, yet the plight of the farmer contunues. But it's not just limited to the farmer. It is everyone's plight.
All thanks to the tractor, the poster child for a doomed system of production. The image above, then, is what unsustainable agriculture looks like in a nutshell. Farming with a tractor with no intention of exploring alternatives, and speaking in the same breath of sustainability, then, is a failure to make the final, logical, cognitive leap. We've made steady progress in the past couple decades with regards to our views of modern food production, but we've stalled out at the point of embracing this basic understanding where the farm power-source is concerned. "Organic" is not so organic if there are tractors involved in the process. It's time to make that leap of understanding, to accelerate our progress as farmers, and as a civilization.
To help keep all this in perspective, remember that at one time not so long ago there were doctors advising patients that smoking was good for you. We've done a fair job of making amends for this. We now need to do the same where the tractor and what it represents is concerned as we did with the cigarette. In the meantime, keep in mind that the current system is going to go away. Our job now is to get to work on something wonderful to replace it with.
The Second Great Transition...
Thompson Small Farm, original location.
"There are heroes as-yet-sung-and-unsung... people who prefer reality over reality-TV, people with a taste for meaning in life, which often requires the recognition that some things are true and some not so true, and you're better off with what's true."
- James Howard Kunstler
"Unsustainable" is not the same thing as "Undesireable." We all should know that when something is unsustainable, such as our modern way of life, there is an eventual correction in the system. A "wall" is hit where the approaches responsible for producing the benefits of the given unsustainable culture cease to work as they did at the zenith of resources. Limits are reached, the present game grinds to an end, a new one takes its place. Humanity finds itself once again on this threshold today. To use another potent symbol of unsustainability as analogy - the automobile - you could say that where we are right now the car has hit the wall, the engine compartment is crumpling, there are some casualties in the front seat (entrenched, widespread recession being a symptom), and yet forward motion continues. And will continue, in fact, likely for some decades to come, although no one can know the timelines in advance.
And so The Second Great Transition of the past century is upon us, The First Great Transition being the final move from an agrarian to an industrial way of life, and the second being the move back. The movement back to an agrarian model will be precipitated by choice or not, but it will occur, as it is based on simple principles of supply-and-demand. Our supplies of non-renewable commodities crucial to running our current system - most importantly conventional oil - have peaked, or are peaking. (Conventional oil by best estimates today peaked around 2005-06. This is why the tarsands and shale oils - unconventional oils that are difficult to profit from and deplete rapidly in the case of the latter as well - have suddenly become so important on the World Stage.) There will be a continued demand for what sustains us, however, and anyone who thinks we will find a replacement for oil has no real understanding of the incredible, utterly unique nature of oil, nor its irreplaceability with respects to the current paradigm. As there are far too many of us to live off the natural food sources, in some cases already on the verge of collapse (think fisheries, for instance,) our only option is to return - ideally gradually - to a smaller-scaled agrarian model, if we expect to eat in the future. For the current industrial model of agriculture, which as we've shown has been failing steadily since its inception despite (and to no small degree because of) "the Green Revolution," will go away along with everything else on this order of scale.
"What appears to be true is that the old order is finished and a new disposition of things is coming along... Sign up for it. Roll up your sleeves. There is so much to do in this country. If you are young, especially, it's all waiting for you." - J.H. Kunstler
It is certainly not in anyone's best interests today to see industrial agriculture disappear overnight, for it is how the world is fed right now. (Less than 1% of today's farms are sustainable.) We need to do what we can to keep this juggernaught going through the transition. This seems a grim option, and indeed, there are many people out there today among the ones who understand this process who will tell you that the days in which we could expect "things to get better" are over. This is in fact a theme we first started to hear the rumblings of in the 1980's, and now it's gone seismic. (In the 70's, by contrast, still flush off our cultural zenith of the 50's and 60's, people in-the-know earnestly told us we'd all be commuting in little personal aircraft to enjoy our 20 hour workweeks by now. A fine example of the Myth of Progress at work.) But we disagree with this view that things are all downhill from here. This is only necessarily true, in fact, if you are speaking in the narrow terms of what we have come to view as "better" in recent generations. But the fact is, there are immense opportunities for improvement in front of us today, as always. And as always in times of change, it will be those who think outside the box who will be on the vanguard of harnessing these opportunities for the benefit of our future generations.
