Greetings, Soil.
Soil Saturdays are immersive experiences in the sometimes hidden elements of a living farm, blending three lenses on soil and the life of the farm: biodynamic farming, exploring and observing directly through the senses, and participatory art-science projects.
This season’s walks were at IMA’s home, Hawthorne Valley Farm, a 900-acre biodynamic dairy and vegetable farm. Throughout the tour, IMA directors and farmers emeriti, Steffen and Rachel Schneider, offered a window into the roles played by plants, animals, soil, seasons, and human farmers in the living farm organism. Adapting the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy’s guiding approach, IMA researcher, Jill Jakimetz, offered invitations to connect with the many beings of the farm by tuning into our senses and sharing what we were noticing. The walks took place the last weekends of August, September and October- a very special time of year when summer turns to autumn. Through the season, we pursued some poetic experiments: visualizing the decompositional capacity of soil, befriending native plants and gathering their seeds, and sounding out the “tasting notes” of the farm soils.
“Crusty, wet, dry, dough, stringy, barky, coolness, humidity, crumbs, cold rocks, water, sand, grainy, stony, gritty, heavy, earthy, forest floor, mountains, freshness, lightness, clairty, green, alive, oxygen, childhood, fresh, chocolaty brown, slight cow but not manure, ocean saltiness, river, undigestible, rustling, gritty, shimmering, variety...”
Soil is something that is the basis of all our food, clothing and shelter, yet many of us aren’t aware of the incredible, lively set of relationships that it is. Healthy soil sticks together. It’s a place for exchange and transformation; a territory for discovery and expression. As a society we have a fatal disconnect from the actual soil beneath our feet. We also share troubling disconnects from one another- there’s a social soil among us that we rarely see or intentionally cultivate as such. Many of us also experience disconnection from ourselves. Meditation, prayer, therapy, ceremony, celebration are designed to cultivate these connections. Soil Saturday walks are 3 hour-tours of the farm, the soil under our feet, the soil within, and the soil that grows among us.
Each Saturday brought blue skies where one participant noted that the morning had the chill and aroma of fall, but summer’s intense heat still bloomed and burned by midday. Once gathered and acquainted with one another, we’re ready for a tour of the farmscape, living soil, and the many beings that make up the farm “super organism”.
Encounter
Encountering another being in the farmscape is an opportunity to hook into a different sense of how the lives of the farm fit together- as a “whole farm organism” and as part of the larger socio-ecological web of being. You and the onion on your kitchen counter could have an encounter, but it takes a certain moment in the mind to access this experience. The sensory guiding and the world of the farm can help participants cross a threshold from the everyday way we mostly see the world (onion: chop, cook, eat) or even (light+water+growing medium+onion seed = onion plant) to a way of seeing that immerses us in presence with say, the onion, in all its onion-ness. Yes, in its qualities: in its roundness, pungency, layers, and burnished shine and perhaps even where it grew, where the seed grew, the lineage of onions, the water sources and the soils, those who picked and planted and packed and sold the onion, too. But beyond sensing a list of qualities or foodshed origins, encountering means feeling alive to the life of another.
Encounter, as it appears in the late writer and activist David Fleming’s Lean Logic: Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It , is “the act of recognising something – a person, a *practice, a *system – on its own terms; the particular character and wholeness of the other is acknowledged; *judgment and opinion about him/her/[they]/it are set in a *relevant context, rather than in the context of universal *general principle or immoveable *mindset.” Amitav Ghosh writes of this “moment of recognition” in his non-fiction book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, as the moment when he senses the living awareness of the river and feels the river pointedly recognize him in return.
What or who is this soil here? How can we get to a place of encountering soil and the many other beings at work on the farm and in the food system? What’s it like when you sense the onion sensing you?
Parts of the whole
We had a series of organic, fair trade shirts, ranging from XL adult to a tiny baby cloth.
At each of our stopping points, we would dig a hole, experience what the soil of that place was like, and plant one shirt. In two months, we would dig them up and discover how much the different soil communities ate up of the cotton shirts.
Under the shusshing of the silver maple leaves, we met, acknowledged all the beings who have been a part of tending to the land we were with, and introduced ourselves to one another. Soon we headed to the compost yard, where a specially-made compost pile was waiting for our first XL tee.
Before we did anything else, we were invited to just look around and notice where we were. We then closed our eyes and were guided, sense-by-sense, through an exploration of what it was like to be there, in our bodies, in that moment. We were invited to open our eyes, but as we opened them, we were invited to see as if what we were looking at was also looking at us. An informal sharing circle gave us the chance, if it felt right to each individual, to just speak out into the compost pile in the center of our circle, to the prompt, “what are you noticing?” Particpants spoke up: “Spider webs.” “Brown.” “Not as much smell as I thought there would be.” “Holy shit!” We had arrived at the compost yard.
Digging into the heavy, shaggy cone, steam seeped, then billowed up, engulfing us in a rich humidity and surprisingly mild aroma. As we dug, Steffen and Rachel Schneider shared about compost and its role on the farm from a biodynamic farming perspective. On a biodynamic farm, or in any healthy system, “it’s important to reconnect the parts to the whole and to connect the whole to itself.” Composting transforms organic scraps, bedded pack, chipped trees, and manure- one could say ‘outputs’ of the farm- into “black gold,” a unique and essential material that keeps fertility on the farm and brings the end results of cows eating grass, harvested grain straw and processed vegetables, back to the source of those life cycles. Perhaps ‘holy shit’ is compost’s best descriptor.
When we had dug a deep pocket, we placed the tee shirt into the center of the pile and covered it up again. We wondered if much would be left come October’s new moon.
August 31, 2019: Fresh, adult XL organic, fair-trade, cotton tee shirt about to be covered into the compost pile.
