This is the first issue of a four-part newsletter on Farmland, Farming and Community. The title of this 4-part newsletter is inspired by the words etched at the back of a hooded sweater that was gifted to me by Crystie Kisler, co-founder of Finnriver Cidery with the husband Keith and partner Eric Jorgensen in 2008. These are the words: “For the love of land, the art of farming and the spirit of community.” Because the context of this newsletter is rather long, I decided to divide into two sections. This is the first of those two sections. I hope that after reading this Part 1, you’ll find the storyline interesting enough to return for the remaining part 2 to 4.
On a cloudy morning in April 2022, I boarded Alaska Airlines from Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) to Portland International Airport (PDX)). I was going to conduct ‘Dialogues of Solidarities’ with three colleagues and friends in the rural towns of Wallowa, Oregon and Chimacum and Skagit Island, both in Washington state.
Those ‘Dialogues of Solidarities’ formed part of my therapy and slow recovery from a stroke that hit me by surprise in January 2020. It’s true what they say, “the proverbial happens when you least expect it.”
Throughout the four- and half-hour flight, I couldn’t stop thinking about these words—worth re-quoting—from Margaret Mitchell’s award-winning (1936) novel, Gone with the Wind.
“Do you stand there, Scarlett O’Hara, and tell me that Tara—that land—doesn’t amount to anything? Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything. For it is the only thing that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! It is only thing worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for—worth dyin’ for.”
For context, these words were uttered in anger by Gerald O’Hara, an Irish immigrant and plantation owner in the USA’s southern state of Georgia, to his daughter, Scarlett O’Hara, upon realizing the cavalier manner in which she treated his proffered gift of Tara ownership. Tara was the name of a fictional plantation which grew and sold cotton as a cash crop.
As I thought of Gerald O’Hara’s question in the context of South Africa’s land reform programme—which after being “mothered by myopia, fathered by compromise, and delivered by coercion, was ‘stillborn” in 1994, I was reminded of what Wendell Berry wrote in his 2002 article, The Agrarian Standard:
“If you have no land, you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no freedom, no life. If we remember this, we know that all economies begin to lie as soon as they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been landless know that the land is invaluable; it is WORTH EVERYTHING.
Pre-agricultural humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the animals. It is a fearful thing to be without a “territory.” Whatever the market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is worth what food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is worth WHAT LIFE IS WORTH.
This perception moved the settlers from the Old World into the New. Most of our [European] ancestors (The ‘European’ emphasis is mine. Berry used ‘American’) came here because they knew what it was to be landless; to be landless was to be threatened by want and also by enslavement. Coming here, they bore the ancestral memory of serfdom. Under feudalism, the few who owned the land owned also, by an inescapable political logic, the people who worked the land.”
As I pondered the ongoing dialogue in my head about the land question in South Africa, I was further reminded of what American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure, Ken Elton Kesey, once said.
When Kesey was asked by one interviewer,
“Are these two things connected?” almost without any second thoughts, he quickly responded, “Of course they’re connected.” Then, he asked the interviewer, “What two things?”
Exactly! “What two things?” because EVERYTHING is CONNECTED.
That’s when it dawned on me. That’s why I was travelling to eastern Oregon, the Olympic Peninsula and the Skagit Delta, to seek the knowledge and wisdom of colleagues who began to notice the hidden connections through their own ‘learning through doing’ attitudes and lived experiences.
Upon my arrival at PDX, Spencer Beebe, my host and old-time friend, was already waiting at the airport parking lot. Together with his favourite dog, Bobcat, we drove to his home in the city. Along the way, we deliberated on some of the anguished questions that I intended to ask cattle farmer and grass-fed beef producer, Cory Carman of Carman Ranch Direct, Crystie Kisler and Kevin Morse, founder and CEO of Cairnspring Mills in Burlington, Washington.
What is farmland for? How can we use land to promote a regenerative agriculture driven “just ecological transition[1]” of a regional food economy?
Can agroecological approach to farming and rural development square the circle for a long term E3 (EQUITY, ECONOMY, and ENVIRONMENT) agenda, regional food security and placemaking[2]? What locally controlled resources can rural communities leverage to foster their own economic democracy[3], prosperity[4], and to build community-owned stock of the eight capitals of wealth creation[5]?
