Master of the Spade

It seems that it would be good in one's lifetime to master something. This might well be a universal longing and yet gone terribly awry in our modern Babylonian times. We are content to have the appearance of mastering something rather than mastery itself. The best example I can think of is the great number of men (seems to always be men) who hike up their pants, sniff like Barney Fife, and announce "Yeah, I'm a licensed pilot... did I mention I was a licensed pilot." Now these men have no prospects of ever owning an airplane nor being hired by anyone else to fly theirs. They've saved up their pennies and bought lessons and aviation fuel a mirror in front of which to practice swaggering ... "Yeah, ... me and the other flyboys..." But I'm talking about really mastering something, not buying an extension of our private parts.

So I set about to genuinely master something ... the shovel!

In another blog I outlined how we arrived at the present oil based economy. Let me weave just such a thread about our food, only I will have to go much farther into the past. Wheat is a convenient food in that it has a good balance of protein and carbs and preserves well. It's drawback is that its high protein content requires nitrogen rich ground. As wheat culture spread from its beginnings several millenia ago in Iraq to Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa, it left behind it the land it had exhausted and eroded.

The story is told that this is how western civilization came about. The Greeks overcropped wheat to such an extent that they permanently eroded away the top soil and so were forced to find crops that would grow on the subsoil: grapes and olives. Lack of grain forced them into making pottery to store the wine and oil, ships to transport it, a writing system and common language for trading in it, and eventually the development of coinage.

At any rate, just after the advance of wheat culture was halted by running into the Atlantic Ocean and thus not able to just move on to the next plot of fertile ground, famines began to be common. Great monocrops of wheat (or anything for that matter) are an invitation to catastrophe and catastrophe has never been inclined to turn down an invitation. Until the 1500's in Europe there was a severe famine one year in seven.

This changed with the age of exploration which brought new fields to be plowed for wheat in the Americas, Africa, India, Australia and introduced new foods into Europe from those continents. Famine was not nearly so common after that time. So wheat culture made its way across every temperate climate with new ground falling under the plow every year .... until suddenly one year there was no more arable land to claim. The year agrominists generally establish as when there was no more land that could be effecively plowed is 1960.

Since we could not just plow more and more land as we had done for 500 years, it was about that time that the specter of periodic and devastating famine reared its head once more. To address this we brought about the so called "Green Revolution." Since we couldn't plant more and more land, we set about to make the land we had produce more and more crops. This was done through plant breeding and hybridization, chemical fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming. All of these are interdependent. The new breeds of plants are only high yielding if plied with chemical fertilizers, over watered by irrigation, and mechanically tended and harvested.

Over the past half centruy, fueled with a supply of fossil fuel treated as if it were endless, crop yields doubled, then doubled again. Alas we have come to an obsticle. You can't just keep doubling crop yields on the same ground forever. Even with damming off many of the world's major rivers so that they no longer flow to the sea at all (such as the Colorado in the US), applying vast amounts of chemical salts to the ground, and mechanically tilling the ground until several feet of depth have eroded away, we have just kept up with the food demands of an ever increasing population. But we have no more water to exploit, are near to depleting the top soil ... and if that don't chuck the biscuits in the creek ... we're running out of oil.

It does not bode well.

The only weapon we have to combat the looming famine is the spade. When I first began my earnest apprenticeship to the Art of the Spade more than thirty years go, there was real hope for the world ... if only they'd listened. They didn't. Now I am not sure there's time.

So like a few vestigal Jedi warriors in reclusion on the fringes of things, I follow the Way fo the Spade. I've got a few years on me now, and yet I manage to turn 16,000 sq ft of ground every year (usually twice in a year) with only a spade I got at the Mart for $3.50.

A spade like this cost very little in the way of resources to produce, it might last 100 years or more, and it has managed to feed a large family for years. Moreover it only just disturbs the soil enough to mix in the organic material and foil the weeds. It does not churn the soil as does plowing and harrowing and it doesn't create a hardpan. Hand tended soil, in practice, does not erode. Quite the contrary, the soil of this garden was hard blue clay seventeen years ago and after that many years of organic amendments, it is soft and pliable enough for an aging Master to work it for some time to come.

The Way of the Spade does not lend itself to swaggering. The crows and beetles and nettles are the only witnesses to such mastery.