{"id":33173,"date":"2018-04-06T06:26:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T11:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33173"},"modified":"2018-04-06T06:26:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-06T11:26:24","slug":"cutting-a-farm-into-a-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33173","title":{"rendered":"Cutting a Farm into a Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cutting a Farm into a Forest<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke of the axe he is writing his signature on the face of the land. <\/em>\u2013Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Many modern back to the land stories unfold on neglected farmland that is ready to be brought back to life with attention and care.\u00a0 The piece of property on which my story takes place had evolved past neglect: it was simply abandoned to the forest.\u00a0 When we looked out the windows of our old home in the early years, we didn\u2019t see fields onto which we could project agrarian dreams, but walls of vegetation that were wild and unwelcoming. If we wanted to make a farm, we would have to cut it into a forest.<\/p>\n

We purchased our home on ten acres in 2011 because of its location \u2014 10 minutes by car to the college where I teach and 3 minutes by foot to my wife\u2019s family\u2019s home \u2014 not because of its agricultural potential. Nine of the ten acres were entangled in a web of noxious weeds and vines climbing up through box elders and Russian olive, pioneer plants whose natural function is to reclaim fields for forests. My affection for the place was not yet rooted in time and memory, so I couldn\u2019t help but see my woods as an obstacle to idealized ends. What we wanted for our place and what it had become required me, in the words of Aldo Leopold, \u201cto write my signature on the face of the land.\u201d But how?<\/p>\n

The industrial solution to land \u201cdevelopment\u201d involves strip-mining sites of their flora, fauna, and topsoil, embodying practices Wendell Berry laments in his poem, \u201cDamage<\/a>\u201d: \u201cThe trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cutting a Farm into a Forest A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke of the axe he is writing his signature on the face of the land. \u2013Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac Many modern back to the land stories unfold on neglected farmland that is ready to be brought back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19702,299,19703,1912,7093,19701,19704,19705,19700],"class_list":["post-33173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-farm","tag-farming","tag-fauna","tag-food-production","tag-forest","tag-front-porch-republic","tag-land-clearing","tag-land-reclamation","tag-mark-manry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33174,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33173\/revisions\/33174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}