grace | Deep Agroecology – The Call of the Land

by Steven McFadden – January 1, 2024
For the sake of the Earth, the people, the animals, the plants, and for the sake of my own need to advocate, I raise my blog voice and declare 2024 to be The Year of Agroecology. Once again.

Twelve months ago I declared 2023 to be The Year of Agroecology, and before that the same in 2022. It’s something that needs to be declared again, and again, and again. Severe matters before us all. Opportunity, too.

While my blog voice may be slight in isolation, it is part of a wide and wise global chorus: millions of voices of people who touch the earth on behalf of all humanity, and who recognize the overwhelming need for transformation of our food systems with clean land, clean food, justice for all. They are acting for change. “The Year of Agroecology” is but one rhetorical frame, among 8 billion possibilities. But it’s a momentous frame.

Farm and food systems are the foundation of all the rest of our world with all its techno splendors and dangers. If we get our foundation right–clean, just, radiantly healthy–what is built upon that foundation has a far-improved likelihood of being wholesome, just, and sustainable.

The authentic, multifaceted global vision of agroecology is worthy of worldwide embrace: genuine, committed engagement to activate a main chance for us all as we pass through a turbulent era of transition characterized by profound social upheaval, wide-ranging environmental contamination, and an ongoing, in-your-face cascade of climate-change catastrophes.

For sober consideration, check out The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Each year for the last six years this report has highlighted the reality that intensification of wars, punishing climate extremes, and economic turbulence, combined with inflation and inequality, are knocking the nations and corporations of the world off track. In the report’s estimation we’ll not meet basic targets set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). That’s not an abstract academic concept. It has harsh real-world consequences.

For balance, check out Food Tank’s podcast highlighting food system wins in 2023, and also predictions for 2024 from ag and food experts.

Agroecology is a grace that needs to be welcomed widely in 2024 for it espouses a way of life in respectful relationship with nature, rather than a relentless profit-driven business model, and a tsunami of marketing angles.

Agroecology is a science, a practice, and a worldwide movement embraced for the sake of clean land, clean water, clean food, and justice for the human beings who touch the earth for all of us, or otherwise work to make our food supply possible.

For all these reasons and more, agroecology deserves acknowledgement and prominence as the year of, the decade of, the century of, and more. For 2024 and onward, I respectfully add my voice to the agroecological chorus. Let us make our Beauty Way visions real.

I was there in New Hampshire a year ago in September 2012, just a few miles away when dairyman Lincoln Geiger was badly hurt by a trampling bull.

That Sunday they airlifted him to a hospital in Boston to reckon with life-threatening injuries. But Lincoln’s spirit was strong and he moved through the wounds and the shock, and the many phases of recovery to come back to the land.

“I was given a new outlook on the world, Lincoln later explained, “by what I now call a form of initiation. My whole sense of reality shifted from an objective view of nature and the environmental movement, to a deeply caring heart-centered understanding.

“I now feel that the way to engage people to improve our world is with an intelligence that emanates through the heart. We need to ensoul nature and all its creatures and feel like guests, friends, or part of the family when in the presence of the forest or the garden or the herd. That is the attitude that comes from the warmth of the soul through the wisdom of the heart.”

From the very beginning Lincoln has been one of the core farmers at the remarkable Temple-Wilton Community Farm. One of the first two Community Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) in America, it is still growing strong nearing thirty growing seasons.

In a blog post recounting his recent visit to the farm, Robert Karp of the Biodynamic Association noted that the Temple-Wilton Community Farm, “keeps showing the way” for thousands of other CSA farms across the nation and around the world.

Fawn – photo by Elfer courtesy of Creative Commons.

A day-and-a-half before his fateful encounter with the bull, Lincoln came and sat beside me in the barn loft at Stonewall Farm Center, just west of Keene. He shared a grace with our conference of people talking about implementing greater food security for the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire.

Lincoln sat as part of a circle of 40 of us or so — all Twentyfirst Century agrarians alive with a sense of doing something foundationally important in the world. After dinner, to offer a blessing, he talked with us for about ten minutes.

He began by telling the story of how on a spring day he had climbed aboard the farm’s tractor and set about mowing the high fields. He never noticed the place in the deep grasses where a fawn lay hidden, and so to his dismay and anguish he found that the blades of his mower had badly injured the fawn.

Within two weeks he had hit four fawns and felt the deer were trying to teach him something monumental. “The day I hit the last fawn I was super alert to make sure there would be no accident. I stood on the tractor platform the whole time I was mowing. About a third into the 10-acre field I saw a deer standing about 200 feet from me. I stopped the tractor, got off and noticed that the deer was looking at me and then looked down and then back at me.

“I felt right away that she was standing by her fawn. I turned off the tractor and headed straight towards the deer. She ran away, I kept walking and soon there in front of me lay a beautiful fawn. I just stood with it for a while, then I called my dairy partner Andrew and our apprentice Sara to come to the field with a cage or something to hold the fawn while I finished mowing.

“I picked up the fawn, it was totally calm and carried it to the bottom of the field. Andrew and Sara came but had no cage, they brought it into the Forrest and let it go. I kept on mowing and just as I was finishing the last couple of swaths, as I look back, there it is with its hoof cut off an inch up. I cried out loud, turned off the tractor and picked it up in my arms again. My heart was broken so bad I can’t tell you. I brought my little friend into the forest, I knew it would never make it. I laid it on a large stone and crushed its beautiful head with a rock.

“Then I cracked open inside and screamed loudly for the world to hear our pain and our love,” Lincoln told us. Time went by. To bring some light and healing to all that arose with the death of the fawns, to respond by giving some beauty back to the world, Lincoln wrote graces.

A year ago Lincoln spoke one of his graces aloud for the circle gathered at Stonewall Farm, just west of The Grand Monadnock:

Thank you Earth so soft and strong

Thank you meadow filled with song

Thank you mountain, forest and stream

By you we rest and find our dream

Thank you creatures wild and tame

Your trust we love and hope to gain

Thank you for your milk and fleece

And for your meat that we may eat

Thank you root and leaf and seed

We’ll not forget your wondrous deed

You hold the earth

You catch the rain

You fill the world with air again

Thank you wind for bringing rain

Please help our friends who are in pain

For us who thirst and cry from hunger

Please bring hope, life and wonder

Thank you moon for guidance and grace

For heart bent flowers

With dew drop lace

Thank you sun as day begins

For golden light

By angel wings

With thankful hearts

and open hands

We ask to share your loving lands.

– Lincoln Geiger, Temple-Wilton Farm

As of Thanksgiving 2013, Lincoln writes: “I am well and full of living.” The Temple-Wilton Community Farm is also well and full of living, as attested to by yet another article about the farm’s place in the history and the destiny of the CSA movement, complete with some wonderful photos. The story – The First CSAs – is published on page 10 of the John Deere company magazine, The Furrow.