February 24 2013

Horticulture versus agriculture

“The land is mine,” says the Lord (Lev. 25:23)

We have 50 acres of land. Typical Eastern Ontario terrain: a bit of clear land where I planted 4000 trees, enough open space around our house to have a spacious vegetable garden, a toolshed, a woodshed, and a guest house with garage. The rest is woods, rocks, hills and lots of wet lands.

Actually according to Leviticus: my first sentence is wrong: “the land is mine” says the Lord. I have legal title, but ultimately the Lord created it and He gave me the holy obligation to look after it.

Last week I concluded my column by suggesting that we can’t do anything without Jesus and Jesus won’t do anything without us. In other words: Ora et Labora, pray and work. That applies to land also: God gave it to us; we must work it to the best of our calling. How do we do that?

There are three basic necessities in life: shelter, clothing and food. I built our house in 1975 on solid rock. It’ll be there a few more years. Clothing: got a closet full: more than I ever will wear out. Food: even though it is good to fast once in a while, our bodies need daily refueling.

Very early humanity, like Adam and Eve, were simply gatherers. The Garden of Eden provided them with a great variety of fruits. Instructed by the Lord-Creator they had first-hand knowledge of the earth’s bounties. When banned from paradise, hunting was added to their skills. Much later horticulture expanded to agriculture which in turn led to domesticating animals and our current industrial culture.

The original foragers lived in small bands and tribes. There some would be tool makers, others skilled in medicine, but almost none had exclusive specialties and everyone helped gather food. Most of their calories came from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers. Rarely would a forager overexploit the environment because destruction of a resource one season would mean starvation the next. Foragers would naturally limit population expansion in line with available resources.

Agriculturists domesticated grain which allowed hoarding and surplus. Because land owners tend to get greedy, the Lord in Leviticus 25 ordained that every fiftieth year would be the Year of Jubilee, in which all land sold would revert back to the original owner: “because (verse 23) the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” I doubt whether it ever did take place.

Most of the earth’s surface was forest at one time. Agriculture changed that. When a forest is cleared for crops, the soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed for many years, but once it is ruined it may never recover: that’s how deserts start their sterile lives.  When land supply was abundant, farmers, faced with soil exhaustion simply moved on to ‘greener pastures’, often displacing the natives. These original foragers were usually confined to a certain region where they knew the habits of particular species and had a culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquered new lands, as new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s knowledge, stories, and traditions. Agricultural societies were and are more progressive, always in need of equipment for grain processing, tractors, combines, robot-milk machines: million dollar tools. This is not a condemnation: we all are engaged in some form of the rat race. As a result societal structures have grown more complicated, from mega-cities to complex governing bodies.

We think of foragers as frequently facing famine, but actually agriculturists fared far worse. Hunter-gatherers, with much lower population densities, with a much more diverse food supply and greater mobility, could find some food in nearly any conditions where farmers regularly experience hunger conditions. By and large they were healthier and taller than farmers.  The historian Fernand Braudel shows that in Europe country-wide famines occurred 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth century. Agriculture did not become a reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid shortfalls: farming now needs 4 to 10 fuel calories for each calorie of food energy.

Leviticus 25 says that “the land belongs to the Lord.” Forager cultures have a built-in check on population, since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be over-harvested without immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar limit on over-exploitation of resources. Thanks to the recent abundance of fertilizer and cheap fuel modern agriculture caused our current population explosion.

Here’s what Jesus had to say about abundant yields. In the parable of the Rich Fool – as recorded in Luke 12: 16-21 – he tells us about a man who had an excellent crop, so good that he planned to tear down the old barns and build new ones to store the surplus, sell it off slowly and enjoy life. Then God showed up: “fool, tonight you’ll die.” It reminds me of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ’There is no God.’” The Grail Psalms, commenting here, say: “The fool is one who has his values all wrong – get rich quick, never mind the poor – and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.” The fool does not believe that ‘the land belongs to God,’ so he can do with the land and the surplus as he pleases, even though his actions lead to death. Is that what current agriculture will do to us?

Jesus always looks to the final result, the ultimate outcome. So, what are the consequences of a surplus?  A surplus creates class division – rich versus poor; grain must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build barns; it takes people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be sold off, waiting for the best marketing conditions. Was that the reason why Jesus spoke this parable? A surplus offers a target for power struggles among the heirs, an object of desire for poor neighbours, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. They who control the surplus control the group. Personal freedom erodes under agriculture.

There is another way to look at this. Agriculture is chronos, the Greek word for time as the clock dictates, time ruled by machines, time that is money, time that turns on technology that not only eclipses our souls, but also kills creation. Agriculture is now an industry, synonymous with manufactured food of which, perhaps, 10 percent is farm-stuff, liberally spiked with addictive salt and sugar. Most of our food cost is advertising, packaging, profit, and sustained by large volumes of climate changing carbon energy. Cheap food ultimately leads to expensive health care. Agriculture today, like the Rich Young Fool, causes people to die before their time, witness obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and cancers. Modern agriculture has resulted in concentration of power by the elite whose only aim is profit.

Creation lives by kairos, a different time frame, that of the earth. We must find a way of growing food that fits in with kairos, the time in tune with the earth, the time that ticks eternally and knows no hour. I believe horticulture is kairos, eternal time, sustainable for ever.

While agriculture has an expiry date, horticulture has not. It uses simple methods to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture in this sense is difficult to define precisely. Simply put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers, using hand tools, while leaving some land fallow. That sort of gardening is a religious act, regarding the earth as a living entity.

In the long run – and that must always be our aim – horticulture is the most efficient method known for obtaining food, measured by return on energy invested.  Horticulturists use poly-cultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals. Horticulture is permaculture, and is a way of growing for eternity. It’s the way to sustainability. Where horticulture has structural constraints against large population, hoarding of surplus, and centralized command and control structures, agriculture inevitably leads to all of those. I have said it before: we need to be anthropoi teleioi (Matt. 5:48), people (anthropoi) who always keeping ‘the end’ (telos) in mind.

In the new earth there is no place for agriculture. Only foraging and horticulture will stand the test of eternity.

Next week: The next pope: a clown or a clone? If you have a chance at all, buy, beg, borrow, but read Morris West’s The Clowns of God in the next week or so. It’s about a pope who abdicates.