Love, Knowing, and N-P-K

With love there is necessarily ignorance. This is not because it is blind as the old saying says, but because love recognizes the whole, it sees the real and it understands that the reality of the beloved is beyond the confining borders of comprehension. To know is to reduce, to enclose, to capture. To love is be always surprised at discovering the beloved. To love is to know that the beloved is always beyond any final knowing because knowing an infinite thing will always require reduction.

I begin by talking about love and knowledge because it marks the greatest difference between agrarian or traditional farming and industrial or scientific farming. For the past 50 years, farming has become dominated by technological science. It has not been science in the best sense, beginning in wonder and opening up more wonder by discovering what we can know only partially. It has been science of the type that has dominated the modern world—science aimed at knowing as a way toward control, power, and manipulation, knowing only the parts and mistaking them for the whole. With this scientific view the mystery of fertility became Nitrogen (N)- Phosphorus (P)-Potassium (K)—the three key chemicals to fertility, but by no means its limit. With that analysis the modern industrial agricultural machine began its work which, when paired with the retiring bomb-making factories of WWII with their tons of nitrogen on hand, began the march of the Green Revolution. By supposing to know the key to fertility, the industrial-scientific movement within agriculture ignored the complex network of billions of organisms, large and small, that work in the soil to keep the agricultural soil ecosystem at its best. Because they acted boldly on partial knowledge, we are beginning to see the environmental detriments of the N-P-K model.

Organic agriculture, before it became co-opted by the industrial-technological complex, was a reaction against the reductionistic N-P-K model of agriculture. Following the teachings of the British agronomist Sir Albert Howard, the organic movement taught that soil was a complex and living thing that, while certainly containing N-P-K, could not be reduced to it. Organic farming was about tending the soil with love and wonder—not inserting particular inputs for predictable outputs. Organic agriculture aimed at cultivating what was already in nature and though this took understanding, it never feigned comprehension.

But now we all know too much without understanding it. We believe that we have the answers to the most complex and basic elements of life when in fact we have become only experts in narrow fields, ignorant of the whole that might complicate our knowledge.

The environmental movement as a whole must not make the mistake of feigning knowledge as the agricultural scientists have. We need to be like the original organic farmers—seeking to understand a system we know is beyond our complete comprehension. This is a stance of humility, a stance of humus—close to the earth. We need to love more and quit pretending that knowing a part is knowing the whole.

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Posted by Ragan Sutterfield on Jan 7, 2008 at 11:59 AM
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This is the lovliest expression of the inestimable and intrinsic value of organic agriculture that I've read. Ragan gets it; she gets me. In this posting, she has articulated that which I have struggled to relate to others when they see me tear up at the news of yet another GMO approved for public consumption. Thank you, Ragan.

Posted by:GreenBee |January 7, 2008 1:15 PM