The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (9 page)

It can take as long as five hundred to a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil. Granted, some farmers are proving that topsoil can be built much faster, as quickly as an inch of loam every five years, says Gardener’s Supply Company founder Will Rapp. This can be done through high-carbon compost, broken down by microbes; through vermiculture; and through the coverage of bare soil—using mulch, cover crops, and plant-crowding.

Pre-Colombian natives in Brazil’s notoriously infertile Amazonia created rich, black soils up to two meters thick that we call
terra preta
, or black earth, containing high levels of charcoal. Similarly, near Mexico City the Chinampa system created rectangular islands in shallow lakes, using lake sediment, mud, and aquatic vegetation. From these, farmers in canoes were able to draw four to six harvests a year. This birthed the Aztec empire and, according to anthropologists, proved itself the most productive form of agriculture ever. Then there are the organic farmers of China, Korea, and Japan who have reaped spectacular harvests from plots of land farmed for four thousand years, described in F. H. King’s book,
Farmers of Forty Centuries.

When I was twenty-two years old I went off to study organic agriculture with a man named Augustus Pembroke Thomson, although he went by A. P. A 74-year-old farmer in a straw hat and with kindness written all over his clean-shaven face, he grew apples at Golden Acres Orchard in Front Royal, Virginia. In June, just after I graduated from college, I read an interview with Mr. Thomson in
Mother Earth News
and wrote to him immediately: “My friend and I would like to pick apples for you.” Mr. Thomson replied that it was not a bearing year, his expected crop was small, and he had just the space for two earth-loving stewards of the soil.

My friend, Irwin, and I arrived to a little trailer next to woods and beneath a huge windmill—eager to pick, eager to learn, eager to be surrounded by fruit. Early the first morning we were fitted with fifteen-foot ladders and pick-sacks, buckets which hung from the neck and strapped across the back, which held about a half bushel and filled quickly. First you pick apples you can reach from the ground, Mr. Thomson told us, then position your ladder and pick as you climb. The ladder needs to rest on a V-shaped limb for support. When the sack is full, you climb down the ladder, unhook the tote’s canvas bottom, and gently roll the apples into a big wooden bin. Up and down, around and around, until the tree is done. “Don’t worry about anything on the ground,” said Mr. Thomson. “We’ll pick up the windfall later to make apple cider vinegar.”

“Our first day picking is wearily over,” I wrote on September 23, 1984. “Our backs and shoulders are sore, face sunburned, arms scratched. We picked long-stemmed Golden Delicious, the hardest to come off and the easiest to bruise. We filled four bins—that’s eighty bushels, about minimum wage.”

Within a couple of days I was taught to drive a tractor. “Why are women led to believe it’s beyond their capabilities?” I wrote. Mr. Thomson appeared at the trailer early one morning and loaned me three books to read. “Then we’ll talk farming,” he said.

Forty years before, Golden Acres was a deeply eroded and unproductive family farm. Mr. Thomson was in the Navy, in Pearl Harbor, and he happened upon the farming classic
Pleasant Valley
by Louis Bromfield. The book made sense and Mr. Thomson began to read everything he could get his hands on about organic agriculture. He began corresponding with Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist considered the father of organic gardening and author of
The Soil and Health
; and J. I. Rodale, founder of Rodale Press, publisher of
Organic Farming and Gardening
and
Prevention
magazines, and popularizer of the word
organic
. In an interview for the
Washington Post Magazine
in 1985, Mr. Thomson said, “You must understand: it was a rare thing in those days. I was fortunate to meet up with the real pioneers.”

Mr. Thomson returned to his family home full of new knowledge about organic agriculture and began to nurse its land back to health. He spread chicken manure and planted green manure crops, bromegrass and sweet clover; he tilled them in, sweetening the soil. In the third year he planted apple trees. When I was there he was still doing regular soil tests in a tiny, cluttered laboratory and adding colloidal phosphate, calcium, and other nutrients yearly. He sprayed Norwegian seaweed and fish emulsions during the growing season. He spread cattle manure. He hand-raised Red Wiggler earthworms.

