Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

On Being an “Objective” Farmer

On Being an “Objective” Farmer Can I put this together?1 —Barry Lopez I was born in a farmhouse south of Medina, North Dakota, a small rural town that is now struggling to survive. My parents began farming on that land in 1930, so they spent their first years as a young farm couple in the midst of the Dust Bowl. Those were hard times that taught harsh lessons. At times my father wasn’t sure he would be able to feed his young family. He learned to be extremely frugal—perhaps too frugal, he later thought. And he vowed that what had happened to his land in the ravages of the Dust Bowl would “never ever happen again.” Eventually he became, by any standard, a successful farmer. The operation expanded from five cows, a team of horses and 120 acres of rented land in 1930 to a 2,400-acre farm with 200 head of cattle by 1970, all of which was owned and debt-free. My father achieved all of this without relying on any science-based research. He learned by observation and through direct experience. His learning was guided by his passions: to be “the best farmer in Stutsman County,” and to provide his land with the best care possible. My father became a serious conservationist, but on his own terms. He introduced farming practices that prevented his land from suffering any further loss of soil due to wind erosion. But in his efforts to raise fifty bushels of wheat per acre, he plowed up a lot of native prairie that most conservationists , including myself, were convinced should have been left in grass. 71 This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Zachary Michael Jack, ed., Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 224–30. 72 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience I grew up in that environment. While I often found myself disagreeing with my father on specific details, I always marveled at his ability to anticipate and prepare for events that seemed wholly unpredictable to me. It seemed he had developed some kind of clairvoyant ability to foresee problems and opportunities before they occurred. In high school and college I learned about the scientific method and how scientists had to remain “value-free.” They had to maintain a certain detachment from what they wanted to know in order to prevent their own biases from distorting the data. This new way of knowing presented me with a puzzle. If detachment and rigorous adherence to the scientific method constituted the only true way of knowing, how did my father consistently anticipate problems and opportunities and take appropriate actions without the benefit of that approach? With only a sixth-grade education, he knew what he knew by immersing himself fully in that which he sought to know, and he filtered his knowledge through the screen of his passion. In graduate school I encountered a variety of methodologies for knowing . I also began to marvel at the ability of those who combined sciencebased knowledge with experience-based intelligence. For example, Aldo Leopold wrote openly about his passion for a reconnection with nature and insisted that an ethic was essential to insuring the health of the land. After graduate school I pursued a career in higher education but always maintained my farming connections. I talked regularly with my father and always spent summer vacations on the farm. In one form or another, those conversations inevitably ended up exploring the way he knew what he knew and how it differed from the way the academy claimed it “knew” what it knew. He had great respect for the academy, but he also harbored deep suspicions of it. Whenever the “science” seemed to contradict what he had learned through field experience, he suspected that the scientists “hadn’t picked enough rocks”—his favorite expression for people who lacked field experience to corroborate their academic conclusions. I continued to search for more mentors. Among philosophers, I found the phenomenologists particularly helpful. I ran across Edmund Husserl’s contention that pure objective reality (usually a given to modern science) was not the concrete basis underlying all experience; rather, objective reality was in fact a theoretical construction that constituted a kind of unwarranted idealization of an intersubjective experience. It occurred to me that there might be a third way to understand how we knew what we knew. [18.191.46...