Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans. Corn. Soybeans.

And did I mention corn?

We drove last week from Austin to Gambier, Ohio, to deliver our youngest to college, and then back to Austin. (Empty nest. Delight. Depression.) That this trip was my maiden voyage into the American Midwest was just one of many notable firsts. At about the time we crossed the line from Kentucky to Ohio, it began: fields of corn and soybeans on either side of the road stretching to the horizon, interrupted only occasionally by copses of oaks or by farm houses and barns or by grain storage units. We started to joke about it by the time we got to Gambier, smack in the middle of Ohio. After installing our daughter in her new dorm room, we turned our noses west and drove from Gambier to Clarksville, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, in one endless, relentless, repetitive, mind- and butt-numbing 600-mile day. The joking stopped at about mile 100.

The landscape wasn’t unpleasant by any means: the apparently unlimited fecundity of the earth was impressive, as was the system that ordered such abundance. The scope of it! And we didn’t even make it into Iowa or Nebraska! No wonder the people behind this astonishing productivity are proud of it.

But there’s another way to see that landscape, and those afflicted with the double vision I wrote about in an earlier post might see the abundance as a tumor, or at least a spreading rash. The economic, cultural, and environmental damage imposed by the efficiencies of agribusiness have been well documented, most popularly by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, along with films like Food, Inc. and Fresh. The idea that inexpensive food can be grown only through the use of annuals and monocultures, efficiencies of scale, and heavy pesticide use has been seriously challenged by farmers like Joel Salatin and Will Allen. Along with the steady depletion of topsoil, the off-farm effects of conventional agriculture are also well documented, from depletion of local biodiversity to the rapidly growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

After spending the night in Clarksville, we drove through another scene of apparent abundance en route to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Arkansas, of course, is the home of Tyson Foods, which began as a chicken wholesaler in 1935. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I love chickens for reasons that aren’t entirely rational. Last year, we moved our chickens at Madroño from the nasty old chicken coop to the Chicken Palace and added substantially to their numbers. The Chicken Palace, built by Robert Selement, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, could probably withstand a nuclear attack and has already foiled a whole lot of skunks, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, and owls.

One of the great pleasures of a Madroño morning is to let the ladies (one of whom is named Fred, for reasons not entirely clear to us) out of the Palace and into the adjoining pasture and then to throw them the previous night’s vegetable scraps. From the moment they see me coming down the hill, they begin an almost-intelligible running commentary that steadily increases in volume and intensity. (“Can you believe she wears boots with her nightgown?” “God, I hope there’s no fennel in that scrap bowl.” “Hasn’t she ever opened a gate before? What’s taking her so long?”) Anticipation is so focused that by the time I open the door to the yard, and then the gate from the yard to the pasture, there’s a charge in the air that surely rivals the first seconds of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. No, really. Those chickens are moving. And I’m laughing. And very happy to gather (and sell) their marigold-yolked eggs. (For the reflections of a true chickenista, be sure to check out the highly readable blog posts of Carol Ann Sayle, who owns and operates Austin’s wonderful Boggy Creek Farm along with her husband Larry Butler. Carol Ann’s chicken blogs are worthy of a BBC comedy of manners with period costumes.)

Given my tender feelings toward our chickens, seeing a Tyson truck rolling down an Arkansas highway carrying its cargo of tightly packed chicken cages made me tense. When we got to Eureka Springs, with its funky old boutiques and gingerbread houses, we found a restaurant that served local produce and whose waitress told us that she was a “universal soul.” I relaxed a little, enough to start chatting with the friendly couple sitting next to us. As it turned out, the husband was a Tyson chicken farmer. The 16-year-old boy he had hired for the summer was worthless, he said, but the 14-year-old was great. He didn’t have an attitude yet, and never complained about the hours he had to spend each day picking up dead chickens.

I got tense again.

