Agriculture Has Made Us Sick

But it can also make us better.

To understand the nature of this monumental chapter in Stagtine: Kincentric Rewilding, make sure you have read the previous one:

Beauty, Darkness, and Dairy Goats

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Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

The Problem

The cafeteria-style mineral program that was working for the cows had no effect on the goats. Even today, pushing a decade later, goats seem to know the difference between soil mediated minerals and the machine moderated alternatives—those delivered through plants’ biochemical processes and those delivered through modern industry’s purely chemical processes. They do finely on the first, poorly on the latter.

But the land for too long had been abused and its biochemical medication was only slowly reawakening.

I led the goats that evening, under falling dusk, passing frog ponds and trickling streams, Pyros’ honeysuckle still sloshing in their bellies, to the milking parlor.

We walked slowly, heads down. There is a popular belief, owing itself, I think, to the technosocial muse of dopamine delivered through swiping and scrolling and likes and views, that farming is romantic, filled with fluffy animals, and profitable. Or, that it should be profitable and these and other things. But this belief only further demonstrates our separation from Earth, for she promises nothing but that she will be here, riding the dawn down on the sun or rain or mist and she promises nothing more. Will we make it? Will anyone? The sun rises and she sets. That is all we know.

We had little expectation for the evening’s milking but at the least we would handle them, continuing their acclimation to the stand and milking system, and look them over. While I milked, Morgan would examine their hooves for rot, udders for mastitis, and would pull down their lower eyelids to check for anemia—scoring what she saw on a dust-covered FAMACHA¹ chart that hung in the barn.

Morgan waited for us in the parlor with her a fresh batch of what we called “goat balls,” a mixture of mullein, fennel seed, thyme, ginger, garlic, hyssop leaf, clove bud, cayenne, wormwood, and sprouted pumpkin seeds held together with organic molasses. An herbal punch to the parasite-beaten gut.

“Penny, Mr. Lafayette, Rose, Jack Frost, Piper, Sonny, Shenandoah, Sasha, Cher, Opal, Opal’s Ogden and Olive—” her voice trailed off as her breath ran out. “—have you seen Mara?”

I scurried around the forty goats in the barn’s stall, eyes scanning for a white and tan cleft doe. “No, I don’t—I’ll check outside.” I replied. But she was not there—not in the barn, the barn’s yard, the day’s fence, or even in Pyros. I walked back with my flashlight rudely scanning an otherwise sleeping landscape, the eyes of frogs in their frog pond reflecting back on me, like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. No Mara.

“One quart.” Morgan had just finished milking when I returned empty handed. “Forty goats. One quart. Daniel—listen—this feels like our fault.”

“Thirty-nine.” I said.

The Equilibrium

Equilibrium is a play between two contrary penchants. If one overwhelms the other, balance becomes lost and life drifts endlessly in the domain of the heavier object. If allowed to stay for a certain amount of time, the heavier domain retunes its senses and an observation of current metrics becomes the equilibrium of current arguments. That is, what is imbalanced seems balanced when disparity’s dominance reigns for long enough.

Agriculture is the equilibrium of our age and extends deep into the perceived history of our world. Its modern modes developed (or redeveloped as we will see) in the confused haptics and heterogeneous cauldron of the Younger Dryas, a mini-ice age, or glaciation events, that lasted from 12,700 to 11,500 years ago. During this time, temperatures dropped to a -5 to -25 °C annual mean, or 23 to -13 °F average.²

Climate change in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in what is now North America, incongruously mixed with the great extinction events of the megafauna and the continent-wide dismantling of the Clovis culture into regionally developed and individual nations.³ That is at least the story we are told. We lost the megafauna when our population increased, then the Ice Age receded and we turned to agriculture for security and its leisure, but, in the infant stages of that development, the world cooled once again (the Younger Dryas) and life slowed down, but agriculture’s stable and stalwart hook was well set and it allowed life to carry on.

This is our equilibrium: agriculture’s dominance over scarcity secures humanity and creates civilization. But is this actually a balanced truth? Is it even true at all? If our hearts were weighed against the feather of Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth and justice, what would be the result?

We are agricultural, I think, because we were told to be.

Anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel published in a 1984 paper an examination of skeletal remains of Homo sapiens before and after the Younger Dryas—before and after the uniform rise and constancy of agriculture. Angel’s inspection focused on teeth, height, life span, and pelvic inlet depth index—an obstetric measurement concerned with birth canal size.⁴

What he found surprised the world.