Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Corn Moon

September moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have entered the lunar cycle known as The Corn Moon in old Celtic and Native American calendars. This was the time of year when the grain that formed the basic sustenance for the community was ripening in the fields and nearly ready to harvest. Even as I write these words, I can look out the window and see rows of corn that are tall and tasseled and ready for picking. I am riding a train through California's Central Valley, an area of the country that produces a significant portion of the food eaten in America.

Once upon a time, the meaning of The Corn Moon would need no explanation. In an agrarian culture, there wouldn't be anyone who wasn't intimately aware of what was happening in the fields. Community members of all ages would be keeping a close eye on the progress of the crops -- and when the grain was ripe, they'd be ready to begin the hard work of gathering in the food that would keep them fed for another year.

But our society is no longer agrarian. Agriculture still provides the vast majority of the food we eat, but very few of us are involved in farming any longer. Most modern-day farming is so highly mechanized and industrialized that even many farmers are out-of-touch with their crops -- they no longer touch them because they no longer have to. They can hire people to drive or fly machines that perform nearly all the functions that used to be done painstakingly by hand. In most cases, it is migrant laborers who have journeyed very far from their own native fields who do what little work remains to be done a mano.

How did we get to this place? How did this transition happen? What was farming like 100 years ago? What is it really like today? How did we get from there to here and where on earth are we headed?

I have been pondering these questions more than ever since I have recently fallen in love with the fiction of Wendell Berry. While I have long known of Berry's importance as an essayist and advocate for sustainable agriculture, I've only recently found myself utterly seduced by his irresistible portrayal of life in the agrarian South.

Berry's novels, novellas, and short stories are set in the vividly imagined town of Port William, Kentucky. They span a century and a half of rural, southern life, stretching as far back in time as the Civil War and touching on every decade of American history up to the present moment. The characters in the town are from a number of different interconnected families, and the reader has the pleasure of getting to know them at many stages of their lives and in various aspects of their all-too-human relationships. I have been following their tender journeys with deepening interest.

In addition to thoroughly enjoying myself, I am learning a lot about the history of American farming. Port William is a community where people were watching what was happening in the fields, and the corn harvest was a matter of widespread interest and concern. Through his portrayal of life in Port William, Berry is able to describe and comment upon the changes that have happened in American agricultural life over the past 150 years. He is not well pleased.

One of Berry's best works is the novel Jayber Crow, told as an autobiography of Port William's barber. It is also a stirring meditation on religious doubt and faith, and a critique of America's post World War II approach to farming. Jayber Crow watches the drama that plays out on one farm and in the fortunes (or misfortunes) of one farming family. The paterfamilias is an accomplished older farmer named Athey Keith. His nemesis is his son-in-law, a youthful and arrogant would-be farmer named Troy Chatham. Berry captures the essence of the difference between the old way of farming and the new by exploring their troubled relationship. Here's a glimpse:

And so began the shift on the Keith farm from self-sufficiency and ecological integration to dependence on petroleum-based inputs and bank mortgages. While Athey used draft horses and mules to work the land -- animals with whom he had developed a deep and mutual understanding, Troy always used the latest machinery to plow and plant his fields -- pieces of equipment which always ended up as outdated junk. While Athey's farming was a careful and deliberate dance between man and nature, Troy's was an endless Sisyphean struggle to dominate it.

The shift from Athey's ways to Troy's ways on the Keith farm was a process that was gradual and piecemeal, as Troy gained control over more and more of Athey's land. After a few decades, Athey's once richly fertile soil had become devoid of nutrients and difficult to farm, and so Troy built a factory hog facility. At the end of the book, after Athey has died and Troy is more deeply in debt than ever, Troy is cutting down the forests on the property that is now his and selling them for lumber -- mining the last resource on a parcel of land that had been carefully maintained and preserved by generations of farmers. It is just a tiny glimpse of what has happened to farming in America over the past 60 years.

It is a depressing picture. But I am spending Labor Day weekend helping out on a small organic farmstead named Live Power Community Farm -- so called because they use horses and mules to pull their equipment, and are supported by the community through their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. They have spent years building the soil and developing an integrated and ecological approach to farming where everything is used to good purpose, and each aspect of nature is respected and worked with. They have an apprenticeship program and bring a number of school groups and others to the farm each year to learn about old-fashioned real farming. They are learning the dance that Athey Keith knew, and teaching it to others.

On the Corn Moon, let us remember that corn -- like everything else on Earth -- is a great gift and a precious resource. How it is grown, where it is grown, how much of it is grown, and why it is grown -- these are all matters of economic, ecological and spiritual significance. And they are a critical part of the history of this country.

You can take a tour through this history by reading Wendell Berry's books. It is an always poignant, sometimes sorrowful, often funny journey. It will leave you wiser than you were before, and deeply grateful that there are people such as Berry that are keeping the knowledge of many generations of farmers alive, and honoring them with such beautiful prose. It's a thing that will give you hope -- and corn is, of course, an enduring symbol of hope. With the aftermath of the hurricane in the South, the ongoing war in Iraq, and steadily rising oil prices, we could all use a big helping of that. I eat mine with lots of butter, a pinch of salt, and a word of thanksgiving for the farmers.