Bags of Fertilizer

I wonder how many bags of fertilizer are spread on a single field to grow corn. In the United States alone we grow corn on 90 million acres. How many 50-pound bags of synthetic fertilizers are emptied out and fed to the soil?

I’m obsessed with this thinking, it’s formed a loop in my mind, like a morning dream that repeats over and over. And while one detail changes, nothing significant enough shifts to allow an escape. The parking ticket can’t be found, the man is still in the bar drinking, how to get out of the parking lot and to safety.

After World War II ended, the companies who made nerve gas and poisons reprogrammed their products, calling them fertilizers. Then, they persuasively changed the way of farming all over the world, poisoning the earth instead of the enemy, while in the long term, harming both humans, insects, and soil. How did we arrive at this idea that we need to manufacture synthetic materials to help the earth grow plants? The microorganisms in the soil are all part of a complex soil web:  the bacteria, the fungal populations, the earthworms, the nematodes, the mycelia are the real farmers.

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

In Beirut this week, thousands of tons of fertilizer exploded and took the lives of 150 people, injured thousands, destroying the homes of hundreds of thousands of others. A country that was already suffering from oppression, injustice, war and corruption is in chaos. Bags of fertilizer, or shall I say explosives, from Batumi, Georgia destined for Mozambique, one of the ten poorest countries on the planet, has shaken this country to its core.

Fertilizer bags are usually cheap paper just thick enough to hold the weight. But if they lay around and attract moisture, the paper decays, the bags leak, and moving them becomes a huge mess. Hazardous waste. Human trash needing to be gotten rid of.  We’re good at manufacturing materials that harm the planet, that have a long shelf life, that don’t disappear even after hundreds of years.

We are caught in a loop of our own creation. How are we going to get out of our destructive cycle?  Surely the farmers in Mozambique know how to grow food naturally. Buying expensive synthetic fertilizers is not going to solve their country’s many problems. It’s not solving the problems in our country. For example, in Kansas, where 90 percent of the state is agricultural land, one in five people go hungry. Kansas isn’t growing food, it grows feed for cattle, ethanol for fuel, and high fructose corn syrup, while a large percent of its population starves.

We have to envision a new model. We have to collectively re-envision the world we want to pass on to the unborn. We live on the planet, we need to eat food grown in its soil, and drink water from its underground rivers. Here is where we need to begin.

We need to believe that nature works and there is a natural way to live in accord with nature. The system is designed to work. We need to trust. And we need to make changes. Almost 70% of agricultural land on the earth is used to grow feed for animals we eat. And this meat provides a much smaller percent of calories to the world’s population than plant-based crops. If we are to provide food for the growing number of people on the planet, farming needs to be a journey in which we relate to the land and all its creatures. 

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

The good news is that a United Nations report in 2014 stated that 80% of the world’s food is still produced by family farms. The future is not in industrial agriculture, but in intelligent small-scale farming. I heard a surprising statistic while listening to a podcast between John Kempf and Zach Bush, two modern agronomists—70% of our food comes from farms that are five acres or less. This statistic gives me hope. But for the people suffering in Lebanon, an outpouring of aid is what is needed. A few of the organizations you can donate to are:

The United Nation’s World Food Program
Unicef
Impact Lebanon
Project Hope

And remember to support your local farms!

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

Note: Artist Julia Tricca was a farmer at Old Frog Pond Farm during her high school and two college summers. She graduated this spring and shared her final art project with me. Julia will be installing a new sculpture at the farm this fall. We’re all proud of you, Julia!

What's the Buzz?

Our bees had a productive spring, and our beekeeper, Don Rota, presented us with seven pounds of ravishing, golden, lucid, liquid gold. On Thursday afternoon, we bottled the honey in six- and twelve-ounce glass jars in the farmhouse kitchen.

But what exactly is honey? When bees gather nectar from the flowers, they receive a jolt of energy in the form of carbohydrates (sugars) to keep them going in the hot sun from flower to flower, but the excess is stored in their nectar stomachs. When they return to the hive, they regurgitate the nectar and offer it to another bee. As this nectar is passed from bee to bee, an enzyme in the bees’ stomachs begins the process of turning it into honey. Then the consolidated nectar is put into cells in the hive. Fanning completes the water evaporation process and what’s left is honey. Bees make honey so they can survive the winter.

Bees have been on the planet for 120,000,000 years. A bee was found preserved in amber from Myanmar dating back 100,000,000 years. Despite the longevity of the species, individual worker bees, all female, only live a month in the summer. It’s hard work to be a worker bee, but then they do have the glory of visiting flower after flower, and gorging on lovely nectar. In winter, however, their physiology changes and worker bees live up to three months.

