Soil as Metaphor

Learning empathy by protecting one of the earth's most priceless commodities.

The soil needs us to be its caretakers, but also its partner.  When people talk about “living off the land”, it reeks of imperialism and colonialism:  why do we get to “live off” this land, this soil, like some sort of blood-sucking parasite?  What does it owe us?  I would rather ask, what do we owe the land?

Using farmland the way humans in the United States have done since the nineteenth century has led to harm; harm to it, and harm to us.  In this soil we continue to grow our addictions and destroy fragile ecosystems in the process.  Precious, fertile soil is used in America’s breadbasket Midwest to grow the ubiquitous chemical sweetener, high fructose corn syrup, as well as dextrose, maltodextrins, sorbitol, corn oil and corn starch, not to mention the unsustainable fuel of ethanol.  While the grains are mostly used for confined animals’ feed in order to create industrial meat, their byproducts are just as detrimental; instead of seeing summer grill-out picnic food as you drive by vast green deserts of gleaming cornstalks, it may be more accurate to see aluminum cans of coke and pepsi encased by corn leaves.   And of course, we are not only growing what is bad for us, but what is bad for the environment (which is bad for anyone who wants to breathe clean air or drink clean water).   Anyone who has driven through Illinois, Iowa or any number of states will tell you it is nearly nonstop corn and soybean fields, meaning non-organic, GMO crops growing in lifeless soil.  What grows there is completely controlled by humans and their chemicals.  Weeds don’t exist there; neither do frogs or butterflies.  The conquerors have won. 

Instead of how we “use the land” or “use the soil”, I’d like to change the language to how we can help each other.  A good partnership supports one another.  Visiting and working on other regenerative, holistic-minded farms has helped reignite our initial reasons we got into farming, and our deep appreciation for the soil food web underneath our feet. 

I found the farm we have been working at in New Mexico on the WWOOF website.  (For those that don’t know, WWOOFing is when you work on a farm in exchange for food and housing.  For us, it was a place to park our RV bus.).  The description on the website was almost perfect: small-scale, off-grid, organic vegetables, biodynamic, soil health, milking goats.  I requested a couple of weeks to work there.  Eric emailed me back right away to accept my request.  Excited, I explained we had our own bus to arrive in, and it was 34 feet long.  “Well,” he wrote back, “the road to the farm is pretty rocky and steep.  The last person who brought an RV your size was ok but almost didn’t make it.”  Blinded by my desperation to work on this farm, I didn’t ask what “almost didn’t make it” meant (like, almost died?), but we had a few more back and forth emails until he decided that we should just try it.  “If you come here and decide it’s not worth it, we can figure out a place to park it and you can stay in the house.”  Full steam ahead, we decided to go for it.

Milking goats. (One of my happiest places to be).

We met Eric on a blustery day, one when the sun was bright and the wind swirled with pale dust.  He met us at the top of the hill of his farm on a motorbike, looking dubiously at our vehicle.  “I don’t know, but I think you should try,” he said, sounding hesitant.

The two-mile drive was about 30 minutes of pure terror; down we went along the rockiest road we’d ever been on, white dust blooming in clouds behind us, making us practically invisible as we drove, tilted the whole way, down the sloped road.  Please don’t let us tip over, I begged silently.   

After our terrifying journey to the farm, we arrived sweating with our hearts pounding, and parked right next to a few hoophouses.  Eric had made us dinner, and showed us around.  He bought the land over twenty years ago, eighteen acres of just raw land, and built his farm, along with his beautiful, pale orange, strawbale, off-grid home.  The farm was paid off years ago, so he felt a little more freedom in his farming.  “I just want to grow enough food for our local farmer’s market, and grow food that doesn’t give people cancer,” was one of the first things he said to us.

As we toured his hoophouses (covered with old goat bedding and manure—how I miss farming with precious, enriching goat manure!), getting ready to be prepped for seeding, we talked heavily about climate change.  Where flooding is a main issue with the northeast and Midwest, the dryness is the issue here.  One of the jobs we had was to hang shade cloth over most of his hoophouses, trying to minimize the relentless desert sun. 

Parking our RV bus next to a few of Eric’s hoophouses.