Irwin and I looped through Red and Golden Delicious, Winesap, and heavy-hanging York, one to four bins daily. We befriended the few other workers, including Mrs. Thomson, who put in long hours grading and packing. One of the pickers was a guy from Washington State named Bob, a wanderer who smoked the thinnest joints I’ve ever seen. He was twenty-seven. He said that nothing mattered much because the earth was not reality anyway.

Even when I was dog-tired, the thirty-five-acre orchard never lost its majesty. The grass was full of blooming vetch, alfalfa, red clover, and Queen Anne’s lace. The trees, in orderly rows, were spangled with colorful apples like ornaments. We paused to eat countless apples without peeling or washing them, shooing away bees. “It is an indescribable pleasure to walk out and pick breakfast,” I wrote.

I was a sorry picker. Mostly I wanted to climb an apple tree with a book and read all day. I wanted to gather pokeberries down by the track and squeeze them into ink. But that month in the Shenandoah, I received a crash course in how to grow food right.

Mr. Thomson didn’t call his style of farming organic. “For a long time,” he wrote in a declaration of principles that he shared with me, “I have felt that the terms ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ were being abused so we adopted a term we could define and defend if need be; that being ‘biologically grown.’” Chemicals treat symptoms of poorly managed soil, but the most productive, healthiest way to grow food is to love the soil. There are as many living organisms in a single cubic inch of healthy soil as there are human beings on the planet, he said. It’s an integrated, pulsating, living, breathing system.

Thomson was a philosopher as much as anything. He believed in mimicking nature. “When you sit by a flower, don’t be as a person, be as a flower,” he said prophetically. “When you sit by a tree, don’t be a person, be a tree; and when you do this millions of signs are given you. It is a communion, not a communication; nature speaks in thousands of tongues but not in language.”

He was fanatical about remineralizing degraded soil with minerals like calcium and magnesium, and trace minerals like boron, chromium, iron, and zinc. He believed that this mimicked the action of glaciers eroding mountains and building soil and that the minerals fed microorganisms in a biological and restorative matrix, multiplying the health-giving aspects of his crop.

“All life in its broadest concept exists in a state of dynamic tension of the opposites, an unbelievable exquisite balance and harmony. There must be balance in the cell, the soil, and throughout the universe.” To this end, Mr. Thomson was also channeling what he called cosmic energy into Golden Acres. In the orchard, he had erected two metaphysical energy receptors—metal towers holding aloft small chambers of copper tubing filled with minerals gathered from around the world—based on ancient Irish towers and the research of Dr. Philip Callahan, then of the University of Florida. A small sign read
ORTHOMOLECULAR MULTIWAVE OSCILLATOR
. The towers elevated a pair of antennae that worked like the old crystal radio receivers. The minerals vibrated on the same frequency as the apple trees, bringing added energy. Christian monks in Ireland between the fifth and seventh centuries built ancient stone silos that contained metallic ore that could collect and resonate the sun’s radio energy, believed to increase the harvest.

Kooky as they sounded, Mr. Thomson’s odd theories seemed proven in every perfectly shaped, officially nutritious, and absolutely delicious apple that came in from the sun.

At night I read the farming literature supplied by Mr. Thomson. I listened to audiotapes of Dr. Carey Reams’s
Theory of Biological Ionization
and Philip Callahan’s work with insects and paramagnetism. I took notes and made plans.

I was abhorred by all I learned about chemicals. One day Mr. Thomson’s son told me that I should see the groundhogs at the next place, which was not organic. “I’ve seen them with no hair on their bodies, stunted legs,” he said. “It’s awful.” The younger Thomson echoed his father in blaming the deformities on the pesticide endrin, which causes leukemia and was used to eradicate mice in orchards. He told me that apples in chemical orchards were sprayed many times with malathion and paraquat. The ground was heavily herbicided and artificially fertilized. For commercial apple juice, the apples were cursorily rinsed, then additives, like aluminum sulfate to dissolve the unsightly pectin, were used in bottling. “The end product is not apple juice but a gallon of poison with a mild apple flavor,” he said.