Drones, the male bees, live longer, do no work, just laze around the hive waiting for a queen to be born. After her birth, the virgin makes a maiden voyage outside the hive, sending out a pheromone to attract the opposite sex. The drones mate with the nubile queen and then die soon after, completely spent after such their lovemaking. She stores this lifetime supply of sperm to use as needed, controlling fertilization of her eggs by releasing sperm as the egg passes through her oviduct. Come fall, any drones still hanging around are booted out of the hive, and left to starve to death.

Queens can live for five years. If the hive’s queen is old or ill, the new queen may fight her and possibly take over. Sometimes worker bees bring a new queen into a hive because it is large and needs a queen so part of the hive can swarm. It’s the decision of the workers to feed royal jelly to larvae bees to make new queens. The worker bees democratically decide about everything that happens in the hive. Depending on the size of the cells the worker bees create, the queen lays unfertilized eggs to become drones (male) or fertilized ones to become worker bees (female).

Some people consider bees to be mammals. They view the hive as an animal without its ‘skin bag.’ The different kinds of bees are like cells in a body with different functions. The ‘swarm’ is the offspring. I like this notion because the hive becomes a larger system, one creature, one body, one ecosystem. 

In summer the hive may grow to over 30,000 bees, but in the winter they drop down to a thousand bees as they conserve resources to survive the winter. The life of the honey bee is one deep and abiding concern for their food supply. Surely this is why they have survived on the planet for so long. In comparison, our ancestors have occupied the planet for only six million years, and we have become dangerously complacent about our food supply.

Humans have a long desired honey. A drawing on a rock face in Spain dating back to 6000 BCE shows two people climbing a rope ladder to get to a hive high up on a flat rock wall. Another drawing found in Zimbabwe from 8000 BCE shows the wavy lines of natural honeycomb with a person approaching it holding some kind of smoker. People in remote areas of Nepal and Macedonia still ‘hunt’ for hives, sometimes climbing steep rock faces to gather prized honey. In Romania, bee hive trucks follow the flowering from the South to the North, parking for a few weeks off highways, giving their bees lots of wild forage. I imagine the colors and shapes help the bees return to their own hives.

Bee hive truck near Vitri, Romania, 2016

The Egyptians described keeping bees for the medicinal properties of the honey in paintings and writing. They used honey for all sorts of sicknesses from diabetes to contraception. There are even paintings depicting ritual circumcisions with the wound being dressed with honey. Today we know there are high levels of antimicrobial activity in raw honey.

Beekeepers are dedicated to their hives. They also are enthusiastic to share information and help each other. Melissa Ljosa used to keep two top bar hives here until she moved to Vermont a few months ago.

Don Rota is the one without the bee suit. Melissa (left), is checking a top bar hive. We miss her!

Don now takes care of ten hives at Old Frog Pond Farm. He loves to keep them here because we are committed to organic practices, and the farm grows healthy forage all season long for the bees. Don told me one spoon of honey takes twelve bees their entire lives to gather. I think of them each morning with my dollop of honey in my morning tea.

A few of Don’s more colorful hives at the farm. Yellow for the sun and blue for the dome above.

And what’s the buzz? As the bee beats its wings, we hear the vibration as buzzing. But the flower feels the buzzing as movement. Pollen may fall off the flower and onto the bee’s body. Some is carried to the next flower the bee visits; the rest is stashed in the bee’s pollen baskets on its hind legs. It will travel back to the hive for the nurse workers who stay in the hive to feed the young.

Pollen Baskets are Full

There’s so much more I could write about bees—but perhaps best to stop here and invite you to stop by our farm stand for a taste of local, raw honey. Its truest secrets are only conveyed by the spoonful on the tongue.

Raw honey for sale at our self-serve farm stand.

Weeds and Other Gifts

A Small Piece of Land, Watercolor LH, 2020

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”                        —Abraham Lincoln

When I am anxious or out of balance, which is often these days, I turn to weeding. I can always find weeds on the farm. The weeds are tenacious; they want to grow. One definition of a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place. We have lots of plants growing in the wrong places. Most of them need to be dug up. On the farm ‘to do’ list, weeding sits in almost every category: blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, asparagus, around the apples, pears, and peach trees, the hoop house, and the kitchen garden.

Sitting on the ground, along the rows of blueberries, as if at a banquet table, each of us brings our favorite utensil. Ariel’s preference is the triangular Korean hoe, Holly prefers a claw, and I use a pink-handled small trowel.

Holly weeding young blueberry bushes on a cold and windy day.

We yank, we pull, we dig, leveraging our tools into thick mats of grasses, and tug some more. Grass clumps lift out—these get a hearty shake sending the worms and the soil attached to the roots back into the row, while whatever is left finds new life in the compost pile.