How can something that seems so clearly wrong to one person seem perfectly acceptable to another? How can I have arrived at my advanced age and still be surprised that this is so? Even though we all technically speak the same language—the Midwestern corn and soybean farmers, the Arkansas chicken farmer, and I—there seems to be an unbridgeable perceptual gulf between us.< When I’m feeling this kind of tension, I become almost ridiculously grateful for things like the National Geographic website, which describes the work of young scientists with big ideas that “show a potential for future breakthroughs.” Among the chosen for 2010—and they are a fascinating group—is an agroecologist named Jerry Glover who works for The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His field of study, so to speak, is perennial grains, wheat in particular. Unlike annual crops, which need to be replanted every year, drain nutrients from the soil, and allow erosion when they die, perennial crops can be “harvested year after year and maintain excellent soil quality.” Glover doesn’t preach (at least not on the National Geographic website), and he doesn’t point fingers at conventional farmers and say: Bad, bad, bad. He points to the evidence in the soils he works with, which speaks for itself—and in the same dialect as the farmers whose practices I find so confounding.

Seeing the scope of those Midwestern cornfields is sobering. Thinking about the money, time, and corporate muscle they represent is daunting. Reading about the salmonella outbreak in factory farm-produced eggs is appalling. When you buy from your local farmers and humane producers, you’re allying yourself with an entity so tiny it barely stubs the giant’s toe when it gets kicked aside. But that tiny stumbling block gathers a little more heft with each kick. To mix my images, watching this process is like watching a big pot of water boil: just when you think your stove is busted or your water’s dead, you start seeing those tiny bubbles appear and get perceptibly more emphatic—especially when then are young scientists like Jerry Glover working next to the giant and turning up the heat. And if those of us who eat keep asking for it, the giant will eventually be able to put sweet organic (or at least less devastating) corn into the pot and feed the less-eroded world with it. Sounds like a fairy tale, I know, but maybe it’s more of a parable—a story with an unexpected and revelatory twist at the end. Whatever it is, just think of the possible chicken commentary on giants in the kitchen. I’ll bet their footwear choices are even more entertaining than mine.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Martin: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

As we approach the end of the year (and decade), we thought a look back at what we’ve accomplished and a look at what lies ahead for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment might be of interest.

This year was a significant one for us. In 2009 we both turned fifty (or, as Heather put it, celebrated our joint centennial); in addition, we experienced both great personal loss and also tremendous excitement and optimism about Madroño Ranch.

We spent much of the year networking—sort of a new thing for a couple of reclusive nerds like us. In February, we attended the Alliance for Artists Communities’ conference for emerging programs in Charlotte NC. Meeting and talking to Caitlin Strokosch and Russ Smith of the Alliance, and the other attendees, was a galvanizing experience—so many bright, creative people! So many great ideas! So many things to think about!

The Alliance’s annual conference in New Orleans in November was perhaps even more inspiring. Not only did we reconnect with some of the friends we’d made at the Charlotte gathering, we met many more fascinating and brilliant people, some of whose ideas we plan to rip off shamelessly.

But so many questions remain to be answered…. For example, while we highly esteem the visual arts and those who work in them, we’ve been assuming we’d only accept writers as residents at Madroño, on the theory that they require less in the way of infrastructure (i.e., kilns, darkrooms, printing presses, etc.). Now, however, we wonder if we shouldn’t rethink that decision. What if we were to invite, say, sculptors and environmental artists to come out and create place-specific, perhaps ephemeral, works?

And what about size? We’ve agreed that, at least initially, we should restrict ourselves to two or three residents at a time. But should we aspire to more? If so, how many more? Six? Eight? Ten? And how long should they stay? Two weeks? Four weeks? Longer?

The answers to these questions will obviously drive many other basic decisions, such as the center’s physical layout. Our working idea is to provide a central facility with sleeping, cooking/dining, and library facilities, etc., and smaller “satellite” structures (sheds, cabins, pods, whatever) which would serve as secluded places for the residents to work in solitude and quiet.

At first, we assumed we’d build this central facility from scratch, tricking it out with all kinds of cutting-edge off-the-grid technology. Now, however, we’re wondering if, at least initially, we can repurpose the ranch’s existing main house, which is, alas, very much on the grid; doing so would require some structural modifications but would still be significantly cheaper than building from scratch. (Presumably we’d still need to build the satellite workplaces.)

Another fundamental issue to be resolved is what the center’s governance structure should be. A nonprofit? LLC? Foundation? We’ve been talking to various leaders in the nonprofit and small business sectors, in hopes of figuring this out, but at this point it’s still an open question.

