Greetings Friends and Neighbors, The human labors here at the Farm consist largely of moving Sheep and Cows from one paddock to another. Before domestication and fences, this work—keeping the herds of hungry ruminants bunched together and always on the move—was the responsibility of those with gleaming incisors. The top predators. And the ground was the beneficiary. Think Bison herds thousands strong thundering across the Prairie, building legendary meters-deep topsoil. The herd acts like a paintbrush in the hands of a master landscape painter. In simplified terms, they use their remarkably-adapted mouths, tongues and digestive systems to transform the standing Grasses into urine and manure, with which they paint the ground. You could say that their job is to feed the ground back to itself. They beget a greening of riotous fecundity. Tragically, after just a few hundred years under the lash of the plow hitched to an economy of extraction, the remarkable capacity of those Prairie soils to sustain life has largely been reduced to rumor, to legend.
Feeding the Ground
Feeding the Ground
Feeding the Ground
Greetings Friends and Neighbors, The human labors here at the Farm consist largely of moving Sheep and Cows from one paddock to another. Before domestication and fences, this work—keeping the herds of hungry ruminants bunched together and always on the move—was the responsibility of those with gleaming incisors. The top predators. And the ground was the beneficiary. Think Bison herds thousands strong thundering across the Prairie, building legendary meters-deep topsoil. The herd acts like a paintbrush in the hands of a master landscape painter. In simplified terms, they use their remarkably-adapted mouths, tongues and digestive systems to transform the standing Grasses into urine and manure, with which they paint the ground. You could say that their job is to feed the ground back to itself. They beget a greening of riotous fecundity. Tragically, after just a few hundred years under the lash of the plow hitched to an economy of extraction, the remarkable capacity of those Prairie soils to sustain life has largely been reduced to rumor, to legend.