Frederic G. Cooper, 1917, U.S. Food Administration

My mind is occupied by thoughts of farms and food. The largest apple grower in our town depends on two migrant workers, but he has yet to hear from the embassy about their arrival. The commercial vegetable market in California doesn’t know how they will manage not only because of their dependence on migrant workers, but the chain of supply, the connective system, the trucks, the transport, the weigh stations, the middle places where all the packaging happens, are facing their own challenges. Farmers in Florida are plowing under vegetables, and in the Midwest, dairies are dumping fresh milk, though stores limit the amount customers can buy. Small farms feel the pressure, too. The restaurant that bought fifty pounds of greens a week is now closed, and many farmer’s markets have been canceled.

Abraham Lincoln promoted the cultivation of land after the bloodshed of the Civil War. During and at the end of World War II, the American Victory Garden movement created sustainability and health. England had their own movement, Dig for Victory. Maybe the restoration of the world’s psyche after times of great suffering was in part due to the return of our connection to the soil, to food. Maybe, it is a time to build more resiliency into our communities. Food is basic to our needs along with water, clean air, and shelter. We need to return to the basics and provide this for all people on the planet. Let’s give up fighting for causes and beliefs that only divide us. Let’s rally around what truly supports us.

I think about these things, and obviously oversimplify them, while I grab a small clump of grass, and ease out its long root system, pure white and thick, from among the blueberry’s dark, thin roots. Pull too hard and the root snaps. Only by teasing gently but firmly, can I coax out a foot-length root, with grass nodules every few inches, to release its hold. Of course, some weeds will quickly regrow, we don’t get them all, but if we don’t weed, the mass of growth under the blueberry plants will rob the bushes of nutrients. We weed in order to ease the competition for resources, to encourage a bountiful crop.  

Weeding is not glamorous work and It doesn’t save lives, but it offers a connection to something trustworthy that helps keep me balanced. I know not everyone has access to weeds, but even in a city, we can break for a moment, see a bit of earth or touch a tree, and know this is all part of us. Amid slicing an apple, or washing salad greens, we can pause within our anxiety, and connect to this gift from the earth, the ground that sustains us. 

This morning’s surprise: blown by the wind from a pile of old materials outside my studio.

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Tibet Impressions

Our three-generational quartet, aged twenty-nine to ninety-two, received four visas for Tibet at our airport Beijing hotel less than twenty-four hours before our scheduled flight to Lhasa. We could hardly believe it, we were going to Tibet after so many hurdles.

In front of the Potala Palace, built in the 7th century and then rebuilt in the 17th century, this masterpiece of Tibetan architecture, was home to the Dalai Lamas and Tibetan government from the 17th century until 1959 when the present Dalai Lama escaped to India.

Bill, my stepfather, and my daughter, Ariel, walking down the wet and slippery slope on the backside of the Potala Palace.

Our travels through Tibet climbed up and down—stairs and mountains, from thrilling sights to chilling realities. The first three shocks upon arrival:

1. Three fighter jets sat near the terminal at the Lhasa airport. Military presence we would learn is everywhere.

2. Our guide pointed to the two recording devices on the dashboard of the vehicle we would be traveling in for the next ten days. We needed to always be aware that what we were saying, not only in the car, but anywhere, might be overheard and reported.

3. Tibetans cannot have passports. No Tibetan person can leave the country.

Blase, my partner, and I send prayers by way of the smoke from burning juniper at a high pass above Lhasa.

Lhasa is seemingly undergoing more construction than any other city in the world. In downtown Lhasa, the snowcapped mountains are partially obscured by high-rise apartment buildings. The construction is primarily for the Chinese who are moving into Tibet. The population is changing. Tibet now has an estimated population of about 6 million Tibetans and 7.5 million Chinese settlers. The apartments are affordable only if you have a government job.

For five days, we stayed in the old part of Lhasa from where we could walk to monasteries, temples, nunneries, noodle shops, teahouses, and explore the narrow streets of old Tibet. We joined the devoted pilgrims walking clockwise around the Barkhor Circuit, Lhasa’s most important pilgrimage Kora.

The Barkhor Kora, an everyday happening.

This walk takes you around the Jokhang, one of Tibet’s oldest temples. Pilgrims make the circuit multiple times, some walk, some do full body bows. Others stop at the plaza in front of the Jokhang, roll out their prostration mat, and do a hundred, or a thousand full prostrations, sliding out on their gloved hands or using wooden blocks strapped to their hands, to extend their arms fully out beyond their head, belly flat on the ground.

Before sunrise prostrations.

