What if....

...Agriculture was never meant to just grow food for us?

What if agriculture was never meant to just grow food for us?

What if through four thousand years of rolling colonization and cultural theft the ritual practices of agriculture were stripped of their spiritual potency and cultural significance?

What if the first Palaeocene agriculturalists were acting out a ritual spell to grow not just food, but to grow ‘culture’?

What if what we call horticulture or agriculture was actually a divine gift, and not a curse as the ‘good book’ has led us to believe?

A miraculous gift that not only feeds us but was meant to create a culture of caretakers!

What if mysterious forces gave us these sacred tools of agriculture to help us weak little humans through lean times on the land, and to expand our population (of caretakers) in times of plenty?

What if agriculture was never about taming or exploiting Her and giving us civilization, as we see it now, but rather about caring for Her and saving Her wild places and working with her as our numbers grew?

Intensive agriculture meant not only would everyone always have food, it also meant we didn’t need to take as much from the wild.

What if those acts like making a furrow or hole and planting seed, or grafting and pruning trees were in fact rituals that enacted sacred agreements between humans and the Urth?

Keep in mind these now secular rituals are essentially how all our food is produced, how our fruit, grains and vegetables are still grown.

What if ‘culture’ (social structures, spiritual orientation…) itself mysteriously grows from these ‘seed’ rituals of sustenance?

And what if by ignoring the agreements and changing the rituals (for more production), we’ve unintentionally changed the spells

that create culture, in ways that no sane person could be proud of?

In E. F Schumacher’s (President of the UK soil association for something like fifty years) book “Small is Beautiful” he makes the observation that any cultures modality of subsistence, it’s agriculture, perfectly reflects that civilizations cultural constructs and treatment of its people, and nature at large. Agriculture both informs and is informed by the culture. As the words themselves indicate culture is inside of agriculture, and agriculture is an extension of culture.

What if the formation of culture more is mysterious and akin to how we work with the Earth agriculturally than we can imagine. As an other example think about fermentation ‘cultures’ like mead, bread or Kefir as a ritual metaphor. Until very recently these foods and drinks were seen as divine gifts, co-created by people and the ‘spirits’ through highly ritualised ceremonies.

They had to be carefully done and gently handled because success depended on being able to host unseen ’spirits’, (we now call Yeast or bacteria.) With ferments it’s clear to see where science and spirituality can be in agreement. They have a different set of descriptors but are walking the same road. Now we have to do the same with thing with our agricultural practices, our GMO monocultures, which are now casting a spell to create a totalitarian culture.

The larger thesis here is if we go back to paleolithic/mesolithic modalities of agriculture, honouring the original agreements, could a sustainable culture grow from it as it once did?

This is a very different and more magical way of thinking about social change. Planting seeds for a better future and growing change, like a grafted tree, from the roots up. This change doesn’t start at the top and work down like government, it starts in your own backyard!

What would an agriculture that follows the original agreements, the Palaeolithic practices look like?

Fortunately we still have living examples of these agreements which are held by indigenous cultures, that still practise the old ways and rituals for their subsistence. We also have extensive archeological records that point to the similar practices in pre-christian Europe and in many other places around the globe like Asia, Middle East, Mediterranean, North Africa and the America’s. These indigenous ways are what I’ve based my personal gardening practices on for the last thirty years and what I teach.

Here is a more specific list of practices and how they relate to cultural traits.

Our agriculture is extremely large scale, requires few people but massive energy and technology inputs. These characteristics relate to the patriarchal, top-down controlling hierarchy we live in.

We think we have the right to control everything in the natural order (and to exploit it as much as possible); from the soil biota, to water, to the genetics of the plant, to controlling pollination by using European bees as pollinators…. These modern fields, gardens or orchard areas are meant to work in relative isolation from the rest of the ecology, and are seen as completely and exclusively as our domain. No other plant animal or insect is allowed (with a few exceptions).

Indigenous plantings are smaller scale, have extremely low input only using manual labour, and work with the natural order in almost every way, including; planting ancestral seeds; moving gardens before the land is exhausted, and working with the spirits of the land and weather, co-creating directly with the Ecology.

The practice of planting in monoculture came about from Roman colonization. Planting had to be simplified because they were making slaves grow the new Roman crops to feed the ongoing war machine.

Indigenous gardens (as seen in traditional Mayan milpas) are poly-cultural, often containing anywhere from twenty to over a hundred plant species. Annuals, perennials, domestic and wild plants are fostered all together for food and medicine in the garden. As with other indigenous cultures there is a much more horizontal and fluid cultural structure.

Modern agriculture plants in straight lines, and alters the landscape to do so. This practice relates back to using a plough and draft animals, where stopping and starting or turning, making curves or angles to fit the land is difficult if not impossible. So the exploitation, and its costs (40 acres of pasture) are built right into the culture. This ultimately led to the industrial era where yoking a huge majority of the population into production lines is necessary.

Indigenous plantings done by hand are often in spiral groupings, like with the three sisters on mounds, emulating the cosmic order. Or the plantings are in irregular patches that fit the microclimates of the existing landscape and soil. Indigenous culture is not seen as an isolated utopia, but rather is formed with the same cosmic and ecological deliberations to keep the culture connected to the land and sky.

Modern agriculture uses huge inputs in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the cost of the machinery and petroleum.

Indigenous agriculture seldom used(s) any form of animal manure (as they didn’t keep domestic ungulates), and had few other inputs, working with the natural fertility of the land. If measured in calories of energy; input against what is harvested or taken out, a person working the land with a stick or hoe is a hundred times more efficient than using draft animals (that you have to clear land and grow food for), and a thousand times more efficient than using machines and modern hydrocarbon inputs.

Historically, the people or cultures that have grown monocultural crops are generally monotheistic, and tend to be very controlling and have strict behavioural rules, and social hierarchies reflecting their growing practices.

The people who work the land in Indigenous ways tend(ed) to be polytheistic animists and or Goddess oriented cultures, who cherish diversity and inclusiveness. These cultures tend to discourage controlling behaviours, seldom ‘telling’ anyone to do anything, nor do they respond well to being ‘told’ what to do.

They also comparatively have very little in the way of top-down governance and even fewer ‘laws’ or rules.

Clearly, if we were all indigenous animists, as we once were, the world would be a very different place, as it once was.

Animism recognizes the spirit within everything and honours its place. So any ‘taking’ or ‘destructive’ action toward plants or anything in the ecology would be viewed with great dismay.

Even making a new path or clearing for an animists involves not just a huge amount of physical work but spiritual work to counter the wake of destruction. These labours are both part of the price to be paid by us in the original agricultural agreements, that we have shrugged off and forgotten. Now we don’t do the physical work or feel any remorse from our destructive acts to the Earth.

With an animist understanding we could never have even thought of making steel machines, highways, skyscrapers or rocket-ships because the cost would simply be too much. More than we could ever pay back in many lifetimes. When the ancients did make monuments they were collective dedications to the ancestors and spirits of fecundity, for the whole community and not for personal wealth or comfort.