To Cohere & to Last

“Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.”

~Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow~

Late January on the farm—the sun low, the clouds heavy, the soil damp. I’ve got a jacket on and am hoping Emmett will waddle into our morning huddle, heave himself into my lap and warm me up. Yesterday I was roasting on the beach, but the beach is in Kihei, where I live, and the farm is at 3,300 feet of elevation, where it gets (to this Texas boy) legitimately cold. Overnight lows routinely dip into the 50s and sometimes 40s up at the farm in winter. It’s hard for the soil to dry out at these temps and with all this rainfall; roots get waterlogged, the microbes are lethargic, and due to all the clouds and shorter days, the photosynthesis with which our crops bless us in summertime is sorely reduced. Wintertime, everything slows down except two things: the oyster mushrooms and the humans. The former—being fungi and not plants—like the cool damp environment and so they can grow pretty explosively; the latter… well, I’ll grant that Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real thing, but the farm is an old-school taskmaster; she beckons us regardless. Less work in the fields just means more time for projects that have been on the back burner (hellooo rear of the barn!).

Soon enough the calendar will march into spring, cucumbers will be getting seeded then planted, flowers will begin to bloom in earnest, I’ll switch from a hot espresso to cold brew, and we’re shifting into high gear again. It’s the nature of the place. Everywhere of course has this—rhythms, flow, natural flux as well as unexpected disruptions; every ecosystem is in a state of motion at all times. Nowhere and no thing ever stands truly in isolation or permanence.

Our planet works its way around the sun in its elliptical orbit, on its tilted axis, circled by our one moon, enveloped by our impossibly complex weather systems perpetually shifting across the globe like Matisse’s dancers. Four and a half billion years of very hard work forming itself, becoming itself through mere dust and gas and gravity, have given us an atmosphere, tectonic plates, oceans and mountains and seasons and life itself. Everywhere—every where, every place—is always and already experiencing the continued interplay of Earth’s movements, always continuing to become its singular self time and again, over and over, in perpetuity. This is part and parcel of being embodied and having form: people and plants and volcanoes inhaling and exhaling elements that have swirled around since time immemorial.

And the farm is a world unto itself, a universe in miniature. Just like the cosmos, it’s a site of endless change. And exchange: life for death, death into decomposition, decomposition in and through—towards and because of—life. The life of the farm holds itself together in part through death (what is compost, after all?). In and around the root systems and mycelial networks there are the tens of thousands of microorganisms in every teaspoon of healthy soil, the bigger tiny things that eat them, the bigger ones that eat those, and on and on up the food chain until you find: us! And then of course we die and return, in a way, to the carnal eternal conversation. Life for death, death into decomposition, decomposition reborn into life. What else is simultaneously so terrifying and so reassuring? We are …and then… we are not. Beyond that, it’s unknown. The angel of death keeps mum; she prefers her cards held close to the chest. Which is fine really. There’s always enough life bursting forth on the farm, even in winter, to pull me back from the existential brink. It’s difficult—blessedly difficult—to plunge too deeply into the philosophical quandaries of death and meaninglessness when a few hundred pounds of carrots and beets and cabbage have to come out of the ground today, and into boxes all nicely washed and neatly packed today, and arugula needs weeding and the mushroom substrate needs to be inoculated and the old substrate needs to be shredded onto the ready-to-be-prepped beds because the salanova from last week has got to get into the ground before it gets rootbound and gives up the ghost! How I love it so. The urgency of tasks, it turns out, is a great way to focus one’s mind.

…As is just looking around the place. If you pay enough attention (and attention is the currency of a farm) lifecycles merge and diverge continually: change and exchange. A farm is in constant conversation with itself, each partner—whether human, vegetable, insect, or water molecule—giving and receiving, often completely and absurdly unaware of its partnership - its membership. All the members of the farm have different timelines and are operating on their own scale. (How could we do otherwise?) We all have different orbits around that center which we call Life. Our mesclun salad mix takes twenty-one days from seeding to harvest in peak summer, tack on maybe another week in January; the rainbow carrots take about seventy-five days, the Song cauliflower forty-two, the ranunculus in the greenhouse need perhaps three months before they start popping off. The oyster mushrooms give us close to four months of vigorous production before we send their growing medium on into the next world. We’ll be planting some trees soon, which is very exciting; I suppose we’ll be measuring their lifespans, like our own, in decades.

