I was recently having a civil, but somewhat intense, debate with someone from church. I would give one argument, he would respond to it, and then I would respond to that and give a different reason why my main point was correct. Eventually it got to the point where he said that all the different lines of argumentation I was using weren’t consistent. Unsurprisingly, I disagreed about that, too! But I could see how it would think that I was changing my tune, even though I still believed each line of reasoning was internally coherent.
We rightly value consistency in life. Being on message is really important. I mention this because it’s possible that if you read all of the articles in this month’s magazine, and in the past few issues, you might think that we’re constantly contradicting ourselves!
For example, a couple of months ago we ran an interview with Eliot Coleman, an organic farmer who’s not afraid of intelligent tillage. We got feedback on that from folks who can’t imagine putting a blade in the ground because their soil would all blow away if they did so. At basically the same time, we got just as much negative email the other way around after I had written in this column that we have to accept that there would be some tradeoffs — however minimal — if we outlawed glyphosate.
In the current issue, you’ll hear a number of different takes on soil health and soil fertility. You’ll get different opinions on biochar. You’ll read from authors committed to no-till and those who do till, and from those who spray and those who wouldn’t dream of it.
Are we just being inconsistent? I don’t think so. Our goal as a magazine is not to present a single set of best practices. You will read things in Acres U.S.A. that contradict each other, and we don’t apologize for that. Our community is a big tent of people who are committed to a better way of farming — ecological agriculture — but not all people within the tent think exactly the same. We have room for no-tillers as well as for organic enthusiasts (and for those devoted to both!). We publish some things that are a bit out there — on the edge of speculation about what’s happening in the soil that science can’t yet explain — and we also publish peer-reviewed science that is more conventional.
Ecological agriculture, as a whole, is a coherent set of principles. Yet within it there can be a lot of debate about particular practices and how/whether they fit into the ecological paradigm.
Unsurprisingly, my church debate remains unresolved! But the other person and I remain in the same tent — the same church. We both recognize that the issue is secondary or tertiary in importance and that it isn’t grounds for pursuing ecclesiastical justice or for leaving in a huff. Hopefully we can all do likewise here within our eco-ag community. We can be narrow in our convictions, but we must remain broad in our affections.
And that’s the view from the country.
