Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Recently I was asked what challenges faced vegetable farmers today.

This is was interesting to think through. In a day-to-day sense while farming, there are many obvious challenges, such as weather conditions, or how to manage time with so many things on the to-do list.

There is one thing above all that is came to mind while thinking about this question of challenges: the amount of time that we spend every year, learning new methods of growing vegetables and farming with no-till. Learning the hard way, getting better and more efficient, as we learn from our successes and mistakes.

What if these weren’t new ventures? What if this sort of thing was simply established as common knowledge?

Today, farming is industrialized. It is highly mechanical. It is dependent on a wide array of synthetic chemicals and absurdly expensive equipment. Challenges in this sort of farming today is about advances in technology, genetic modification, precision applicators, or slow-release fertilizers.

After a long enough time, these sorts of methods become so normalized that it is difficult to imagine any other way of doing things.

Where would we be today if farmers were instead handed down information about plants and soil biology, about how nature functions, about the carbon cycle, if the tools and methods we learned to use were designed to assist nature and work with nature’s principles?

There is a great lack of institutional and generational knowledge in any method of farming that isn’t an industrial method. This isn’t to say there is no information available – there certainly is – but it is a different thing entirely to come into sets of information and experiences by both those who came before you and the community surrounding you.

A common knowledge set of how the symphony of nature works together to do incredible things, available as generational knowledge and institutional knowledge held by the community writ large, would be an absolute game-changer. It would effect how we approach everything from the design of cities to the methods of agriculture.

The real challenge then, is to do the difficult, consistent work of building that knowledge, one generation at a time.

Graham