Educational Agriculture By Eliot Coleman

“Soil is the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization.” - Steven Stoll

Someday in the future, when advances in understanding have made small-scale agriculture truly financially viable, I want to recreate that famous scene in The Graduate. I want to walk up to some well-educated young person and tell them I have only one word to say – farming. But I am afraid that the ability to make a good living from farming will not be a sufficient inducement. There is another barrier. Today it is considered somehow unworthy of educated people to involve themselves in food production – to work with their hands in the soil like lesser mortals.

Modern education has been too easily swayed by the spectacular and the industrial while ignoring the fundamental and the biological. Schools and colleges spend millions to familiarize students with Internet systems in the ether above their heads, while nothing is spent to introduce them to the vital systems in the earth beneath their feet. We impress students with the spectacle of millions of stars in the heavens, but neglect to awe them with the miracle of millions of living organisms in a single teaspoon of fertile soil. We introduce them to the chemical table of elements but leave them unaware of the susceptibility of the creatures in that teaspoon to the daily chemical residues of our industrial production. How can we hope to train students to care for the planet when they are unfamiliar with the irreplaceable role of the skin of that planet in the miracle of their life?

Our educators are doing a reasonable job at explaining the intricacies of human society to students in lab and classroom, but they are neglecting to make them aware of the web of life in field and garden. If we wish to teach reverence for the earth, we need to insist that practical time spent on the soils of a farm is just as valuable in training citizens for an informed life in the 21st century as time spent studying chalk-filled blackboards in the academy's lecture halls.

Education's dismissal of agriculture's ability to teach us about life has historical background. For much of the past, for many people, farming was devoid of anything but incessant toil and illiterate neighbors. That impression of farming has persisted to the present day. But advances in biology since the 1850s (which unfortunately in the public mind have been overshadowed by the propaganda of the chemical bandwagon) have unlocked mysteries that make today's organic farming as intellectually stimulating as any other profession. The interrelated activities described by soil microbiology, nitrogen fixation, symbiotic relationships, mychorrizal associations, allelopathy, weed ecology, and systemic acquired resistance have helped contemporary farmers appreciate the intuitive brilliance of age-old practices like crop rotations, green manures, mixed stocking, and compost making.

When food production is considered a lowly activity, something for the unschooled, the result is forfeit for all – the forfeit of humanity's essential connection to the source of life. By choosing not to educate our children about soil and agriculture and food, our society in general, and more important, our institutions of higher learning, deprive today's young people of a truly valuable education. The generations to come will remain ignorant of that thin layer of fertile soil upon which their survival depends.

What better medium than a compost heap for students to come face-to-face with life, death, and the processes that keep our planet alive? If we expect today's students to find solutions to ensure the future of their world, which they will need to do, what could be better than the direct knowledge that compost – the world's best fertilizer, made for free in your back yard from kitchen and farm animal waste products – is a model for other simple and inexpensive solutions? We have a belief on our farm that if what we are doing is in any way complicated it is probably wrong, and we modify our practices accordingly. Biologically based agriculture is not only a subject. It is a teacher.

In 1800, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, wrote that although chemistry and physics could be considered as having achieved the status of sciences, agriculture remained an art. I think that is still true today. This art involves subtleties and judgment calls such as adding just enough limestone but not too much (and whether calcitic or dolomitic), finding the proper depth of tillage (if you till at all), figuring out the ideal balance of ingredients (fungal or bacterial) in the compost, knowing the optimum humification of compost for each use, managing green manures as either surface or incorporated amendments, maximizing the use of “inputs” that spring from natural processes on the farm itself, involving one's mind in all aspects of the biological world of the soil.

None of the above is dull or unskilled. Balancing these factors is fascinating, challenging, and inspiring, since skill grows with practice.

The results of an intimate, caring, and alert involvement with soil and food-growing are vigorous, healthy plants and animals, a clean environment, and the inward satisfaction of participating in a truly sustainable agriculture that can feed the human population in perpetuity.

Such work cannot continue to be considered beneath the dignity of the educated.

from http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2007/05/eliot-coleman-educational-agriculture