If we are smart, we will take advantage of this current time, with its yet immense residual wealth, technology and food production, to set in motion forces that will create a rosier future for human beings and our environment, a better way of life than even the past hundred years has presented. Such a course of proaction has unfortunately little historic precedent. We have a great opportunity here, then, to show that we truly are evolving. We need to try every trick in the book to secure a positive future environment for humanity, technological and traditional, and ignore neither, as they will stand as hedges against one-another. A concerted move back to small, sustainable agrarianism will form the fundament to a future worth contemplating. Still, we will need to continue to capitalize on sources of oil and gas to their full potential for now, encouraging an approach of environmental optimisation rather than opposition, as a smoother transition on the scale of a civilisation can only be facilitated in a time of relative wealth, and oil is, and will remain, the primary underpinning of that wealth until this current culture is gone. It is what feeds our economy and our bodies both, at present, and will continue to be until we have created an infrastructure that can run on other options.
We have a chance here, then, to alter the usual course of human history.
Now wouldn't that be "Progress!"
- James Howard Kunstler
"Unsustainable" is not the same thing as "Undesireable." We all should know that when something is unsustainable, such as our modern way of life, there is an eventual correction in the system. A "wall" is hit where the approaches responsible for producing the benefits of the given unsustainable culture cease to work as they did at the zenith of resources. Limits are reached, the present game grinds to an end, a new one takes its place. Humanity finds itself once again on this threshold today. To use another potent symbol of unsustainability as analogy - the automobile - you could say that where we are right now the car has hit the wall, the engine compartment is crumpling, there are some casualties in the front seat (entrenched, widespread recession being a symptom), and yet forward motion continues. And will continue, in fact, likely for some decades to come, although no one can know the timelines in advance.
And so The Second Great Transition of the past century is upon us, The First Great Transition being the final move from an agrarian to an industrial way of life, and the second being the move back. The movement back to an agrarian model will be precipitated by choice or not, but it will occur, as it is based on simple principles of supply-and-demand. Our supplies of non-renewable commodities crucial to running our current system - most importantly conventional oil - have peaked, or are peaking. (Conventional oil by best estimates today peaked around 2005-06. This is why the tarsands and shale oils - unconventional oils that are difficult to profit from and deplete rapidly in the case of the latter as well - have suddenly become so important on the World Stage.) There will be a continued demand for what sustains us, however, and anyone who thinks we will find a replacement for oil has no real understanding of the incredible, utterly unique nature of oil, nor its irreplaceability with respects to the current paradigm. As there are far too many of us to live off the natural food sources, in some cases already on the verge of collapse (think fisheries, for instance,) our only option is to return - ideally gradually - to a smaller-scaled agrarian model, if we expect to eat in the future. For the current industrial model of agriculture, which as we've shown has been failing steadily since its inception despite (and to no small degree because of) "the Green Revolution," will go away along with everything else on this order of scale.
"What appears to be true is that the old order is finished and a new disposition of things is coming along... Sign up for it. Roll up your sleeves. There is so much to do in this country. If you are young, especially, it's all waiting for you." - J.H. Kunstler
It is certainly not in anyone's best interests today to see industrial agriculture disappear overnight, for it is how the world is fed right now. (Less than 1% of today's farms are sustainable.) We need to do what we can to keep this juggernaught going through the transition. This seems a grim option, and indeed, there are many people out there today among the ones who understand this process who will tell you that the days in which we could expect "things to get better" are over. This is in fact a theme we first started to hear the rumblings of in the 1980's, and now it's gone seismic. (In the 70's, by contrast, still flush off our cultural zenith of the 50's and 60's, people in-the-know earnestly told us we'd all be commuting in little personal aircraft to enjoy our 20 hour workweeks by now. A fine example of the Myth of Progress at work.) But we disagree with this view that things are all downhill from here. This is only necessarily true, in fact, if you are speaking in the narrow terms of what we have come to view as "better" in recent generations. But the fact is, there are immense opportunities for improvement in front of us today, as always. And as always in times of change, it will be those who think outside the box who will be on the vanguard of harnessing these opportunities for the benefit of our future generations.
