CREATIVE NONFICTION 29did humans happen to arrive on the planet—
his answers seem evasive at best.
Maybe that’s necessary if you teach in The
Cove, or maybe it’s because I’m sitting in front
of him, notebook in hand, doing my best
thoughtful interviewer nod, and asking ques-
tions that are none of my business. Whatever
the reason, Jeff clearly fits somewhere in the
middle of the supposed unbridgeable divide,
proof that simple answers and strict categories
will never capture the full picture.
my roundabout search for folks
who inhabit some middle territory in the
science-faith debate eventually leads me to
Pete Yoder. He farms 1,600 acres of corn and
soybeans just outside of London, Ohio. The
corn is sold for use in making ethanol and
corn sweetener, while most of the soybeans
end up as tofu.
It is a large operation. Pete, cheerful,
energetic, and commendably fit for a man in
his late fifties, takes me on a brisk tour of the
barns and outbuildings scattered across his
sprawling property, stopping to explain each
of the many machines he employs to run his
farm: small tractors, large tractors, combines,
headers, cultivators, grain conveyors, harvest-
ers, ammonia spreaders, and even a pair of
hopper-bottom 18-wheelers. He might as
well be a kid showing me his Matchbox car
collection, except these vehicles are real,
and massive.
Many of them are GPS-guided, allowing
him to track what has been planted, what has
been fertilized, all of it cross-referenced with
previous years’ yields, field by field, row by
row. Pete clearly enjoys what he does, using
the term “fun” repeatedly as he articulates
how seed is fed into the spreader, how corn is
cut, or how ammonia is “knifed” down into
the soil.
After the tour, we retire to the maroon-
sided farmhouse where he and his wife,
Mary Ette, raised three now-grown children.
Pete’s office, just off the family dining room,
has a window looking out on a birdfeeder,
populated by hungry grackles and a red finch
or two.
“I’m a Christian, a person of faith, and I
have no problem reconciling my faith with sci-
ence,” Pete tells me as we sit on opposite sides
of a large desk covered with farm catalogues.
“Probably where I have incongruencies with
my practices and what I believe—where those
two don’t meet—is more in my political
views. I find myself at odds with a lot of my
fellow farmers.”
That’s an understatement, given the main-
stream conservatism running through rural
Ohio, and given Pete’s decidedly progressive
views. A “Black Lives Matter” sign sits in a
flower patch in his side yard, conceivably the
only such sign in all of Madison County.
I ask what the neighbors think, and he
laughs. “They’re used to me by now.”
Pete and his family are practicing Men-
nonites, a Christian denomination that
runs from highly conservative—Old Order
Mennonites share many practices with the
Amish—to more modern. Traditionally,
the more conservative Mennonites reject
climate change, but Pete is part of a nascent
Mennonite progressive movement embracing
conservation and sustainability.
He employs a “no-till” method on his land,
for instance, planting soybeans between the
previous year’s corn rather than cutting the
stalks and plowing them under, limiting
erosion and chemical runoff. What becomes
clear to me as we talk is that Pete’s focus on
state-of-the-art farm machinery and fancy
GPS guidance systems is not just farm-nerd
gadgetry but connects directly to his wish for
sustainability: each acre he doesn’t till, each
row that requires less chemical treatment,
every step that allows him to use less horse-
power in his machinery and burn less fuel, is
an environmental act.
He shrugs when I ask about this: “My farmer
friends all laugh at the idea that a fifteen- or
twenty-thousand-dollar addition to a tractor is
going to save the world from climate change.
They just scoff.”
Pete’s sustainable farming practices are
based in science, but for Pete the practices are
a spiritual matter as well. He was among the
first in his part of Ohio to place an agricultural