How did you get interested in agriculture? And what are you hoping to gain from your apprenticeship?
May 2025
I became truly interested in agriculture when I learned that humans can and do impact the rest of nature for the better. I remember fifteen years ago thinking to myself, “I should probably become a farmer.”
At the University of Montana, while studying Resource Conservation, I got an extra large serving of environmental doomerism. There were countless stories of the regrettable ways that human meddling, in all its sapience, led to noxious weeds, dust storms, plastic oceans, habitat loss, extinction, erosion, desertification, and on and on. The biggest and scariest of all was climate change. Mass extinction, migration, mega storms, the acid die-off of ocean photosynthesizers that fill our very lungs. All that dour data–all those stories–are still rattling around in the back of my mind, and sometimes too the forefront. Far too often, we do terribly by our more-than-human partners in the biosphere.
But I also learned about other more useful stories. Between backpacking the Bob Marshall, and surveying ancient larch stands with Ben Thompson, a Columbia Falls logger, I was absorbing how we cannot be separated from ‘nature’ in any sensible way. I read from David Abram about the wild birth of written language, and how that phenomenon has cast a formidable shadow over the animate, creative earth over the past few millennia. I read Gary Snyder’s ‘Song of the Taste.’ I read about Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden.
I learned about the livelihoods of Indigenous people throughout the globe, who practice stewardship of whole ecosystems that leads to mind-boggling abundance. I learned that those practices are the fruit of a more robust, ethical science than the one I’d been raised in. They weren’t inherently or mythically better, a pristine and primitive accident that ‘uncivilized’ minds were gifted by Providence. They are better in the sense that thousands of years of survival/livelihood driven trial and error lead to soil, water, plants, animals, and people all having much more opportunity to thrive. A few short centuries ago, the whole continent was rich with deep roots, the water table was higher, the fisheries and game herds were overflowing, hectare after hectare of Chestnut trees giving a family’s worth of calories away for free. And every place, be it mountain or hot spring or salt lick, had a story. I was also learning that those life-ways weren’t in the past (another flawed notion I’d been passively raised into) but with me in the here and now, embodied in practice, consecrated by ritual, spoken in countless languages, passed in berry-stained stories from mother to daughter today, and again tomorrow.
Some part of me knew for my whole adult life that I wanted to be part of building up soil, sowing new seeds. I was raised in a world of consumption, at the top of the pyramid of a global empire, disconnected from the ground that sustains me, the living cycles that housed, clothed, and fed me. In my life I have drifted closer and away from this understanding, this clarity of purpose. But now, in agriculture, I get to be a producer, a steward of growing things: where I was always meant to be.