Why Do I Grow the Organic Way?
The Short Answer?
I can’t see any valid reason in doing it any other way.
The Long Answer?
This is my reasoning – others will say it another way, but this is how I see it.
Like a human being defined by skin, the planet is a finite entity. Both do extend beyond their range, but we won’t go there. I could see this ‘living entity’ comparison quite early on in life.
It was connected to learning how much I had in common with the way all living beings are made. I was lucky enough to have a mild-mannered biochemist as a father. After WWI, food and the making of it was highly valued. As a boy, he was taught to garden the old way at a Yorkshire primary school using muck and the new word employed by Sir Albert Howard, ‘compost’. From my dad, I inherited a small monograph called ‘The Mycorrhizal Association,’ which in his youth was a new thing. Today, all budding soil lovers take to it and nod.
At 16, Dad took me to the Sydney Botanical Gardens and took me through the birth of life on rock to lichen ferns grasses and trees. Walking around the gardens, he showed me the botanical notion of Gwandanaland before it was named as such. He showed me the commonality of shared plants in the countries that we had lived in. He taught me that life chemistry is shared between plants and creatures and between animals amongst themselves. The relationship between plant cycles and our lives was there to be understood and appreciated. To mess this complex and evolving ancient way of sustaining the mantle of the earth seemed foolhardy to me, even then.
I finished off my self-education in our molecular relationship with Planet Earth when I learnt about buffering, which is too technical to look at here but highly important.
At 30, I encountered the agriculture of modern chemical use of industrial wastes and the development of applying blanket poisoning of the soils in the name of food production. You kill one beetle you kill them all – so what!? This type of agriculture is heavy-handed from an intracellular viewpoint. Introduced chemicals will upset the equilibrium of continuing buffering in a chemical sense – be it plant or animal.
This seemed nonsensical to me.
So in my small one-bit way, I started growing sub-tropical fruits and vegetables, native trees and a nursery for regenerating a dry rainforest and raising dairy cows. This plant/animal mix; the way that Mother Earth works, made sense to me. I did not have the entrepreneurial skills to take it to a galloping profit but I could see forest returning, wildlife coming to it, absolutely yummy foods and healthy plants and animals.
Today, it has been very gratifying to see how much more is now known about Mother Earth’s mantle and the clever cycles that sustain life here. Of course, much of it was understood for a long, long time and ignored. But now we ‘know’ from both the old and new: it is best not ignored.
I hope you found that (pretty long-winded) reason for organic farming to be meaningful to you. There are other reasons too, related to the taste and complexity of nutrition and keeping quality high, but that’s for another blog.
Mary Done
Owner, Wymah Organics
