Hanging In
The stress over this drought lived in my subconscious until last week when I started dreaming about it. One dreamscape was on fire, the cornfields to the south of us ablaze, dense smoke obstructing the sun and challenging our breathing. At this day and age, that's someone else's reality. Our compatriots in the west and our neighbors to the north deal with dry seasons and their world on fire. Not us, muggy midwesterners. But how much our climate here is changing reminds me that nothing is sacred.
After airing out my anxieties over the weeks-long absence of rain, I realized that the source of my worry stems from the greater implications of this extreme weather, rather than our immediate concerns. We're hanging in there thanks to our steadfast well which pulls from a wealth of groundwater. In fact, we resisted the temptation to buy land in different neighborhoods around Dayton and waited as long as it took (a long time) to find a property that offered a good, deep, reliable source of water. I'm so glad we kept our priorities straight, as we have been so reliant on irrigation to keep our cultivated vegetables alive this second half of summer. Alive they are, but certainly not thriving. It's survival mode at this point with hot September days in full sun and not even a tease of rain in the 10-day forecast. Even the most recent tropical storm withheld precipitation from the midwest, only sending on the leftover wind of a diminishing monster. The trees are losing their leaves and Jack just asked if it's Thanksgiving time. It's sure looking like it out there with all shades of burnt sienna, orange, yellow, and struggling green.
Looking out over the thirty acres of our farm, I'm relieved that the vast majority of it is in total perennial cover...the milkweed and grasses, the queen anne's lace and golden rod look exhausted by the perpetual heat, but they stand alive, holding soil and moisture in the shade of their foliage. A polyculture such as this mediates soil conditions. As wild and feral as it may look, its protective quality offers much more resilience than our annual vegetable plantings and the huge swaths of monoculture soybeans and corn which comprise most of our locale.
And so it's the annual agriculture within our garden plots which we rise early to irrigate with the very generous well that taps the ground here. We plant efficiently and tightly, with the intention of using less of our precious resources like water and even our time to cultivate the vegetables that sustain us. We prioritize watering the plants with shallow root systems which suffer the worst as those top layers of soil suffer the consequences of a D-3 level drought. By now, it might even be categorized as a D-4 as the southeastern counties of our state reached that lowest of lows last week.
I truly have never seen the ground so thirsty in our time here. The clay in our soil dramatizes the dire straits driving epic cracks through the less-watered spaces. One of our ongoing goals is to improve the tilth of the soil we inherited in rather a depleted condition after years of corn and soybean rotations. Believe it or not after seeing the photo above, we have come a long way following six years of feeding and resupplying the ground. And when I look to the ecosystem that has come back to life on our 20-some acres surrounding the vegetable plantings, I'm assured that we are having a positive effect on the land we manage.
Cause and effect...that relationship between two entities: the initiator and the initiated. We humans have the power and free will to set things in motion, to produce outcomes...outcomes which we can't fully predict, but which we have the ability to take stock of and react to accordingly. All this to say that in times of natural disaster such as this, I hope that on a federal and individual level we are taking stock. As someone who inherited the philosophy of leaving something better than you found it, we've got our work cut out for us as a people.
But once again, working closely with the earth has nurtured the optimism in me. Considering how much we have seen this little corner of the world rebound from naked earth studded with corn stalk stubble, I know much is possible. Regeneration is waiting for its chance. And with all that this place gives the earthlings who call it home, I hope that we do our part to care for it in turn.
Thank you for reading :).
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