During our last couple of years at our farm’s property, I became obsessed with turning our farm into a no-till farm.  I could only think that what we were doing by tilling was creating a massive genocide of every living microorganism in the soil.  Our last year, we began to experiment and had success with a few of our acres, transitioning them into completely no-till growing.  Our plan is to continue that trajectory on our next property, helping to nourish our soil, to protect the delicate structure, to let the over 50 million genera of bacteria and fungi thrive.   Scientists have named only a fraction of these microorganisms, but their importance is nothing small; their life within the soil structure along with the soil’s aggradation makes the rest of life on earth function.  Every farm we work at reminds me of this need to take care of soil, and to do this, we must be able to withstand challenges with moisture, both too much and too little.  What soil really needs is for nature to take over, to be left undisturbed; imagine a forest floor, with layers upon layers of leaf mulch, encouraging microbial life within the soil to thrive.  The soil’s web and structure is crucial to have strong plants, and mandatory for building and protecting the soil’s resilience to capricious weather events and a changing climate.    

A glimpse at Eric’s hand-built strawbale house.

One of the best parts, for me, was how Eric cooked for his workers.  As someone who is used to being the primary family cook, it felt almost resort-like to take a break from cooking and have a meal ready for us at both lunch and dinner time everyday.  When we came in for lunch, we were dusty and sweating (“I tell people that a third of my diet is dust,” Eric told us), and very ready to eat.  All four of us ate whatever was in front of us—luckily, Eric was a great vegetarian cook.  Usually it was rice with spices, refried beans he made, salad with the hoophouse greens, stir-fries with tempeh and broccoli and carrots, with dressings made of tamari and vinegar and ground-up hot peppers, or a curry sauce with coconut milk, and saurkraut made of cabbage, peppers and radishes. 

On the busy days, the meals were very simple.  For one of our dinners, we got done working later than usual, getting finished seeding and some hoop house construction at six.  Tired, we all sauntered into Eric’s house, seeing Eric rubbing his chin and looking at his stove.   Eric had leftover refried beans; thinking aloud, he asked us, “you guys like crepes?”  Crepes were something I never made—and not even really thought of making.  I told him we liked anything.     

I then asked him what his process of crepe-making was, and he said he didn’t have one.  “I never use a recipe for anything,” he said.  “I just toss in whatever I have.”  I watched as he, mad scientist-style, began pouring things into his blender:  a few glugs of goat milk from a jar, some corn flour from a bag, an egg, and a bit of his sourdough starter.  It was, frankly, inspiring to see how little concern he had to if these crepes were going to work.  He blended up the mixture, and immediately began pouring the thick liquid into pancake shapes in his large cast-iron skillet.  He flipped each crepe and put them onto the plates.  Eaten hot with refried beans and sauerkraut, the crepes were amazing: salty, slightly tangy, and a touch sweet. 

Our last work day at the farm, the end of our two weeks, we helped prune his apple trees with him.  Underneath the blue New Mexico sky, trimming off the spindly skeletal branches that shimmered in the gold light, he sighed.  “Why don’t more people care about the earth, and the planet’s health?  Why do people not care about how they are harming it?  It was perfect before.”  The sounds of snipping twigs filled the silence, as all we could do was agree. 

Alex helping with hoophouse construction.

And to this, we are brought back to earth; the literal earth.  The soil has billions of beautiful, wonderous microorganisms that are naturally living there, making it into a rich, crumbly cake.  Healthy, balanced, undisturbed soil is full of lacy threads of mycorrhizal fungi that sweetly administer nutrients up the root radicle’s tubes, producing a nutrient-rich plant that is healthy and vigorous.  Lucky the person is who eats such a plant and retains those nutrients for themselves; what that person can therefore do is give back, and help with soil thrive, help plants be healthy, nourish wildlife and pollinator habitat, and save the seeds to keep on the cycle.

So why do farmers choose to pummel the earth with steel tractor blades, slaughtering earthworms, beneficial fungi threads, protozoa, and the roots’ Rhizosphere?  Tilling creates fluffy beds for easy planting, and is a much quicker way to get into the ground.  Though it helps more seeds get planted, thus increasing the yield and therefore profitability of the crop, it does no favors for the soil’s fertility, the carbon being released into the atmosphere, thus starving the soil, or ability to grow healthy, nutrient-dense plants.

