Full Moon Edition September 2023
The Harvest Moon
A romantic image that one, eh? The Harvest Moon in full. Bringing in the crops. Largesse of the earth that will sustain us. The bounty of agrarian practice to nourish us through the coming fall and winter months.
I’ve been thinking a lot about mythologies of the modern West for a class I’m creating. Those of us who grew up Western are saddled with bags of luminous myth. All those images. Cowboys and Indians. The rugged individualist. Riding herd. Tall in the saddle. Taming the wilderness. Taming the earth. Breaking sod and planting the soil. Steering water to the desert and inducing yield from the parched earth. Sage dominion over the earth and all its creatures.
Family ranches and family farms. Toiling honorably in the fields of the Lord. It’s a vision of the West that agriculture long ago left behind. Cattle barons, grazing leases, stock yards, feed lots, mono-cropping, genetically modified seed, industrial farming are the reality of rural life in the West. Herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and lots of pharmaceutical inoculations are the stock in trade. Collectively, they may be the nation’s greatest polluters. Romance dies hard.
Back to the Earth
It was a movement that began when the counterculture was in full bloom. Not many stuck it out because it was hard work. But some of them did. They consciously defied Big Ag and defined the concept of sustainable agriculture in a modern world mad for scale. These folks thought small. They did so proudly.
Organic food became an industry unto itself. Locavore became a concept that married the interest in getting clean food from local farmers who cared like you did about what it was you put in your body and carried it fresh from their farm a very few miles down the road to your table in town.
You are what you eat, we all believed, and fortunately there were people who cared enough to do the work to raise food free of artificial influences that you could proudly serve to your family and friends, knowing it was nourishing. God bless those hippies who made it happen because that’s where it all started.
Beating Big Ag
There are many debatable aspects of genetically modified organisms. When it comes to Monsanto and Roundup Ready seeds, no discussion is needed. Whether you want them or not, though, Monsanto will try to ram them down your throat. It’s a power play, plain and simple. They are bigger than you are and they’re going to have their way. Or not. Not in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon.
Organic farming is a way of life for many folks hereabouts who work the land. It’s a brand, too, one they’re rightfully proud of. The thing about food grown organically is that is has to be protected from intrusion. Spores from seeds that mighty Monsanto successfully introduces into an ecosystem and spreads its corruption on breezes wafting from one field to another, as a vivid example.
Oh, and not only does that modified seed spore pollute your crop. It also makes your seed bank subsequently belong to Monsanto because, well, your seeds now carry its patented genes and you are officially screwed. That’s how these guys do business.
Except in the Valley. Here we took the matter to a county-wide vote and the good people of this little rural place where the Big Ag gangster ran a well-funded campaign to sway the ballot and have its way as it is so used to doing instead was resoundingly voted out of the entire county and sent packing. There are no legal seeds of that sinister sort in Jackson County, Oregon and, yes, David slew Goliath right here.