The membership of the farm includes each worker and each crop but it is never only that; it is far more than the sum of its consitituent parts. We strive to make our work at Lapa’au consistent: we have our own patterns and rhythms that we have created, our ways of working that have come to define our days. And we do this, our labor, at a human scale, knowing that there are greater patterns at work operating on their own larger scales. A healthy ecosystem or biome, whether or not it’s a farm, is the type of place that seems like it’s always been what it is—it looks right—even as you know it is always somehow becoming new. It is both everchanging and everlasting. And so we see, as I quoted at the top, that a farm wishes “to cohere and to last” and for “all of its lives to flourish,” but also that “Change is constant, random, and irrepressible, and it happens to be the dominant force driving species evolution” (Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters—yes, go read it). So there is change and coherence, in some kind of union. It is to the benefit of the farmer to keep that union; more than that, it is an imperative. A farm is always inviting its farmers into its union, for we the farmers are part of the life of the farm. It asks us, and insists we answer: How do transformation and constancy meet? What does it mean for metamorphosis and stability to dance together? (In more practical terms: how do we keep growing food?)

A significant aspect of this metamorphosis is that while our work is contained within the boundaries of the property, so much of what makes life happen here is just kind of passing through. The varied amounts of daylight and precipitation throughout the year are two of the most obvious or discernable paths that cross the farm, but there’s also the patterns in the winds, the seasonality of the birds’ pillaging, the presence of the pollinators during our cut flowers months. Then there’s the cycles of the weeds who apparently like tag-teaming us (you take those months, I’ll handle these, we’ll really wear em ragged). The cress shows up in winter, purslane takes off in summer—and the amaranth is their year-round ringleader. Pests too: the cabbage moth and the cutworm have different life cycles and show up at different times and in different numbers. It may take them longer to move across the property than it takes a ray of sunshine, but they are certainly not stagnant and in fact quite impressively mobile. 

The great mystery of farming—or at least one mystery of many to me—is how a farm is both a complete entity and fully in time. We can look at Lapa’au as a place formally named and delineated, we can drive onto the property and see it layed out before us in its contained and working splendor, we can look at the order board and see all our accounts and their wish lists and our checkmarks next to their orders (2 cs oyster ✓, 3 cs salanova ✓, 10# celery ✓, 20# mix beets ✓, 15# daikon ✓, 7# chard ✓), we can see the business and a bank account and my direct deposit and W2. We can see that it is, simply and directly, full stop. There is a felt wholeness. But also… it is nothing but an accumulation of complex processes. The soil is living, the plants are living, the damn pests and weeds are living, the humans (and cats and dog) are living, and after a variable amount of time each of these lives will end, making room for something else. That is what I mean by “in time.” We are inescapably in the flow of time; we are mortal creatures, fully of flesh, knit together in and through—towards and because of—life. And life ends in death, or else it would not be life. And life also cannot be contained. It cannot be made into exactly as we want. Lapa’au has being, but it is a tenuous being. It is conditional, and provisional, and depends in large part upon our willingness to do the necessary work of its stewardship.

At some level, the land is always yearning to be set free from the rigors of the farming life - a farm is not, to be honest, a natural thing. We do our best to mimic the vibrancy of the natural world, but nowhere in nature are heads of lettuce set at exactly sixteen inches apart in four rows for one hundred feet. It is artful work, but it is also artificial. (This is why you have to be relentlessly attentive, because the forces of entropic decay are always pushing you around; the whole universe is flying off into chaos and nothingness at 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec and we’re trying to keep a dang vegetable farm in order.)

It is a great privilege to care for the life of the farm and an immeasurable gift to recognize the reciprocity - that the farm cares for my life. It offers in abundance the good things growing out of the soil. It makes room for me to lie down and be supported. It moves in recognizable patterns, it experiences the give and take and ebb and flow of material existence …just like me. It has good days and bad days, just like me. We offer and participate in the farm’s coherence, even as we ourselves are changing day to day. “In the end,” Zoë Schlanger writes, “the thing that survives is the biome, the whole community of life, just in varying states of composition.” That, perhaps more than anything, is where my faith lies. Life and death, sunshine and darkness, the giving and receiving of nutrients—none of this happens without movement, without adaptation, without a staggering degree of complexity interlaced across time and space. And somehow, through some alchemy of generativity and responsibility, a farm exists. Lapa’au was here yesterday, it’s here today, and dammit it’ll be here tomorrow.