E.B. White (1899 - 1985) standing on his property at his home, North Brooklin, Maine, December 29, 1977
My breakfast reading has been E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. I’ve read it multiple times over the years and never fail to enjoy the humor of his writing. He does have his somber moments though.
Line drawing of his farm in North Brooklin, Maine
This one from 1942 struck me. From E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat, page 266:
“November 1942, ‘A Week in November’, Thursday. In time, ownership of property will probably carry with it certain obligations, over and above the obligation to pay the tax and keep the mortgage going. There are signs that this is coming, and I think it should come. Today, if a landowner feels the urge, he can put a backhoe into his hillside pasture and disembowel it. He can set his plow against the contours and let his wealth run down into the brook and into the sea. He can sell his topsoil off by the load and make a gravel pit of a hayfield. For all the interference he will get from the community, he can dig to China, exploiting as he goes. With an axe in his hand he can annihilate the woods, leaving brush piles and stumps. He can build any sort of building he chooses on his land in the shape of a square or an octagon or a milk bottle. Except in zoned areas he can erect any sort of sign. Nobody can tell him where to head in-it is his land and this is a free country. Yet people are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility. The earth is common ground and we are all overlords, whether we hold title or not; gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safekeeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to public good to allow an individual, merely because of his whims or his ambitions, to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or the water or even the view.
After some years in the country, during which time I have experienced the satisfaction of working the land, building the soil, and making brown into green, I am beginning to believe that our new world that will open up after the war should be constructed round a repopulated rural America, so that a reasonably large proportion of the population shall participate in the culture of the earth. The trend is often in the opposite direction, even in peace. As things are now in America, country living is possible only for those who have either the talents and instincts of a true farmer or the means to live wherever they chose. I think there are large numbers of people who have not quite got either but who would like to (and probably should) dwell in the open and participate to some degree in the agricultural life. Good roads and electric power make the farm a likely unit for a better world, and the country should be inhabited very largely and broadly by all the people who feel at home there, because of its gift of light, and air and food, and security, and because it supplies a man directly, instead of indirectly. The trend toward the ownership of land by fewer and fewer individuals is, it seems to me, a disastrous thing. For when too large a proportion of the populace is supporting itself by the indirections of trades and business and commerce and art and the million schemes of men in cities, then the complexity of society is likely to become so great as to destroy its equilibrium, and it will always be out of balance in some way. But if a considerable portion of the people are occupied wholly or partially in labors that directly supply them with many things that they want, or think they want, whether it be a sweet pea or a sour pickle, then the public poise will be a good deal harder to upset.”
E. B. White with his geese on his farm 1970
With so many young people wanting to grow their own food and make a living from the land, it’s too bad his vision of more people on the land did not come to pass. And his fear has.
The cost of land, decent land one can make a living from, is extremely high and being built on at a great rate. The Connecticut River valley where I live is the 7th best soil in the world, per National Geographic survey. But we are not a large valley and it is being built on very rapidly. Each year we see another farm selling off pieces of land for a house.
And I wonder, what will we grow food on?
As older people we are slowly working on transitioning to aging in place. This means once the construction is done, we will be starting on a transition plan, to try to find a young person or family who will want to take over our organic farm, while we age in place. To get the plan to the final end can take up to 10 years. Mostly it’s finding the right match of a young farmer or family.
In this way, we can bring someone or a family back to the land, and keep all the hard work we’ve put into this place from being turned into a housing tract.
But we are a small farm, 8½ acres with another free leased 12 acres nearby, enough for a healthy couple to make a living. There’s more land nearby that could be leased also. But a farm of this size is small potatoes compared to the need to feed so many people on dwindling farm land.
And I wonder, what will we grow food on?
Source: https://www.katrinakenison.com/2016/08/04/14509/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/living-with-geese-139853490/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/02/farm-barn-inspired-charlottes-web-sale/