My view here in the country is a good one. I was reminded of this the other day while sitting on the back porch after dinner with some guests. One friend who’s from Arizona protested that the views are much better out West. He’s right — it’s incredible to be able to see thunderstorms 25 miles in the distance and the sun shining through the clouds in front of the mountains in a different direction — but we all agreed that for the Midwest, the view of our ten-acre property from the back deck is really good. The garden and orchard are doing well, the temperature was perfect, and it’s been too dry for the bugs to become too much of a nuisance.
The dryness is a bit of a concern. Most people in our disconnected-from-nature country don’t understand the gravity of drought. But those who farm really mean it when they request prayer for rain. Hopefully those prayers will be answered by the time you’re reading this.
Another nice thing about living in the country is regularly running into people you’re in some way connected with. The other day, for example, I was at the local hospital getting my blood drawn, and the guy taking my blood turned out to be the college-aged son of a nearby neighbor.
The blood test was just for a regular physical, and thankfully everything looks fine. But I was reminded how incredible testing can be — my doctor (we’re blessed with a naturopathic-leaning D.O.) went through test after test and described why each metric was important and where my numbers were on the spectrum of bad to good. Based on my experience, I guessed my numbers wouldn’t be too bad, but it was nice to get the confirmation.
It’s just like our executive editor says regarding plants and soil: don’t guess — test.
The visit also brought to mind another analogy between human and plant/soil health; when discussing my cholesterol numbers, my doctor was quick to point out that the commonly known description of “good” (HDL) and “bad” (LDL) cholesterol is a poor way to think of things. As he explained it, both play important roles — LDL is a sticky substance that can help repair wear and tear within arteries; once that damage has been healed, HDL comes along and takes the LDL “patch” away so that plaque doesn’t build up on that LDL patch and cause blockages. It’s like with “pests”: the “bad” insects are performing vital ecosystem functions just as much as the “good” ones; we tend not to recognize contributions of them all, though, because most of our ecosystems are so out of whack.
We live in strange times. We have remarkable technologies, like blood, soil and plant tests that can give us indicators of things happening inside that are invisible to our senses — and yet we understand so little of how the human body, soil and plants work that we vastly oversimplify their infinitely complex design and fail to recognize how each part works together.
This month in the magazine we highlight the complexity of that which has been our focus here at Acres U.S.A. for over fifty years: soil. Allen Philo, Ken Wacha and Jerry Hatfield describe a new paradigm for understanding soil based on soil energetics. Ron Nichols and Allen Williams remember one of the great modern pioneers of soil health, Dave Brandt. And in the interview, Neal Kinsey reflects on his work in balancing soil — a career stretching nearly the entirety of this publication.
And that’s the view from the country.
