Caught up in the flying colors of fall harvest season we should have checked our most recent e-blast a little more before hitting send. Quite a few elders were shocked by our typos! We apologize to all who hold us in some literary regard. We can do better.
Like all corrections, this offers us the chance to intensify our focus. After all, sensing, looping, and feedback are what allow living systems to regulate themselves. In an earth-crisis of this magnitude, the largest test will be whether we can re-form, re-orient and respond to the coming emergencies. This is exactly what we need to practice. So here we go.
Violence is easy. Condemnation is easy. Hopelessness is easy. But that’s not our project. We, Greenhorns, are here to undertake the opposite approach—that of fostering and sheltering an empowering discourse for new farmers, of creating a welcoming and hospitable network, of offering a scaffold of useful resources and collective action, and of helping more and more people join the work of organic agriculture, agro-ecology and the related fields. Whining that “the kids don’t want to work” does not create the conditions for kids to work.
We believe that each farm operates as an organ of our larger society. We believe that like an organ, each farm serves, stabilizes, cleanses and nourishes our social system and our democracy. We believe these organs and their farmers, land-workers, scientists and accompanying stakeholders have more to do than merely serve. We must also send signals out into the bloodstream of the larger society— to give feedback, to share lessons, to caution, to question, to propose research agendas and to share demands.
We want the kids to work, and we want to be kids who work, because we recognize that we humans need work as much as we need purpose. Work is hard, healing is hard, indeed, the tasks ahead will be even harder. Everything we want to create, each farm, each crystalline pattern of self-determined, generative, relational agriculture—is built through effort, toil and held in tension by thousands of related lives. This work needs to be valued. Only together can we build a culture that values the work ahead.You, our literary community of working farmers and those adjacent to and in alliance with agriculture—each of you relate to and respond to the changes you perceive. It is your response, your sensing, your feedback, your predictions and hypotheses that we want to circulate through the bloodstream of our shared culture. And we want to do this through our literary project: THE NEW FARMER’S ALMANAC.
We appreciate your forgiveness.
We want your essay in the next Almanac.
We ask that as we crest the hill of harvest stress into the longer chilly evenings of the Northern Hemisphere fall, we all follow a traditional literacy cycle and settle down to work on essays.