If we are smart, we will take advantage of this current time, with its yet immense residual wealth, technology and food production, to set in motion forces that will create a rosier future for human beings and our environment, a better way of life than even the past hundred years has presented. Such a course of proaction has unfortunately little historic precedent. We have a great opportunity here, then, to show that we truly are evolving. We need to try every trick in the book to secure a positive future environment for humanity, technological and traditional, and ignore neither, as they will stand as hedges against one-another. A concerted move back to small, sustainable agrarianism will form the fundament to a future worth contemplating. Still, we will need to continue to capitalize on sources of oil and gas to their full potential for now, encouraging an approach of environmental optimisation rather than opposition, as a smoother transition on the scale of a civilisation can only be facilitated in a time of relative wealth, and oil is, and will remain, the primary underpinning of that wealth until this current culture is gone. It is what feeds our economy and our bodies both, at present, and will continue to be until we have created an infrastructure that can run on other options.
We have a chance here, then, to alter the usual course of human history.
Now wouldn't that be "Progress!"
Re-enter the Horse
"Work Horses Pulling Plow " Paul Bransom
"Most of us have two images of a horse. One is the workhorse... then there is the image of a horse running free... Between them lies the history of humanity." - J. Edward Chamberlin
While we desperately need agricultural reform, we don't need to invent a solar-powered tractor that, like a 'green' car, takes 40,000 gallons of water, untold amounts of oil, strip mines and foundaries etcetera to manufacture and therefore misses the mark of sustainability anyway. But the primary reason we don't need to invent a solar-powered tractor is because we've already got one. It manufactures and runs itself utilizing the energy of the sun stored in the grass that is all around us, and it's called the Horse.
Earlier, we offered a potent symbol, an icon for representing unsustainable agriculture as it is practised today. Here, at left, we offer an icon to represent sustainable agriculture, the place to which we will return.
We chose the horse as the fundamental power source for most - although not yet all - of the activities on Thompson Small Farm. We don't own a tractor. We chose the horse not because we were horse lovers in anything but an abstract sense (although we are now!) nor Luddites, but rather because we were serious about taking a shot at sustainability, and not just using it as a political buzzword to move product. As it stands right now, the horse is where it's at - you cannot show us another proven, remotely scalable option for farming sustainably, for underwriting food security indefinately, because there isn't a proven one, and if we are honest, a view of the technological horizon reveals nothing of real promise to date, either. In the meantime, the clock keeps ticking.
Yet we are in a better position than most of us realize. All we need do is acknowledge our situation - we have the horses for breeding stock (we will need more,) we have the knowledge (albeit rather widely flung at present,) and unbeknowst to many, we have today factories rolling out new, field-tested, highly innovative horse-drawn equipment. All we lack is a larger awareness accompanied by the will to take advantage of this current situation and turn things back in a positive direction. Done well, one can achieve a balance on the farm through horsepower that comes as close as we can come to being the biodynamic, sustainable ideal: the farm as a self-enclosed ecosystem that can sustain us not for a mere hundred years or less, but for millennia. And there's still time for a gradual transition if we get serious right now. (I know some of you are shouting "Permaculture!" at this point. While we are in complete agreement that permaculture systems as they are being extolled today are extremely promising in theory and in some limited instances in practice as well, they need a lot more application in a full spectrum of climates, as well as in the crucible of the real, scaleable, supply-and-demand world before we would be wise to put too many eggs in this basket. We certainly need to keep working on this one! And horses can very likely play a fundamental role making our lives more fruitful and enjoyable here, too.)
"A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise." - Ernest Hemingway. 1935
To lend further insight into the importance of horses to our future, here is a list of the advantages of the horse over the tractor:
- Horses (and other draft animals) tread lightly on the land. Compared to machinery used for farming and woodlot management, they do minuscule damage;
- they provide on-farm, organic fertilizer, which on industrial farms is all off-farm, non-renewable hydrocarbon based;
- they help plant and harvest their own "fuel," making you less dependent on fossil fuels;
- they cost less than mechanized equipment (both to purchase and to maintain), they don't depreciate as rapidly, and they don't break down as often - vital considerations to the economic sustainability of the small farm;
- they work well in hilly terrain that defies a tractor;
- they can work soil that's wet enough to bog down machinery;
- they let you easily work without human helpers—a properly trained team will pull ahead on voice command while, for example, you haul hay, clear a field of stones, or gather up firewood;
- their slower pace gives you plenty of time to think while you work, making you less likely to get hurt in an accident compared to operating fast, noisy, powerful equipment;
- emissions are negligible compared to a tractor, and don't compromise your lungs;
- they haven't buggered your hearing by the end of the day;
- they offer companionship. No one develops the rapport with a rototiller or a tractor that a teamster inevitably has with a team.
