Our winter squash failed last summer. I planted it in a new plot, where the soil was poor. Good soil takes years to build. If not for the intense drought, I could have made do with this first-year plot. Twenty years ago, when I first came to this valley, a normal summer would see about ten days above ninety degrees, but last summer rose above that mark for forty-five days. During this period, we not only had no measurable rain, but also no dew. Virginia is normally humid in the summer. This year it was dry like the desert. Day after day, I would step outside at seven in the morning to find the air torrid and the ground parched to the point of cracking, even where it was planted or mulched. Plant and animal life alike were left dazed and struggling.
Cursed be the ground for your sake; with toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. And it will cause thorns and thistles to grow for you, and you shall eat the herbs of the field. With the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for which you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return.
Even in a good year, the expulsion from paradise lingers in my mind when working on land. My morning patrol of the property always drives home how far we have fallen from out native understanding and intuition on the long path to separation from dominion. There is never a shortage of thorns and thistles and toil and sweat. I spend time removing plants as pests that earlier people would have known how to use. I puzzle over what fungus is torturing squash, as I try to keep alive these maladapted descendants of wilder plants, fit for the landscape. Here, we are overrun one year with stinkbugs, another year with gypsy months, and still another year with lantern flies. Everywhere there is work. Last year added to that the threat of scarcity. Trying to irrigate became a game of chicken with the well. The returns to irrigation on degraded, relatively impermeable soil are poor. The plants suffered—not just from dehydration but starvation. Dry soil is dead soil, not merely for want of water, but for want of the microbial life and nutrient transport that accompanies the dryness.
Our squash plants that managed not to wither in the ground as seedlings still showed signs of stress and stress memory—dwarfed leaves, early flowering, or no flowering at all. Better soil would have provided resilience, absorbing and holding more water and providing better habitat for deep, strong plant roots and microbial life. The roots of the plants in turn exude sugars, amino and organic acids, hormones, phenolics, and flavonoids into the soil. At some point, the plants sustain the soil, and the soil sustains the plants. We have broken that cycle. In its place, we have left a fragile system in which both nature and agricultural plants must eke out their existence in poor soil. Until the soil is restored, the ecosystem must be closely managed. Centuries of abuse have created a need for skilled stewards for almost every acre of land, whether it be wilderness or farmland. A good regenerative gardener or farmer has some ability to speed the process of turning bad soil into good. But growth and decay, and the development of soil structure, have their own pace and will only be hurried along so much.
When we acquired this land, we decided to convert several acres of pasture back to native meadows. Before European settlement, the Shenandoah Valley contained many biodiverse transition zones between piedmont and mountains, forest and grassland, wetland and upland. Many of the animals that shaped and maintained the environment of the pre-colonial valley are gone now. The bison, mountain lions, and wolves were hunted to extirpation, the Eastern elk, and the passenger pigeon to extinction. The Siouan-speaking Manahoac people were gone from the valley by the end of the seventeenth century, decimated first by European disease, and then by the intrusions of the expanding Iroquois Confederacy, who took the valley from the Manahoac and used it as a hunting ground—but only a few decades before they too were forced to cede its control to the English colonies in the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster. This subsequent European settlement resulted in the establishment first of tobacco and then grass farms. The legacy of this agriculture is an almost total replacement of the native grasslands that once dominated the Virginia landscape.
Biologists at the Natural Resources Conservation Service estimate that the remnants of native grasslands that we find today represent only 0.0001 of the total Virginia grasslands before European settlement. These vestigial habitats are mostly on private land, or along roadsides and under power lines. They have survived in land that, for one reason or another over centuries, was deemed not worthy of exploitation. Even these fragments are now being destroyed by development and poor management. When we purchased this property, our fields were full of domesticated European grasses: fescue and orchard grass, Kentucky bluegrass, Timothy grass. These grasses did not evolve as a part of a coherent ecosystem, but rather were bred as forage for their high yield and grazing tolerance.
When I was no older than six, I remember leaning my head into the backseat window of my parents’ car while looking out at the unremitting cornfields around their childhood home of Elkhart, Indiana. Those cornfields gave way to gas stations, car dealerships, shopping malls. Through the window, I tried to blur my vision to peer back into the past wilderness whose ghost, I hoped, still lived behind the altered landscape. I was aware of my thoughts as silly, the kind of daydream that shouldn’t be shared with serious people living their serious lives, that even my own ideas would rightly fade into seriousness as I matured. But they never did, neither for me, nor for my partner. For us, restoring most of the land that we purchased seemed like an obvious choice. It was probably better that our total ignorance gave us no chance to balk at the work involved. In the first year of the restoration, I spent ninety hours on the mower, followed by countless more hours patrolling with clippers, a shovel, and a backpack sprayer, all in the service of non-native plant destruction.