One day Mr. Thomson told me about a chemical peddler who wanted to know why Thomson bothered with organic farming. Mr. Thomson replied, “I want the comfort of knowing that if a little child picks up one of my apples without washing it first, he won’t be in danger of being poisoned.” He cursed apples “grown with chemicals carrying the skull and crossbones, immersed in coal-tar-derived skin preservatives, sprayed with fungicide-impregnated, petroleum-derived wax and probably containing systemic poisons administered to the tree roots.”

Mr. Thomson also shared his vegetable garden with us—carrots as big as wine bottles, tomatoes, butternut squash. Once, coming out with a handful of huge beets, we met Mr. Thomson going in. “Phosphate and aragonite,” he smiled. “That’s what does it.”

“I just want to teach people what I know,” Mr. Thomson said, “and inspire them to try new ideas themselves.” What I learned from Mr. Thomson is that the Agribusiness Total Chemical Age, as he called it, begets pollution, soil degradation, health hazards, loss of biodiversity, erosion of nutrition, and pauperization of rural communities. It took me many years, and a lot of twists and turns, but I’m finally building some soil.

You must understand: I was fortunate to meet up with one of the real pioneers.

SOON AFTER I MOVED
to Sycamore, I began to package seeds in tiny manila envelopes labeled
HOEDOWN ORGANIC FARM
and ship them here and there, a dollar a pack. By the time I was twenty-four, in 1986, I was exhibiting heirlooms and novelty plant seeds at the Florida Folk Festival, an extravaganza held every Memorial Day weekend on the banks of the
Suwannee River, at Stephen Foster State Park in White Springs.

Old-timers would hover lovingly over my table, peering into baby food jars of wild coral bean, the only truly red seed I know; droplets of tobacco seeds; knots of brown cotton. They would lightly shake vials of Velvet bean, four o’clocks, Red okra, Moon and Stars watermelon, Soldier bean. I remember one slight Cracker gentleman in a cuffed shirt and a ball cap. “Bless my soul,” he said. “This is Conch pea.”

“You know it?” I asked.

“Oh, hell, I’ve planted a million of these. We grew ’em when I was a boy. It lies close to the ground when it grows, like a sweet potato vine. Haven’t seen them in years.”

“I never heard of it until recently,” I said. “I saw seed advertised in the
Florida Market Bulletin
and I bought some and grew it. I can’t find it in any of the catalogs.

“It’s a real old breed,” the gentleman said, adjusting the waist of his pants. “It used to be very popular.”

“Did you hear where it came from?”

“No.”

“It was supposedly found on a Florida beach with debris from a shipwreck.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He bought a couple of packs.

Before long an older woman was slipping her reading glasses on her nose. “We used to grow this Cowhorn okra when I was a girl,” she said. “It’s the one with the long pods, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened to it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It got discontinued for some reason. It’s a wonderful okra as far as I’m concerned.”

Or these Jacob’s Cattle beans. Or German Pink tomatoes. “I’m so glad to see you again,” said a heavy man, a retired farmer with pink cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses. “I only came to the festival this year because I thought you might be here.” He bent to the seeds like a scientist, working his way through the envelopes and jars, as if they restored something unnamable to him or as if to handle them was a right that he had been denied most of his life.

If that Sycamore existence had been my mythology and if it had been feasible, I might still be in north Florida in an ever-more-microbial, leafy, and rich garden, experimenting and developing. But I was called away. One day while I was mulching our Southern apple trees next to the road, a man stopped for directions. He was a dozen years my senior, handsome and interested in homesteading. We began to date and then live together. I was married and had given birth to a baby boy by the summer of 1988.