Before diving in, I have a little housekeeping. I’ve recently turned on paid subscriptions for Headwaters. You can read more about my setup here. TLDR, I am not paywalling anything, and I’ve priced the monthly and annual tiers to be as close to one another as Substack will allow, as I am personally tired of the subscription economy and want to replicate something closer to an occasional payment. I appreciate any and all contributions to my work exploring the possibilities and potential of a sustainable food system.
I’ve also established some quasi-editorial standards that I’ve been using for a while but wanted to officially lay out to be transparent about my writing practices and methods of sourcing information.
One of the most transcendent experiences one can behold is walking a patch of ground with a steward who is intimately familiar with its contours and characteristics. The following passages from John McPhee’s Basin and Range, recounting his experience walking Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains with geologist and ranching scion David Love, capture the experience well:
Allan and David called it Jumpin-Off Draw, its name on the map today. Finding numerous large bones in a meadowy bog, they named the place Buffalo Wallows. Indians had apparently driven the bison into the swamp to kill them. One could infer that. One could also see that the swamp was there because water was bleeding from rock outcrops above the meadows. In a youth spent on horseback, there was not a lot to do but look at the landscape. The rock that was bleeding water was not just porous but permeable. It was also strong. It was the same red rock that the granary stood on, and the bunkhouse. Very evidently, it was made of naturally cemented sand. The water could not have come from the creek. The Buffalo Wallows were sixty feet higher than the creek. The sandstone layers tilted north. They therefore reached out to the east and west. There was high ground to the east. The water must be coming down from there. One did not need a Ph.D from Yale to figure that out — especially if one was growing up in a place where so much rock was exposed. Pending further study, his interpretation of the Buffalo Wallows was just a horseback guess.
The water in the sandstone produced not only the bogs but the adjacent meadows as well — in this case desiccated terrain. From the meadows came hay. There was an obvious close relationship between bedrock geology and ranching. David would not have articulated that in just those words, of course, but he thought about the subject much of the time, and he was drawn to be a geologist in the way that someone growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, would be drawn to be a fisherman. “It was something to think about on long rides day after day when everything was so monotonous,” he remarked not long ago. “Monotony was what we fought out there. Day after day, you had nothing to but the terrain around you — you had nothing to think about but why the shale had stripes on it, why the boggy places were boggy, why the vegetation grew where it did, why trees only grew on certain types of rock, why water was good in some places and bad in others, why the meadows were where they were, why some creek crossings were so sandy they were all but impassable.
Such extensive knowledge is generated from having eyes on the land. The level of insight and intensity of detail gleaned from an incessant presence on a patch of ground is simply sublime. This ingrained knowledge is exponentially enriched when a steward’s personal experience is buttressed by the teachings of generations past.
Unfortunately, our society is experiencing a crisis of human presence on the land. The European fires that torched countrysides from Spain to Romania last summer were worsened by the high rates of woody vegetation that have taken over abandoned farmland and depopulated villages. Without young folks on the land, no one was around to prune, graze, or clear brush. Additionally, the dearth of people available to notice smoke rising up in the distance or potential sources of sparks likely aided in new fires going unnoticed. A few more pairs of eyes could have caught a blaze while it was still young and manageable. A lack of observation allows threats, both acute and chronic, to fester long past when they can be addressed.
The retreat from our rural hinterlands is a global trend impacting the stewardship of many landscapes. Another affected land is the Oases of Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Declines in rainfall are parching the date palm plantings that sustain the economy and spirit of oasis communities. The irrigation networks that have historically supplemented the region’s aquifers with meltwater from the Atlas Mountains are drying out as snowpack dwindles. To address the prolonged water crisis, farmers have resorted to solar-powered pumps to tap into the region’s sparse groundwater reserves.
Out-migration from these communities, up to 20% of their population, has made it more difficult to cope with these protracted changes to climatic conditions. As young folks leave, the elderly farmers that remain are less able to maintain the sprawling irrigation networks they historically relied upon, increasing their dependence on groundwater withdrawals and accelerating the ecological decline of the oases. As the water situation worsens, the mighty date palms have withered and died, leaving even less opportunity for young people who want to stay in these communities. One farmer, Abdelkarim Bannaoui, told National Geographic correspondent Tristan McConnell that he anticipates that all of his children will move to the city, ending his family’s generational tenure on the land. Another community saw its numbers drop from 200 households to 5. Lacking manpower to maintain the earthen walls, alleys, and vegetation that kept the desert at bay, it is slowly sinking into the sand. As McConnell reports:
“One of the few still living here is 68-year-old Belaaid Lagnaoui, a thick-set farmer who long ago ceded the ground floor of his mud-walled house to the desert. From his perch upstairs, he uses the flashlight on his phone to peer to the sand-filled hall below.”