Inside the darkness of the old Jokhang pilgrims are moving always in a clockwise direction, making offerings to colorful thangkas and sculptures of Buddhas, deities, demons, and kings. Butter lamps burn, silver bowls of water glisten, cans of beer (some protectors favor beer) along with fruit, money, and yak butter decorations are packed into every nook and cranny. Gongs and drums, wood and cloth, bright colors, meditation cushions piled with burgundy meditation robes, people jostling, hurrying, determined to complete their rounds, Tibetan Buddhism is practiced here by Tibetans everyday.

We arrived at Sera monastery during celebrations for their six-hundred year anniversary. The road was closed. The Police were limiting the number of people. Following our guide, we started walking to see if there was another way to enter and saw people slipping through a hole in a fence and running across a yak field. We followed at the fastest clip we could manage on day one at 12,000 feet, avoiding the entrance road and entering further up towards the monastery. Our timing worked. Another ten minutes and this alternate route would have been closed. The monastery was filled with pilgrims from all over Tibet in colorful traditional clothing, mala beads in hand, making offerings and chanting, We followed a group of people to see the Thangka unveiled for the occasion, about three hundred feet in length and hanging over a slap of flat rock, covered in plastic because of the rain.

Monasteries are traditionally built into the hillsides, and above many of them are rocky paths leading to caves where monks, and Dalai Lamas, and yogis like Milarepa and Guru Rinpoche once meditated for years at a time.

During the cultural revolution ninety-five percent of the monasteries were destroyed, but now the Central Government is rebuilding them, though limiting the number of monks who can live at each one. Tibetan families historically sent at least one son to become a monk, but today, you need to be approved by the Central Government. Monasteries were the principal sites of resistance—the government wants to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. The Police have a convincing presence at the large monasteries, the head Abbot is appointed by the Central Government. I imagine even in a monastery one must be careful with one’s opinions.

After visiting Gangden Monastery, a complex with some fifty buildings that was first destroyed during the 1959 Tibetan Uprising and then reduced to rubble during the 1966-67 Cultural Revolution, the brutality of the deaths kept me awake all night weeping. Throughout the trip I worried that we could be arrested for our sympathy for the Tibetans or that we would put our guide at risk.

Nuns at morning service in the main assembly hall at the Nunnery in Chimpuk.

In spite of decades of persecution, the Tibetan people are among the most spiritually devoted people I have encountered. There was never a monastery, nunnery, or temple without pilgrims. In the streets, it seemed like everyone carried their mala beads, even while shopping. I wondered if it was prayer or a devotional peaceful resistance? We visited a small monastery in Lhasa that was completely packed with worshipers. People covered every inch of the courtyard and chapels.

We visited Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, climbing the hill nearby to have a view of its mandala pattern and take in the fields and bare mountains.

The hill above Samye Monastery.

We learned the local houses around Samye will soon be razed to the ground to clean up the area around the monastery. These local people will be given housing in several apartment buildings. How will they remain farmers and herders? Where will the cows return to at night?

An ancient world is changing. Roads are being built throughout the country. In the river valleys the Central Government has planted hundreds of thousands of trees. Power comes from gigantic solar arrays and large hydro dams that India and other countries downstream are concerned will affect their water supply. The Chinese say that Tibet has been part of China for centuries—the Tibetans and much of the Western world disagree. Tibet is rich in natural resources and strategically important to China: its square footage is larger than the United States. But our questions of why the Chinese are so determined to control Tibet, what are they really doing there, and what are their intentions for the Tibetan people remained unanswered.

 “Are there Tibetan poets and writers today?” I asked our guide. He didn’t answer.

A visit to a painting workshop.

Monks still yak butter offerings as well as talk on their cell phones.

A view inside the monastery kitchen.

It was a trip that will take more time for me to realize how I have been affected. It was a trip to a third-world country with its close-to-the-earth living, inside a first-world-country with its money and high-rise bureaucracy. A trip made special because I shared it with my daughter, husband, and step-father.

Our wonderful guide with Blase and Ariel.

The memory of family members who died during and after the Chinese invasion is still very much alive for the present generation of Tibetans. They consider Tibet their country, though their language is no longer taught in the public schools. Many Tibetans are concerned about passing their culture onto their children.

The Tibetans we met were honored that Bill would make such an arduous journey at his age.

The trip was an electrical jolt reminding us how fortunate we are to live with so much personal freedom.

How do we offer care to this country whose people have been sending prayers for peace from their once remote kingdom to the entire world for centuries? One thing we can do is learn what is happening today—Free Tibet has up-to-date information.

And send our love to all those in the world who are not free, who are living under totalitarian regimes or imprisoned for their views or choices. Let the prayers fly!