Thinking Like a River

When we drive by a modern farm, we still expect to see green plants sprouting from the earth, bearing the promise of food or cooking oil or a cotton shirt. Pulling up one of those plants, we are still prepared to find dirt clinging to its roots. Even in this age of high-tech euphoria, agriculture remains essentially a matter of plants growing in the soil. But another element besides soil has always been a part of the farmer’s life-water. Farming is not only growing crops on a piece of land, it is also growing crops in water. I don’t mean a hydroponics lab. I mean that the farmer and his plants inescapably are participants in the natural cycle of water on this planet. Water is a more volatile, uncertain element than soil in the agricultural equation. Soil naturally stays there on the farm, unless poor management intervenes, whereas water is by nature forever on the move, falling from the clouds, soaking down to roots, running off in streams to the sea. We must farm rivers and the flow of water as well as fields and pastures if we are to continue to thrive. But it has never been easy to extract a living from something so mobile and elusive, so relentless and yet so vulnerable as water. If there is to be a long-term, sustainable agriculture in the United States or elsewhere, farmers must think and act in accord with the flow of water over, under, through, and beyond their farms. Preserving the fertility of the soil resource is critical to sustaining it, of course, but not more so than maintaining the quality of water. In many ways, the two ideals are one. And their failure is one, as when rain erodes the topsoil and creeks and rivers suffer. But there are differences between those two resources, differences we must understand and respect. Unlike soil, water cannot be “built.” It can be lost to the farmer, or it can be diverted, polluted, misused, or over-appropriated, but it can never be deepened or enhanced as soil can be.