October 26, 2019: After two months in a compost pile, all that remains of an adult XL, white cotton tee shirt are the hemming and bits of stained fabric. Black-brown crumbs of compost stick to the looping synthetic threads.
Remains from a shirt buried in the newly seeded cover crop field (left) and the remains of the shirt buried in the compost pile (right).
From the compost yard, we wandered over to the locust grove in one of the dairy herd’s pastures. As we walked, we tuned our attention to movement around us. This time of year, the pasture and grove were nursery to a group of calves and cow moms, who seemed to be enjoying some rest-time when we arrived. But not everything was sleepy and still. As was brought up in our sharing circle, when we made the opportunity and paid attention, there was a lot we could observe coming and go, movement happening all around, all sizes and places: many kinds of flies buzzing, each with their own particular zuzzing way, spiders waiting, grasses streaming, flower heads wildly bobbing, chicken feathers fluffing, butterflies lilting…
Harriet, a nurse cow, pauses on her way to the locust trees, where the calves had just awoken, ready for milky snack time.
It was difficult to dig here. A well-knit mat of grass roots tangled with soil and many stones, egg-sized and smaller. One walker observed of digging the hole, “it sounds different, already”. The moisture of the compost pile was absent here in the pasture earth, perhaps living mostly within the plants and bellies of the cows, until the next rain. One person placed the tee down and several helped cover it again with handfuls of soil, patting down the snug tufts of turf.
Two months later, the chickens had moved to another part of the pasture and it seemed duller without the group of calves and nurse cows. Though nurse cows Harriet and Pearl were absent, their horns were echoed in the kaleidoscopic mare’s tails exploding across the sky. The nine inches of rain that had fallen through September and October had helped along lush leaf growth, and the soil retained a moisture and darker color, while earthworms- “rainworms” in German- were caught up now and then, fat and long in the tangled roots we lifted from the earth. Somewhere in the two months, the flag was lost and the tee had decomposed enough to make it hard to find by digging through the small area of pasture. It would have been fun to see the tee, but the ‘taste’ of the soil, the qualities of the grass and presence of various farm beings had plenty to tell us.
Five soil samples collected along with the remains of the shirts. In a circle, we read aloud the sensory words we collected through our ‘soil tasting’, in many ways, like a poem offered to the land.
Lessons of Lost and Found
The sun was climbing and the air warming. We walked across the pasture, blue chicory blooming, to the stream crossing: a slatted wooden footbridge, striding through a thicket of breezy young willows. We ducked under the low branches of recently planted sycamores and dug another scrape in the pebbly ground for the young teen tee alongside the running water. It came up in our sharing circles that grief can come up, sometimes unbidden, unexpected, resented, difficult- especially in a group setting. Some wondered about “planting” the tees versus “burying” tees. We may “bury” for safekeeping, cleansing, hiding. When we were ‘burying’ a shirt one participant felt brief moment of panic for her own living family. Some experienced a connection to the lives of their own ancestors and to the lives of the people and animals who had lived in that particular place through time. Another was reminded of the hands and lives of the people who had grown the cotton, run the looms, cut and sewn the cloth; of just how many people work in agricultural and textiles globally. Here at the stream, we also lost the shirt. We had assumed there would be less transformation of the cotton in the pebbly ‘soil’ of the stream bank. We also thought it would be very likely that in one of the big rains of the summer, the tee would get swept away. We discussed how to keep track of what’s happening in important places- how could we better mark the spot? Stronger materials, plantings, stories, daily walking rituals might do the work. One participant had the piece of the puzzle: his own daily walks told him of a beaver dam upstream that lasted almost the entire summer and early fall, until the last few weeks when the water breached the dam and washed out the bridge where we were now standing. It felt odd to have been oblivious to such a dramatic event.
At our next stop, once we encountered the newly sown cover crop seeds in the vegetable field and the full grown ‘solar mix’ crop including sunflowers and buckwheat, and recovered the last two fabric remains, it became easier to feel like were were “planting” the tee shirts and to appreciate the capability of the soil web to translate tees into food and seeds into plants. When does metaphor become manifest; and material change our minds?
Cotton fabric entangled with soil and pea roots, exhumed two months after being planted along with a mix of cover crop seeds.
Nature and Culture Repair on our Farms
In the feedback loop of nature and culture, farms have inflicted and sustained a lot of damage. But hidden behind the habit of industrial farming is the widely forgotten capacity of farms to be well and to do good. These tours of the invisible farm offer an opportunity to tune into our senses and notice the more-than-human beings in their own rights.
Jade, a farm apprentice, arranges the 260 cow horns into a spiral. Filled with the manure of lactating cows, they are buried and sit through the winter until they are ready in the spring. Participants helped fill horns and sensed the material differences in the manure going in and the finished, transformed, composted material that is mixed with rainwater and sprayed on the fields.
Rachel Schneider holds two soils dug up in August- one from the newly seeded field and one from the drive strip in permanent grass, just 2 feet to the side.
Whether digging and sensing the soil, watching a cover crop of sunflower bloom, seeking out and sitting with a native plant going to seed in the pollinator garden and beetle banks, or holding a cow horn and filling its cup with the stuff soil is made of, these Soil Saturday walks allowed many of us to re-member: to regain our limbs, our breath, our nervous systems, and to gather as individuals and become members of a group by being together, walking and sharing. In remembering, we find a place in the web of life for our own humanity. Of course, without wider repair to the nature and culture that holds our everyday lives, it is easy to forget again. It’s okay. The rhythms of farm life run in cycles and we can tune back in any time.
Cover crop seeds planted in August transform into lush stems and leaves by September. How do seeds remember to become plants?