But while I was expending so much energy trying to kill, and kill, and kill again all those thorns, thistles, burdock, and fescue, I was expending equal effort trying to keep some measly rows of monocrop vegetables alive in the ground. At some point in the first year, standing over etiolated Brussel sprouts and trying to decide what expensive and energy-intensive organic fertilizer and insect treatment I was going to use to coax them to live, I looked around at my aggressively undead pasture, then back to my struggling vegetables, and thought—this is wrong. I’m doing it wrong.
Both the pasture and crops were non-native plants, but the feral, self-sustaining, biodiverse pasture was undeniably stronger and healthier than the lettuce, corn, and brassicas grown in a monoculture. I changed what I did, focusing on farming the soil instead of farming the plants. This meant paying attention to organic matter, using seed inoculants, cover cropping, focusing on nutrition and remineralization so that the plants could revitalize the soil through their roots and eventual decomposition. I fostered biodiversity in the crops I planted to attract and feed a diverse soil microbiome. Years after changing my growing techniques, I had healthy plants with minimal inputs that I fancied were a kind of imitation of the feral pasture that grew without human interference at all. But last summer’s drought laid bare the weakness even of the pastures.
The root systems of the domesticated pasture grasses are shallower than the native grasses and wildflowers. These shallow root systems, combined with management practices that include spraying, overgrazing, and soil compaction, have left the pastures and mowed lawns surrounding our property fragile compared to the grasses and meadow plants. We could see the disparity during last year’s drought when our native meadow, only in its second year of establishment, continued to grow and stayed green while pastures and lawns around us died.
Cursed be the ground for your sake.
The expulsion from paradise, the link between the beginning of agriculture and moral, ecological, and spiritual decay, appears in many cultures, even those far from the Mediterranean rim. The Rigveda and the Atharvaveda speak of a golden age in which humans lived with nature, food was abundant, and there was no need for agriculture. But as man’s moral state declined, nature and abundance dwindled, replaced with agriculture and toil. In the mythology of the West African Dogon people, the god Amma gifted agriculture to humanity, which allowed them to develop complex civilizations, but at a spiritual and ecological cost. The body of the Earth was wounded by tilling and exploitation, and as a result, fertility declined. The first agriculturalists were aware of the richness of native soils; the biodiversity and abundance they yielded was everywhere to be seen. Today seventy-five percent of the Earth’s surface is degraded by human activity. Most of us have never touched good soil or seen a healthy farm or ecosystem. We wouldn’t even know it if we did; we lack the experience and memory of a prelapsarian world.
The disciplines of regenerative agriculture and nature restoration both seek to establish a more natural relationship with land. Both are experimenting with understanding what that relationship might look like in a modern world. Cattle pastures, even non-native pastures, need not wither away in a drought as most pastures in my valley did last year. Last summer, at the height of the drought, I met a rancher who lives about twenty miles south of us. He kept his cattle on grass all through the blistering drought, without any irrigation or extra hay feeding, while neighboring farmers’ pastures withered, and they started feeding hay early. He had been regeneratively managing his property for over twenty years, grazing his cows in a way that enhances organic matter, stimulates root growth, and prevents erosion. These kinds of successes are part of why I have hope for the future of my squash, even if poor conditions persist.
The native meadow is only in its second year. It can take up to twenty years or more for a restored grassland to mature. Grassland ecologists are still trying to understand why restored grasslands look and behave differently than the reference ecosystems. In Virginia, the loss of nearly all our original grassland ecosystems has posed a challenge to our ability to understand the original soil conditions in which native ecosystems thrived. The restoration projects currently underway have been planted in soil that, for having been cultivated for centuries, is significantly altered from its native condition.
Almost as long as humans have known that agriculture can hurt the land, many cultures, at different places and times, have learned to farm in a way that avoids the curse of fertility loss and biodiversity destruction. Modern-day regenerative ranchers often report that after years of restorative grazing, one year they start to see the return of native grasses and wildflowers on the property that, in all their previous years of management, they had never seen before. What changed? Did the management of the soil, for sustainable agricultural purposes, have the effect of slowly restoring the soil to a state closer to that of the native grasslands so that the native plants, long dormant, could once again thrive?
We don’t yet know. Until such a time as more is done to understand our native landscapes, and understand how to restore them, I now see concord in the world of cultivation and restoration where I once saw division. The chores are different, but the work is the same—the revival of self-sustaining life cycles, the lifting of the curse from the land.