There is work to do, but we speak from experience in saying that it is highly rewarding work that imparts a daily, multidimensional authenticity to life that it seems most today feel they are lacking. There are hurdles, economic, physiological and psychological, to be overcome. For today, as a byproduct of being The People of Oil, we have also become The People of the Machine, (which is why, for instance, we invest so much unfounded faith in such oxymorons as the 'green' car.) Our culture is currently helpless without machines, and most individuals are now, too. Horses, along with most other animals, have become entirely abstract, if not alien, to the majority of us. This, along with the aforementioned Myth of Progress (which denies the truth that any given model of civilization inevitably runs its course and eventually dies - that there is no such thing as perpetual upward trajectory;) is why we have yet to embrace them as part of the solution to the crisis that is our current civilization, why they so rarely come up in the dialogue to date. But the horse, over time, has proven even more irreplacable to us than oil, with one crucial advantage: the horse is renewable while oil is not. This is why oil, and all that depends on it to be brought into existance and run, will eventually go, while the horse, which requires only itself, will remain.
Because the horse will therefore be as important to us in our future as it was in our past, and because the horse represents a powerful and currently available tool of transition away from an unsustainable fossil-fuel economy while the recourse of fossil fuels however briefly remains a scaleable, affordable option, one of our fundamental goals at The New Farmer School is to re-acquaint people with the working horse. They are marvelous creatures, magnificant in bearing and spirit, with an immense and millenia-proven capacity for healing and advancing the human condition, for doing us lasting good. The working horse brought us to the very threshold of this brief golden interlude the epilogue of which we are living today, and it retains the power to help usher us as smoothly as is possible back out again. To serve as a fundamental source for all that is needed in human life, materially and spiritually. They are not the "silver bullet," as none exists, but they will be a necessary component in the fabric of any silver lining we're likely to weave from today's unraveling tapestry.
While we desperately need agricultural reform, we don't need to invent a solar-powered tractor that, like a 'green' car, takes 40,000 gallons of water, untold amounts of oil, strip mines and foundaries etcetera to manufacture and therefore misses the mark of sustainability anyway. But the primary reason we don't need to invent a solar-powered tractor is because we've already got one. It manufactures and runs itself utilizing the energy of the sun stored in the grass that is all around us, and it's called the Horse.
Earlier, we offered a potent symbol, an icon for representing unsustainable agriculture as it is practised today. Here, at left, we offer an icon to represent sustainable agriculture, the place to which we will return.
We chose the horse as the fundamental power source for most - although not yet all - of the activities on Thompson Small Farm. We don't own a tractor. We chose the horse not because we were horse lovers in anything but an abstract sense (although we are now!) nor Luddites, but rather because we were serious about taking a shot at sustainability, and not just using it as a political buzzword to move product. As it stands right now, the horse is where it's at - you cannot show us another proven, remotely scalable option for farming sustainably, for underwriting food security indefinately, because there isn't a proven one, and if we are honest, a view of the technological horizon reveals nothing of real promise to date, either. In the meantime, the clock keeps ticking.
Yet we are in a better position than most of us realize. All we need do is acknowledge our situation - we have the horses for breeding stock (we will need more,) we have the knowledge (albeit rather widely flung at present,) and unbeknowst to many, we have today factories rolling out new, field-tested, highly innovative horse-drawn equipment. All we lack is a larger awareness accompanied by the will to take advantage of this current situation and turn things back in a positive direction. Done well, one can achieve a balance on the farm through horsepower that comes as close as we can come to being the biodynamic, sustainable ideal: the farm as a self-enclosed ecosystem that can sustain us not for a mere hundred years or less, but for millennia. And there's still time for a gradual transition if we get serious right now. (I know some of you are shouting "Permaculture!" at this point. While we are in complete agreement that permaculture systems as they are being extolled today are extremely promising in theory and in some limited instances in practice as well, they need a lot more application in a full spectrum of climates, as well as in the crucible of the real, scaleable, supply-and-demand world before we would be wise to put too many eggs in this basket. We certainly need to keep working on this one! And horses can very likely play a fundamental role making our lives more fruitful and enjoyable here, too.)
