This Christmas I stayed close to home. My parents live about an hour’s drive away, as do my aunts and uncles, my grandmother and great grandmother. My other grandparents travel to visit their children and grandchildren in central Arkansas frequently. Even with staying close, the burden of travel was difficult—I had to come back to the farm every day to feed the animals and do whatever minimal chores needed doing.

To actually go away for a week? That takes at least a month of planning—finding someone to take care of the farm and setting up the chores to be as easy as possible.

I am an oddity in my need to stay put. Most people can go away for a week or two without too much anxiety. We are, as many have put it, a transient people. Our vacations are only a taste of our ability to move. Most Americans live in something like seven permanent residences in their lifetime and that number seems low.

At one time there were many more people who had to stay put. They had a farm or at least chickens, a milk cow, or a pig. It was only when farms failed with the great depression that people began to become transient en masse.

The correlation seems to hold—when farms fail a mobile public arises. Now that less than 3% of the U.S. is involved in agriculture we are perhaps more mobile than ever. The question we must ask is this: what does mobility mean for our culture and landscape?

Wendell Berry, in his book The Unsettling of America, argues that transience leads to a lack of care for the land and that only through settling can we properly care for a place. Over a long time of living on a landscape we begin to develop a deeper knowledge of it—what its problems are and what solutions are possible. If we move constantly how can we know a place deeply enough to save it? How many of us know where our watersheds are? Or how the landscape around us has changed over the past fifty years?

My knowledge of my place is limited, but with the tether of my farm I am learning the borders and features of my bioregion and how to care for it. Staying put is a possibility for all of us whether we live in a city, a suburb, or the countryside. Wherever we are, we have great models in this love and care—Walt Whitman with his Brooklyn, William Carlos Williams with his Patterson, Wendell Berry with his Port Royal, and Gary Snyder with his Sierra Nevadas.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer and farmer living in the mountains of central Arkansas. After earning a degree in philosophy Ragan spent some time working in Chicago, but decided that he'd rather be back in the rural Arkansas of his childhood. After two years apprenticing with an organic sheep farmer Ragan set out to start his own farm, called Adama Farm (‘Adama’ is the Hebrew word for ‘soil.’) He raises sheep, cattle, chickens, and a very rare breed of pig called the Gloucestershire Old Spot Pig. In all aspects of his farm he tries to use sustainable practices and he experiments constantly with finding better ways to farm at nature's pace. 

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Posted by Ragan Sutterfield on Jan 2, 2007 at 11:01 AM
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