For as long as there have been humans, our species has gone through long periods of great knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in, an understanding that we, being humans, periodically and promptly forget and have to painstakingly relearn.
Knowledge can be lost for a variety of reasons: War with its accompanying disruptions, population-decimating diseases, or the climate becoming inhospitable to humans and animals alike. Centuries-long droughts, or excessive flooding, earthquakes, volcanoes, heat and cold have been the downfall of many a civilization.
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Losing and regaining knowledge is cyclical.
Partially because of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been in a long forgetting stage with centuries of hard-won knowledge pushed aside for the sake of convenience.
For untold centuries, skills were passed down from one family member to another, from master craftsmen to eager apprentices.
The Industrial Revolution, along with various wars and famines and pestilences, has changed many present-day civilizations from nomadic herders and more settled farmers to city dwellers.
There’s nothing wrong with living in a city, but herders and farmers need more land in order to produce food — not only land, but also the intimate knowledge of such.
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Family farms, although dwindling in number, still produce vast quantities of our food. Other than farmers and herdsmen, too many people have no understanding or knowledge of the skill and effort involved, and sadly, even more think food comes out of the back room at the grocery store.
In reality, our food, whether it’s animal or vegetable, has to be raised. Whether it’s calves, or chickens, or vegetables, there’s a tremendous amount of time involved — and care. Animals have to be fed and cared for. Vegetables have to be planted and harvested. All of this has to be processed and shipped.
All of it is a labor of love.
Farmers have a deep and abiding passion for their land and what their land produces. They have to, for their job is no 9-to-5, heated and air-conditioned, cushy, paper-pushing profession. Farming is 24-7-365 and intensive.
Where am I going with all this?
Circles. Circles and cycles.
Hopefully we’re coming to the end of the forgetting cycle!
While many are willfully oblivious, many more are coming back around to respecting and revering the land that feeds them.
People are relearning how to care for the soil, how to plant and grow their own food, how to pay attention to the weather and the seasons to maximize their land’s potential. They are recognizing that most weeds have a purpose, whether as medicinal or as food, or even just a measure of the health of your soil.
All of those are seemingly simple things that our grandparents took for granted. After two world wars, and having been exposed to other cultures and other ways of life, people eagerly left their agrarian roots and flocked to concrete jungles. That’s because farming was, and is, such unrelenting hard work. After our guys — and gals — came back from overseas, many had no interest in staying on the family farm and working themselves to death, opting instead for city life, and an easier life.
But with that ease comes a cost, one many are unwilling to bear any more.
Sure, it’s easier to go to the store and buy a bag of potatoes, or apples, but those who grow their own know nothing tastes like fresh, in-season produce.
We’ve become accustomed to having produce available year-round. Most folks have no idea when a particular vegetable or fruit is in season and at its peak of flavor, much less how to get it to that stage.
Does growing your own mean only eating what’s grown locally? Not necessarily. What if a certain type of fruit won’t grow in your area? Should you do without? Cherries, for instance. They will only grow well in areas that have cold winters.
While most people nowadays have no desire to spend 12 to 18 backbreaking hours a day taking care of never-ending chores such as chopping cotton and suckering tobacco and hoeing gardens and milking cows, many are opting for a simpler lifestyle that includes learning more about sustainable farming in a small area, or even in containers, and keeping a few chickens in their backyard.
Also, people are again learning how to keep and use a sourdough starter. Some are even getting involved in sourdough to the extent of buying countertop mills to grind their own wheat berries into flour. Far more nutritious — just like homegrown vegetables — fresh-milled flour contains all the nutrition lacking in store-bought flour, due to its over processing and shelf-life-extending preservatives.
While during the past few decades, we had excelled in forgetting how to do things like permaculture, we are now seeing a resurgence in relearning what our grandparents knew.
They wouldn’t have recognized the word permaculture, but they lived it. Everything had a purpose. Nothing went to waste. Cleaning out the barn stalls or the chicken coop served the dual purpose of removing manure in order to keep the animals’ pens clean, and then using that manure as fertilizer. Whatever wasn’t eaten or preserved out of the garden was fed to the chickens and hogs, which then fed the humans.
Life has a rhythm, and our grandparents’ knowledge of where their food came from and how it had been raised was a great part of that rhythm. Those same core values are making a comeback, and we’re better off for it.
In search of easier and faster, we’ve lost that rhythm, that oneness with the land. We’ve lost nutrition and substituted chemicals. We’ve traded honest physical work for working out at the gym, or vegging in front of the TV.
It’s past time for us to get back to the learning stage. Here’s hoping my next few articles will help you, inspire you, and possibly guide you a bit in making your way back to being closer to the land, to understanding more about gardening, and being more self-sufficient, to living a healthier life, and maybe making your soil a little healthier and more productive as well.