Where does that leave the soil, the earth, and the farmers?  I understand that money is an unfortunate motivator in our capitalist, not-built-for-empathy society.  It’s the motivator behind thousands of acres of soil destruction, where commodity crops are planted.  Many farmers and farm workers are desperate to support their families, and many manufacturing, seed and chemical companies rely on farmers’ dependence for their inputs.  The soil is merely something to use and abuse without any kind of forward thinking; why treat the soil like the priceless foundation that it is when there is money that can be stripped from it, corn stalks waving in the wind like dollar bills?  It is simple math, really. 

For Eric, he just wants his plants to grow, and he wants his food to be healthy.  He wants the earth and land to be healthy enough for these things to happen, too.  “Climate change is pretty striking here.  The sun seems more intense every year.  It’s scary,” he told us.    

What can we do?   Like food choices, even though it may seem insurmountable at times, like buying eggs or cheese or potatoes or spinach isn’t going to make a big difference, it still comes down to making a choice, however small.  I, for one, choose empathy.  I choose to keep pressing on, growing food, nourishing soil biota, sequestering carbon, layering the soil with deep mulch and keeping it covered before planting, trying my best to make a positive impact and grow the most nutrient-dense plants I can.  Soil can be both a metaphor as well as a tangible example of who we are as people and how we behave on this planet to each other, to every living thing.  I choose to believe we are interwoven with all living things, right down to the tiniest microorganism, the smallest nematode or anthropod, inside the littlest tunnel winding through the deepest, darkest soil.  Soil is either something we can nourish, while having it help us combat climate change, or it is something we can treat like dirt; the question is, which world do we want to live in?

From the Tiny Kitchen:

The first week at the farm, Eric asked if we ate meat.  His neighbor raises organic, grass-fed cattle, and had given him a pound of ground beef.  He gave it me, saying he was vegetarian for the time being, and he didn’t want it to go to waste.  I have been trying to perfect my chili recipe, so here is what I made with it.  Chili is something great to make for cold nights. (Desert nights are cold!).  It can also be made as spicy as you want.    

Desert Night Chili:

• 1 lb. grass-fed ground beef

• 2 tbsp olive oil, butter or ghee

• 1 medium onion (1 cup chopped)

• 2 large bell peppers (any color)

•  3 cloves garlic, chopped

• 28 ounce can whole peeled tomato

• 1 cup of cooked kidney beans (I have a pot of beans cooking every other day or so, so I often have leftover cooked beans, which this is perfect for!), or 1 15 ounce can of kidney beans 

•  sea salt

• Black pepper

• 1 cup chopped mushrooms (shitake, cremini, etc.) (optional)

• 1 tbsp chili powder

• 1 tsp cumin

• 1 cup canned green chilies (or more)

• Chopped Kale (optional)

Toppings:

Cilantro

Avocado

Grated Cheese

Sour Cream (optional)

Green onions (optional)

• In a large pot over medium heat, brown beef for 3-5 minutes, stirring frequently, in butter or ghee. Season with 1/2 tsp each of salt and pepper. 

• Add more ghee, butter or olive oil to pot, add chopped onion, bell pepper, garlic, mushrooms and jalapeno (optional). Saute for 5 minutes. 

• Add tomato, beans, green chiles, and spices and to pot and stir for 2 minutes. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 20-25 minutes. 

• Add chopped kale and stir until wilted (just a minute or so).

• Serve topped with cheese, avocado, sour cream, chopped green onions or scallions, and fresh cilantro. (and add hot sauce if you want, or pickled jalapeno!)

On the road:

After two great weeks at Eric’s farm, we decided to regroup and take a break, and do what us fulltime RV-ers call “boondocking”—that is, parking for free someplace that allows it, public land or a national forest, living off just our solar panels and the water we are able to carry in (this whole trip has been a very good lesson in water conservation!).  We fought over where to go next.  I wanted to head up to the Albuquerque and Santa Fe area, while Alex wanted to try up near Sedona, Arizona.  I lost the argument.  (It’s a little cold in Albuquerque for our bus).  So, we made our way, not without mechanical issues, up winding mountain roads to Sedona, which is possibly one of the strangest towns I have ever been to.  Next week I will talk about that, plus focus more about how we are cooking and frugally meal planning, and how I feel that the family cook is similar to the family doctor.  (Yes, I really do think food makes that much of a difference in your family’s health and well-being!).