And then there’s the whole food thing. (Those of you who know us know that food is never far from our thoughts.) Madroño Ranch is teeming with sources of protein—our herd of twenty-seven bison, our trusty chickens, uncounted feral hogs and deer—and we hope to begin distributing some of it in some fashion. Our first bison harvest will take place in the spring, though we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the meat: give it away? Sell it to restaurants in Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Bandera? And the meat is only one part of a larger scheme. What if we go into small-scale farming—say, pears, peaches, and apples—and set up a CSA to distribute the produce, with the proceeds (if any) helping support the residency program?

And—here’s an idea we heard in New Orleans and really liked—what if we set up a culinary residency as well, whereby a chef who wants some non-restaurant experience comes out to the ranch and helps develop a truly local cuisine, using only foods grown on the ranch or nearby, while cooking for the other residents?

And how about engaging the local community in some meaningful fashion? Could we offer classes or workshops on the ranch? Invite the ag students at the local high school out to gain experience in organic farming?

Last month we met with a couple of graphic designers to talk about getting a logo to use on business cards, a website, brochures, and letterhead—and (why not?) also on T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, etc. But even that turns out to be more complicated than we’d thought. For one thing, do we need a logo, or two (one for the residency and one for the farming operation)? Or more? Until we figure out how all these ideas and moving parts fit together, coming up with a visual “brand” will have to wait.

Sigh. Sometimes the tasks still facing us seem overwhelming. But we hope to keep forging ahead, slowly if not always surely. Perhaps our first and most tangible accomplishment to date was starting this blog, which we conceived as a way to spread the word about Madroño Ranch and keep our friends and other interested parties abreast of our progress. The fact that you’re reading it now suggests that—what do you know!—it’s working.

Obviously, we still have to do a lot more thinking about all of this. But on the theory that many heads are more likely to produce wisdom than one or two, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on these and other issues.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Martin: Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

This summer we attended a screening of Fresh, a documentary that highlights the efficiency and productivity of organic farming and the casual cruelty and hidden costs of industrial agriculture. Along with about a hundred others, we watched the film under the pecan trees at Boggy Creek Farm while eating locally sourced vegetarian picnic dinners provided by the Alamo Drafthouse, one of the screening’s cosponsors. (The others were Edible Austin and our friend Steve Kinney’s Front Porch Project.)

This kind of setting induces feelings of satisfaction that can all too easily morph into self-righteousness, and there’s no question that this event was a classic case of preaching to the choir. One of Boggy Creek’s neighbors’ front yards frequently sports a sign demanding housing for the homeless, not food for the rich. There’s no question that the momentum behind the local/sustainable food movement has been slowed by the argument that it’s a movement for the dainty tastes of the economic elite.

Fresh delivers a powerful counterpunch—maybe even a KO—in the person and work of Will Allen, whose nonprofit Growing Power Inc. operates two acres of greenhouses in working-class Milwaukee, producing mountains of affordable, healthy food, and trains countless inner-city residents to convert empty lots into thriving organic food centers.

The son of a sharecropper, Allen believes with every fiber of his 6’7″ body that healthy food is primarily a social justice issue: income should have no bearing on access to quality food. He himself is a happy consumer of doughnuts and doesn’t condemn those who have no alternative to KFC, but his passion for fresh food is altering the urban landscape and the food choices of thousands of people who might otherwise face a future of obesity and diabetes.

We’re no experts on food pricing, but we would guess that Growing Power enjoys a pricing “advantage” over other organic farmers because of grant money and a sizable volunteer labor pool. Agribusiness is able to control costs through government subsidies. What if the playing field on which organic and industrial agriculture compete were level? If organics were subsidized? If the costs of the ecological devastation caused by agribusiness monocultures, manure cesspools, and the health issues resulting from fast foods were factored into the cost of “cheap” food?

Before the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, many considered conservation a hobby for the wealthy. Carson made clear the connection between environmental issues and civil rights. We hope that people like Will Allen and movies like Fresh will do the same for the local/sustainable food movement.

After the screening at Boggy Creek, Edible Austin sold copies of the movie on DVD, along with licensing agreements allowing purchasers to show it to groups of up to twenty people—neighborhood gatherings, church groups, book clubs, etc. Through this bottom-up, grass-roots, guerilla marketing campaign, the producers hope to spread the word far beyond those hundred or so predominantly white, relatively wealthy faces under the trees. We bought two copies, one for Robert and one for us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Meat Book
Martin: Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead