“Good Dirt ”

• Scriptural Reference: Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-36
• June 3, 2007

It all starts with dirt. We don’t have anything of worth that didn’t originate in dirt. Sure, cleanliness is next to godliness, as the saying goes, but if there isn’t any dirt, there aren’t any crops. No crops, no food. No food, no people. All scientists, clergy, doctors, bus drivers, even presidents – everybody on the planet great and small – every one has to eat and if they don’t have quality food, they won’t thrive, even if they survive. And you won’t have any quality food unless you have quality dirt.

Quality dirt. Does that sound funny? It really shouldn’t. Where else do plants get their nutrients? Yes, they process sunlight through photosynthesis, which makes chlorophyll, which makes the leaves green, but any gardener knows that what’s in the soil makes all the difference in the world to the quality of the fruit, whether it’s the acidic quality of Hanover County land that yields such famous tomatoes, or the quality of the Idaho hills that yield such famous potatoes.

How do you get quality dirt? I have a cousin who farms in eastern North Carolina, and I’m going to share with you some of his insights regarding how you get quality dirt. In order to have healthy dirt, one must employ healthy farming practices, such as crop rotation, letting fields lie fallow at regular intervals, not using huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides that end up killing off not only the so-called “pests” and weeds, but also the beneficent insects, worms, and other creatures which serve to make fertile soil. One cannot, however, do healthy farming on the large scale characteristic of the practices of contemporary agribusiness.

Why is that? In order to practice healthy farming, one must love the land and care for it. One must take the time to observe, bend down and squeeze the soil between the fingers, and look at the dirt to see and feel if it is good. Smell it. If one has thousands of acres to plow, one must necessarily overlook much of the land. One cannot love what one overlooks. What one overlooks soon becomes neglected and neglect leads to eventual ruin. As an example of the ruin that results from lack of a close, loving relationship to the land, the writer Wendell Berry cites the vast loss of topsoil now threatening the long-term health of harvests all across the mid-western portion of the United States. The farms have become so huge, with fewer and fewer people farming more and more acreage, that farmers must use heavy machinery to plow, plant, fertilize, till, and harvest. Heavy machinery not only compacts the soil because of sheer weight, but because it costs thousands of dollars, farmers must go into massive debt to buy and pay for the things. That kind of financial burden results in a need to make the land yield constantly, with many such farmers abandoning the practice of crop rotation. A fallow field becomes an unproductive field, and so agriculture is abandoned more and more in favor of agribusiness.

Ironically, if the farmer produces a bumper crop, the laws of the marketplace dictate lower prices. Greater supply leads to cheaper products in the laws of free market capitalism, but in the case of the farmer trying to pay the bills for his expensive machinery, the lower prices mean that he’s in the same financial straits he would’ve been in if he’d produced less of a crop. As a result, the farmer must plant more land, press more production, use more herbicides and pesticides, which requires more infusions of cash, which leads to a vicious cycle of larger acreage being cared for less and less and in the end, further degradation of the soil itself.

Berry advocates smaller farms and more farmers. My cousin agrees, but he points out a dilemma that immediately pops up. In order to do this, though, farmers must determine to live with fewer of the consumer goods which our advertising industry holds up as the epitome of the “good life.” It’s possible to have healthy agriculture in our country, says Berry, but it will take a redefinition of what constitutes the good life and willingness for persons to find more joy in the work they do and less in the gadgets they can buy.

Here’s the deal: certain things won’t give. There are some standards human beings discovered in ancient times which we discard at our peril. For example, no farmer can employ a very popular philosophical outlook which lots of people accept as normal. That’s the outlook that says, in effect, that practice you have is good for you, but it isn’t good for me. That belief is good for you but it isn’t good for me. You determine what works for you and I’ll determine what works for me. This is classic post modernism.

But a major problem emerges at this point. You see, I cannot define nature “for me” while you define nature “for you.” It takes a certain amount of time for a certain seed to germinate, grow, and produce fruit. One must harvest at a certain time. If you live in Virginia, one cannot decide to plant tomatoes in the fall and harvest them in the winter. If you want tomatoes in the winter – to use Garrison Koeller’s phrase – “you have to buy those things they strip mined down in Texas.” And when you buy the tomatoes in the supermarket that were trucked in from another state or country, you notice that they don’t have the flavor and consistency of tomatoes you grow yourself and eat from the vine. You realize that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes was right: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1).” We may be able to hedge the harvest times somewhat through the expenditure of huge amounts of petroleum shipping vegetables and fruits from warmer climates to colder ones, but even in doing that, we can feel and taste the fact that they aren’t “in season.”

I think Berry makes some excellent points. Notice, though, that according to Berry, healthy agriculture can only come when persons in agriculture pay close attention to caring and tending for the land. This is nothing short of the vocational assignment God gave to Adam when God placed Adam in the Garden and if Berry’s right, that vocation still lies at the center of what it takes for human beings to survive. Tending and Caring still lie at the center of what constitutes the good life.

Many farmers, however, are not the only persons in our society who need to redefine for themselves what the “good life” is. In fact, Berry advocates that all persons who eat food – which covers just about everybody I know – should become more intimately acquainted with what goes into producing it. To do that, though, requires that all persons radically reassess what they spend most of their time doing and why they do it. The dilemma Berry describes in agriculture really boils down to a crisis of vocation for all of us.

The wisdom spoken of in Proverbs is the spiritual dirt out of which everything else about our souls grows. If we haven’t taken care of that dirt, if we’ve not tended to it, if we have infused our lifestyles with unnatural rhythms, if we have neglected the silence, if we have never learned to listen, if we have instead chocked our lives full of gadgets, noise and entertainment, we will suffer a profound erosion and famine of spirit.

What is that wisdom? It is Jesus Christ, his life, teachings, and character.