Sustaining Cultivation 515long as we engage our differences and take responsibility for response ability, for
difference is creativity’s own unfinalizable wellspring. By coming to imagine agri-
culture as here and now, wherever we are, and not beyond and behind, we ask for
and welcome that engagement. Eaters, growers, purveyors, teachers, builders, doc-
tors, lawyers, bus drivers, factory workers, scientists, even realtors and regulators:
we are all potentially agriculturalists in the sense of the gardening of creation. It
depends upon our state of mind and action, upon how we contribute to this task
that is, thankfully, larger than any of us.
This, I believe, is the practical message of Practical Farmers of Iowa: that cul-
tivation in the agricultural sense depends upon an approach to cultivation in the
social sense that embraces the creativity of difference, openness and the unfinaliz-
able. A dialogic, practical agriculture requires that we all consider agriculture a
central feature of everyone’s lives, worthy of everyone’s care and careful attention.
A dialogic, practical agriculture requires that we sustain the broadest possible con-
versation about agriculture. For what Iowa’s practical farmers are really trying to
farm is democracy, the democracy of the people’s good earth. The same is true of
practical farmers everywhere. They are all guided by a common insight: that farm-
ing for us all, in every field of human endeavour, is only possible when there is
farming by us all.
Acknowledgements
As I sit down to write these acknowledgements, the autumnal equinox fast
approaches and the harvest is on in the Midwest. It’s a time for finishing up, for
gathering together, for putting things away, for reflecting on the season past. As
day and night near equality, it’s a time for assessing the balance of things. And it’s
a time for giving thanks.
Harvest and the equinox thus seems to me a very good time to write the
acknowledgments for a book long in cultivation, perhaps especially for a book
about farming. When the crop is full ripe (or as ripe as it’s going to get), it needs
to be gathered together. And so it is with the crop of this book. It is time to finish
up. It is time to reflect on the season past and to give thanks for those who have
contributed so much to its fruits.
A common myth – there can be no other word for it – is that the real farmer
farms alone, toiling single-handedly against the elements, and that every farm has
only one farmer. He (in the myth it almost always is a he) is the farmer. The others
are farm workers, farmhands, farm wives, farm kids. The members of Practical
Farmers of Iowa and other sustainable agriculture groups, as this chapter describes,
are struggling to overcome this singular understanding of the authorship of a farm,
as part of their efforts to create a more dialogic, and thus more practical, agricul-
ture. We need also to struggle against the parallel myth of the single authorship of
a book. No author truly works alone. No book truly has just one author.
This is particularly true of a book such as this one. Central to whatever fruit this
book can be said to offer are the participatory methods with which the underlying