- [1] Just transition as a principle, a process and a practice. The principle is that equity, economy and environment should coexist. The process is to promote economic democracy that inspires the practice of a regenerative rather than an extractive economy.
- [2] According to MIT Urban Studies, “Placemaking is the deliberate shaping of an environment to facilitate social interaction and improve a community’s quality of life.” [Source: Changing Places: A Placemakers’ Field-Guide by Mike Freedman]
- [3] Economic democracy is “a system of governance that puts capital and resources under democratic control and ownership.” It cannot happen without the participation of the people most impacted by the current economic paradigm. [Source: MIT Urban Studies]
- [4] Prosperity, Michael Fairbanks said “is the ability of an individual, group, or nation to provide shelter, nutrition, and other material goods that enable people to live a good life, according to their own definition. Prosperity helps to create the space in peoples’ hearts and minds so that, unfettered by the everyday concern of the material goods they require to survive, they might develop a healthy emotional and spiritual life, according to their preferences. Prosperity can only be achieved when a nation’s leadership sets its own vision and follows a self-determined path.”
- [5] Individual Capital: The existing stock of skills, understanding, physical health and mental wellness in a region’s people.
- Intellectual Capital: The existing stock of knowledge, resourcefulness, creativity and innovation in a region’s people, institutions, organizations, and sectors.
- Social Capital: The existing stock of trust, relationships, and networks in a region’s population.
- Cultural Capital: The existing stock of traditions, customs, ways of doing, and world views in a region’s population.
- Natural Capital: The existing stock of natural resources—for example, water, land, air, plants, and animals—in a region’s places.
- Built Capital: The existing stock of constructed infrastructure—for example, buildings, sewer systems, broadband, roads—in a region’s places.
- Political Capital: The existing stock of goodwill, influence and power that people, organizations and institutions in the region can exercise in decision-making.
- Financial Capital: The existing stock of monetary resources.
What are some of the regenerative agriculture inspired practical solutions to climate change? How can rural communities everywhere build their own homegrown “no regrets opportunities” to improve their resilience? Understanding of course that “Imizi ayifani. Ifana ngeentlanti zodwa.” [Every place is different from the next]. What are the hidden connections between land, farming and community and how do we make them visible?
If, to change our one world, we need more connections and bridging networks, more meaningful conversations and more communities of practice, how do we become adept at finding the hidden connections given the fact that humanity is wired and socialized to see the dividing lines better than the connecting ones?
Before long, we were at Spencer’s home in the city, making fire and enjoying a long fireside chat, reminiscing about our tour of the Eastern Cape in 2012, searching for sheep wool farmers to supply Patagonia in the US.
Early the next morning, we left Portland for Eastern Oregon. We drove along the picturesque Columbia River Gorge towards the town of Boardman. Along the way, we slowed down to appreciate the regrowth after the destructive Eagle Creek wildfire Fire in Oregon, with smaller spot-fires in Washington state that was started, on September 2, 2017, by a 15-year-old boy igniting fireworks during a burn ban.
From there, we made a brief stop where Spencer caught his first Falcon, on the high cliffs above the river. Next, we spotted from a distance, the Hanford Site (also known as Site W), the now decommissioned nuclear production complex operated of the United States federal government. After a quiet drive through the wheat fields of Eastern Oregon, we arrived at the Wildhorse Resort and Casino in the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation for breakfast with Himéeqis Káa’awn Antone Minthorn, elder and former Chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Pendleton, OR.
After gaining a few nuggets of wisdom from Himéeqis Káa’awn, we drove around the corner for a brief tour of the Tamástslikt (Tah-MAHST-slickt) Cultural Institute, with its Executive Director, Roberta “Bobbie” Conner. The work of the Institute is “to perpetuate the knowledge and histories of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla people.” The storytelling did not disappoint.
After an hour and forty-five-minute drive from Pendleton, almost 9 hours since we left Portland, we finally arrived in the town of Wallowa. We found Cory Carman and her farm manager waiting for us in a paddock where a mixed herd of Angus and Herefords were leisurely grazing.
Among America West ranchers, Cory Carman is a very unusual one. She is very pretty. She could have easily become a successful model. She is a super smart graduate of Stanford University. As far as I am concerned, she is a walking definition of resilience: the capacity to effectively influence and adapt to change.
