Excerpted from:
A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil
By Sharon Astyk & Aaron Newton

Fifty miles outside of a big city might not seem like all that far, but my parents live in a convincingly rural redneck of the woods, about that distance from Charlotte. The last few miles of the journey to their home was only paved a few years ago. This is a part of North Carolina where farming is still alive and well- if largely industrialized- with cropland interspersed between logging clear cuts and commuter cul-de-sac communities servicing the big city some distance away. Still, there are long stretches of country road where the view is just what you might expect from the rolling foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It is a beautiful country.

My step father grew up not too far away and after years of moving around , he and my mother settled again in a home we built as a family. The house is 60 feet from the Yadkin River, just a day’s upstream paddle from Uwharrie National Forrest. Theirs is a home in the woods.

A few years back my parents bought an additional three acres up the street from their address. It was mostly cleared and purchased as an investment. Still unsure as to when and if they would build a house for sale on this parcel, my step father decided to farm it. “I’m going to buy a tractor!,” he informed me one sunny summer afternoon. He never quite got to mentioning growing food, but I gathered that was the gist of it.

My step father has a history of renovating old contraptions. He was planning to buy an old tractor, a classic red Massey Ferguson long associated with the small to medium sized farms throughout our area, and when he talked about “fixing it up,” I knew he meant completely restoring the old red iron horse.

When I would go to visit he would have parts and pieces laid out all over the garage floor and he would be full of explanations about who he had lined up to repaint the old body parts or retool some of the key piece of his mechanized agricultural puzzle. He was plainly delighted by the challenge.

For Christmas that year I offered him a gift certificate to Seeds of Change, one of my favorite seed companies, so he could purchase his spring seeds , and a copy of John Jeavon’s Biointensive handbook, How to grow vegetables…
Jeavons’ book is about the power of small scale hand agriculture to maximize food production. It was clear that he and I were seeing his project very differently.

It’s important for me to stop and say that one my first experiences in farming was not dissimilar to my stepfather’s. I didn’t have a tractor, but had my city lot been bigger, I might have. I was born into the tractor world, and that’s how I thought about growing food. A tractor turns the soil. A tractor prepares the furrows. A person (or sometimes a tractor) plants the seed in rows. And a combination of tractor and human with hoe hold back the onslaught of unwanted weeds while water is provided by irrigation.

My first garden was in raised beds, but it was row- planted in bare soil, carrots in one bed, beans in another. Far be it from me to suggest that it is easy to overcome what we’ve been taught about late 20th century agriculture. And those messages have been part of my step-father’s life far longer than they were part of mine. Industrial agriculture has intellectually engulfed us all.
Our collective image of farming has become a field plowed by red tractors, and this restored iconic piece of farm machinery became admirable, powerful, even beautiful. It was, dare I say, parade ready.

But the tractor allowed him to turn over more square footage than was necessary. It meant a clean slate for not only the crops he grew in straight rows across more than an acre of his land but also for the weeds that inevitably dogged the garden, awakened by disturbed soil. Bugs and other pests were drawn to the large patches of single crops. The heat and the sun baked the red clay that surrounded each plant and helped to dry the soil which would shun the first of any rain as the nutrient rich clay ran off to enter into the small creek nearby. The soil held its nutrients and waited, in vein to have them restored by an input of organic matter and life of beneficial little critters in the densely populated ecosystem that is the topsoil of our world. The restoration of a vibrant web of life on many such sites still waits.

My parents grew lots of food from that garden. Subsequent years have seen a smaller effort – their lives are busy, a problem as acute for me as for them, as I type this story in the spring of 2008- inside my home instead of out in the garden.

We have arranged our lives in such a way that the idea of spending more time in the garden is a dream that requires the dismantling of other preconceived notions; ideas about how we could live differently require us to rewrite the meeting of our needs and indeed the very definition of need.

But I also believe my parents stopped gardening in part because of the time it took to cultivate such a large tract of land in a way that worked against. the helping hand of nature. Americans think big – we take on too much and to approach such undertakings in familiar ways. But too much and too close a fixation on our tools can keep us from realizing the potential of others ways of accomplishing our goals. Weeds can be largely eliminated if mulch is used after planting. This helps to hold in precious moisture and to slow down the run off of rain before the earth can begin to accept the water.

Planting many different crops together and in specific combinations can help avoid offering the all-you-can-eat monocrop buffet to insects that would like to devour all that is planted. Growing cover crops specifically to hold soil, choke out weeds, and to feed the soil can help build soil fertility, add carbon (and remove it from the atmosphere) and provide the basis for a community of microorganism crucial to the long term fruitfulness of the soil.

A tractor is overkill for many small gardeners and farmers. We have to look beyond it – but we can’t do so unless we do approach our food systems with fresh eyes and a open mind. All of us can participate, even, and perhaps especially, without a tractor.