Scenes like this are playing out in rural communities the world over. From Japan’s northern island to the southern tip of Chile. The magnetic pull of the world’s cities is drawing young people away from the countryside in search of opportunity: be it romantic, occupational, or the tantalizing pace of urban life.
The pursuits of metropolitan life are certainly worth celebrating. The connections forged and the energies stimulated in the concrete jungle, be it economic, cultural, or educational, drive technological innovation, talent development, and artistic maturation. Cities are central drivers of quality of life improvements; they are places where creative minds congregate and collaborate to design trains, learn how to practice medicine, and craft the next generation-defining songs. These intellectual energies support the countryside as well; plant breeding and soil science tend to happen in the city. It’s also good that people with an aversion to farm work or other land-based livelihoods now have the option to pursue industrial, office, or service professions. I have many friends and relatives who would be absolutely miserable if their only option was life on the farm. They thrive under the excitement of cosmopolitanism. Not everyone is cut out for toiling in the fields or going to the same three bars every Friday night, and the fact that we’ve established an economy in which a sizable number of people can pursue alternative occupations in cities is a civilizational achievement.
But this progress comes with a cost. Migration to cities comes at the expense of rural vitality. The exodus of young people from the countryside has taken bodies out of the field, clientele from the taverns and shops, seats from the theater, and eyes off the land.
In some ways, technology can make up for the deficit of human attention (“some” doing the heavy lifting in that sentence). Data-driven precision agriculture and conservation technologies, including rich, spatially granular datasets derived from extensive soil sensors and imaging installations, are a rudimentary substitute for the intuition and observation of a tenured steward in decision-making. When married with a steward who has a deep understanding of a landscape, such tools could expand the area one decision-maker can reasonably manage.
Furthermore, automated equipment platforms can remedy the labor shortages that plague aging rural communities and lead to unruly land or crumbling infrastructure. By assigning the drudgery of the most bothersome of farm tasks to robots, remaining rural residents can focus on some of the more intellectually and physically stimulating aspects of farm work.
But while quantitative technologies can remedy some of the drawbacks from rural depopulation, they are wholly insufficient in the prospect of fully replacing land management by a flesh-and-blood intelligence. Humans can draw connections and see realities that are invisible to machines. Data aggregation systems can never be truly comprehensive, and statistical models cannot establish every connection that we know is there. Actual, conscious experience of a place and an intuitive understanding of a land’s dynamics is necessary to deeply understand its condition and trajectory. If a precision ag platform isn’t designed to listen for bird calls or insect buzzing, how could it know its activities are degrading the local environment? If a predictive model isn’t fed information about soil stability, how can it know a massive gully is forming at the edge of a field? And if it’s not programmed to care, how can it take part in actions to course-correct?
Additionally, people are what make the economy, and automating farm work really only benefits farm owners while consigning non-equity holders to unemployment. The automation of certain tasks on the farm has the potential to make farming a more pleasant job and may even support new management models that promote multifunctional landscapes and lower input use. But these futures cannot come to pass if the only programmed goal is higher yield.
Rural areas still need a human factor in play, and not just because of these pragmatic concerns. Rural culture, artistic traditions, foodways, celebrations, and communities cannot be maintained in a countryside managed by robots, servers, and algorithms. Advanced technology can and will play an important role in managing the transitions brought on by urbanization, but it must only be a complement to human labor, not a replacement. We need real, human eyes on the land. To see what computer vision cannot. To notice the health of local wildlife. To maintain traditional varieties of fruit and grain. To tell the stories, both old and new, of the land and the people on it.
Ultimately, we need to make a thriving rural life both possible and fulfilling, while also enjoying the societal benefits of growing cities. The urbanization and mechanization shocks have been generation-defining for many small towns and backcountries. As rates of migration (at least in my neck of the woods) steady and global conditions change, it is incumbent on those of us who care about rural spaces and places to consider how we may keep people on the land. The age of remote collaboration presents several opportunities, as does the contemporary rethinking of global supply chains and concentrated economies. As the economic pendulum swings towards re-localization and regionalization, new niches for rural communities and land-based industries could emerge or be manifested by intentional actors. These changes offer new pathways through which new livelihoods can be constructed that bring a human touch back to the streams and meadows, the fields and forests, the mountains and prairies, and the deserts and coasts over which we once watched.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
After Work, We’ll Have Each Other: Drawing from the memoirs of European aristocrats, ethnographies of upper-class Midwesterners, and oral histories of American working-class immigrants, the author definitely demonstrates that people never derived meaning and purpose from their work, but from their community and compatriots.
Cultivated Meat Has Been Declared Dead. I Remain Optimistic: The founder of the Good Food Institute makes the case that post-farming meat still has a future.