“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
When our founding fathers decided to declare their independence from Great Britain, they didn’t simply state, “We no longer submit to you, and here’s how we’re going to govern ourselves.” The action they chose to take came only after they spent most of the document declaring the principles whereby they made their decision: all men are created equal; the Creator has given unalienable rights to all; government derives its power from the consent of the governed. The practice — declaring independence — was based on bedrock principles.
The Bible displays a similar form. Practically every verse can be categorized as either an indicative or an imperative. Indicatives are statements about who God is, who people are, and what God has done for His people. They are the principles — the foundation of what is true. Imperatives are the commands, articulated in the Ten Commandments and throughout the rest of the Bible, for how we should then live, based on the principles.
While it’s possible to emphasize the indicatives without embracing the imperatives (someone who loves studying theology but never bothers putting it into practice), the greater danger is focusing on the imperatives without first believing the indicatives: seeking to do, do, do without remembering that Scripture’s message is that God first did. Imperatives — “do this” and “don’t do that” — done without indicatives — God’s promises for his people — turn into lifeless legalism. The whole point of Christianity is that one cannot be saved by his or her own practices. We must rely on the principle: the grace of God alone. 1 John 4:19 is a classic example of this: “We love [the imperative] because He first loved us [the indicative].”
What in the world does all this have to do with farming, you ask? Simply this: farming practices have to be based on principles. Copying what someone else does without understanding why is a recipe for disaster.
Ecologically minded farmers seek to solve problems by using first-principles thinking. They consider how a system works and determine practices based on those principles. They seek to understand, for example, how the plant works, how the plant and the many microbes in the soil and on the leaves interact, and how other environmental factors like heat and water and beneficial insects impact the plant. They put principles first; they understand the indicatives of the plant’s entire ecology before making decisions about how to farm.
The opposite of first-principles thinking is simply seeking to replicate what others have done. There is of course a place for this — we don’t need to understand all the inner workings of a tractor engine in order to use it. But for biological systems like farming, merely copying someone else’s practices is bound to result in failure. Obeying the imperatives of the fertilizer salesman without understanding why is neither economically nor ecologically prudent. This type of thinking — based on practices and imperatives rather than principles and indicatives — is never successful in the long run.
The lynchpin not only of agriculture but of our entire society — our political as well as our religious institutions — has always been first-principles thinking. And this has been the basis of Acres U.S.A. since our founding in 1971. Our goal is to continue to preach sound ecological principles so farmers can successfully implement practices that work in their individual contexts.
And that’s the view from the country.