"A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise." - Ernest Hemingway. 1935
To lend further insight into the importance of horses to our future, here is a list of the advantages of the horse over the tractor:
- Horses (and other draft animals) tread lightly on the land. Compared to machinery used for farming and woodlot management, they do minuscule damage;
- they provide on-farm, organic fertilizer, which on industrial farms is all off-farm, non-renewable hydrocarbon based;
- they help plant and harvest their own "fuel," making you less dependent on fossil fuels;
- they cost less than mechanized equipment (both to purchase and to maintain), they don't depreciate as rapidly, and they don't break down as often - vital considerations to the economic sustainability of the small farm;
- they work well in hilly terrain that defies a tractor;
- they can work soil that's wet enough to bog down machinery;
- they let you easily work without human helpers—a properly trained team will pull ahead on voice command while, for example, you haul hay, clear a field of stones, or gather up firewood;
- their slower pace gives you plenty of time to think while you work, making you less likely to get hurt in an accident compared to operating fast, noisy, powerful equipment;
- emissions are negligible compared to a tractor, and don't compromise your lungs;
- they haven't buggered your hearing by the end of the day;
- they offer companionship. No one develops the rapport with a rototiller or a tractor that a teamster inevitably has with a team.
There is work to do, but we speak from experience in saying that it is highly rewarding work that imparts a daily, multidimensional authenticity to life that it seems most today feel they are lacking. There are hurdles, economic, physiological and psychological, to be overcome. For today, as a byproduct of being The People of Oil, we have also become The People of the Machine, (which is why, for instance, we invest so much unfounded faith in such oxymorons as the 'green' car.) Our culture is currently helpless without machines, and most individuals are now, too. Horses, along with most other animals, have become entirely abstract, if not alien, to the majority of us. This, along with the aforementioned Myth of Progress (which denies the truth that any given model of civilization inevitably runs its course and eventually dies - that there is no such thing as perpetual upward trajectory;) is why we have yet to embrace them as part of the solution to the crisis that is our current civilization, why they so rarely come up in the dialogue to date. But the horse, over time, has proven even more irreplacable to us than oil, with one crucial advantage: the horse is renewable while oil is not. This is why oil, and all that depends on it to be brought into existance and run, will eventually go, while the horse, which requires only itself, will remain.
Because the horse will therefore be as important to us in our future as it was in our past, and because the horse represents a powerful and currently available tool of transition away from an unsustainable fossil-fuel economy while the recourse of fossil fuels however briefly remains a scaleable, affordable option, one of our fundamental goals at The New Farmer School is to re-acquaint people with the working horse. They are marvelous creatures, magnificant in bearing and spirit, with an immense and millenia-proven capacity for healing and advancing the human condition, for doing us lasting good. The working horse brought us to the very threshold of this brief golden interlude the epilogue of which we are living today, and it retains the power to help usher us as smoothly as is possible back out again. To serve as a fundamental source for all that is needed in human life, materially and spiritually. They are not the "silver bullet," as none exists, but they will be a necessary component in the fabric of any silver lining we're likely to weave from today's unraveling tapestry.
Let us Celebrate...
photo: Laura Fetherstonhaugh
It is time to focus all our postitive energies on the future. With this in mind, let us not then beat down and berate ourselves anymore for our blindnesses, our trespasses, our indiscretions of the industrial centuries, for it is not possible for most of us to see around corners. We did our best with what we had, as we always have in the balance, and what we had most recently was enormous, and what we did with it was in many ways fabulous. Let us not say we haven't had an amazing time. Let us think of fine automobiles and shining towers and classic motorcycles and freight trains, of great lakers coming down the locks. Let us think of Christmas wth our families on the other side of continents, home again the next day, and great cinema and concerts and the Internet and the home stereo that brings the symphony into our living rooms. Let us think of modern medicine and a warm home at the flick of a switch at minus thirty. Let us continue to enjoy these things as we strive for solutions.
Let us learn from our mistakes, some of them horrible, yes, yet let us not dwell on assigning guilt to the point where it forms an impediment to forward thinking, for we are most of us guilty and to do so is both hypocritical and counterproductive. Let us instead look productively to the future and think positively of how we have benefitted from this Golden Age and then let us look beyond, towards what is to come and what we can make of a new time. And yet, let us not stand for mere gestures anymore, nor other displays of disingenuosity. Let us prepare. While we work on our technological options, let us at the same time envision once again great sailing vessels and heavy horses coming home from the field. Let us start today, to have the best chance of hanging on to some of the best things about our current time. Let us get even more things right in this coming time than we did in the last, as we are that much more experienced, and should that not bring greater wisdom to draw upon?
Let us do all of this in the spirit of celebration, of our past and our future. We are all of and in the same race.
Let us prepare.