Of all the career options available to her, she consciously chose to be a rancher, a male dominated field in America because she wanted to protect her family’s legacy of ranching. If you ever wanted any convincing about the importance of owning farming real estate; there you have it. She left behind a good paying job in Washington DC to become a rancher and a successful agribusiness owner.
Cory Carman is a fourth-generation rancher in Wallowa County, Oregon. Along with others in her community, Cory uses her cattle as a tool to restore soil health.
Cory and I first met in November 2011 on an airstrip near her ranch on the foothills of the snow-capped Wallowa Mountains in eastern Oregon. My friend and life coach Spencer Beebe, Founding Trustee of Salmon Nation, Founder of Ecotrust and Co-founder of Conservation International, flew me there on his small C-182 airplane to visit their family cottage in Joseph Creek, homeland of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce native Americans of Wallowa.
Cory came to the airstrip, on a rather very chilly afternoon, with her beautiful family, bearing nature’s gifts: colourful chicken eggs (it was the first time I saw blue-green eggs), pork and beef sausages and steaks. I am deliberately putting the beef steaks last because finally I could add a human face to the tender and lightly marbled beef steaks, I had tasted in Portland the previous month.
In November 2011, I was invited for a five-week fellowship at Ecotrust. On the afternoon of my arrival in Portland, I was lying in bed at an aptly named Spencer Hotel downtown, trying to shake the jet lag from 28 hours of flying through different time zones, reading Cory Carman’s profile in the Portland Monthly magazine (I encourage you to read it).
Coming from South Africa, where livestock farming is a male testosterone driven industry, I couldn’t believe my eyes and what I was reading. To believe it, I wanted to see and touch the woman in the profile. In his book, Rules of Thumb, author and Mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Alan Webber, writes, “You don’t know if you don’t go.” That’s why two weeks later, I was standing on an airstrip near the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve shaking Cory Carman’s hand.
In her own words, here’s a rich vein of reflection and thought from Cory Carman about land and community:
Wendell Berry said, “Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.”
I live in a beautiful place among incredible farmers who are deeply committed to the land and community. We represent a growing group who take very seriously our responsibility to grow food in a regenerative way. And we are fortunate to live in a time when many consumers understand the importance of the conscious eating Wendell Berry is talking about.
But this hasn’t always been the case. My grandmother, who grew up on our ranch, saw incredible changes in how food is raised and how agriculture is practiced over the course of her 93 years.
When my grandmother was a child, people spent nearly half of their income on food and about one in five people were farmers. Today, we spend about 6 percent of our income on food and less than 2 percent of the population farms. And while she had smoked her own bacon and gathered her own eggs, Grandma saw the ability to buy these items at the grocery store as progress.
When I moved back to the ranch, eventually bringing the pigs and chickens back too, she saw that leaving those animals behind also meant a loss of taste and quality. But there was something else we lost along the way: the essential infrastructure farmers, ranchers, and fishermen need to get food to eaters outside of volatile commodity markets many of us still depend on.
At Carman Ranch, we can’t grow our business until we have access to more freezer and cooler space, and we won’t become more profitable until we have value-added processing, which ensures that we can sell every cut in the animal for a good price.
Sustainable, regenerative models of agriculture only succeed only if we can break through the current barriers to infrastructure, restore the flow of dollars back to the people dedicated to staying on the land, and support their wisdom.
Here is Cory’s confirmation that Sustainable Beef is Possible.
After two days of poking in the nooks and crannies of the towns of Wallowa, Evans Lostine, Enterprise and Joseph, and visiting with Dan Probert—owner of the Lightning Bolt Ranch with his wife Suzy Probert—who raises cattle under a conservation easements on Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, to supply Carman Ranch Direct programme, we returned to Portland, satisfied that my intended mission was accomplished: Noticing and revealing the hidden connections between farmland, farming and community.
Thank you for reading, liking, commenting, restacking and sharing this dialogue with your friends. You’re helping to spread fresh thinking to create abundance, prosperity and resilience. Before you leave, I have a question for you: After listening to Cory Carman, what hidden connections of your own (if any) do you notice between farmland, farming and community?
