The Feed Store

I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility.

How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man?

Our trees are unlikely to make a measurable difference in global carbon dioxide levels, and they will not do anything to hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but according to Wendell Berry, these facts have nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not our decision to plant trees is, as Kerstin declared, good.

Thinking about ecology from a national perspective, my house with standard R-19 walls and R40 roof, standard windows, and so on, is a “problem.” From a local perspective, though, there’s a solution that’s far simpler than the ones proposed by national standards for green building: Get up from my library chair and throw another log in the wood stove.

Gardening is wholly mundane, but in a way that complements our pursuit of holiness and spirituality because it keeps us properly focused and disposed.

Moore insists that his book about farming is not exclusively about rural places: “the point is not even about farming . . . most of what I’ve said in this book is equally applicable to work in the office, factory, classroom, or home." Moore argues that in each of these locations, the human experience begins and ends with gratitude.

For farming to exist sustainably, even from an economic perspective, it must be re-imagined.

The maypop shows, however, that localism need not mean confining oneself to an austere and moralistic diet. If I cannot grow bananas and mangoes in the Ozarks, I can nonetheless harvest maypops.

This is a description of small-town life and the help you can expect to receive from people not conditioned to give strangers the finger.

Better dumb guineas than no guineas at all.