The Sky Was Empty and The Land Was Dead

A warm spring day--not a cloud out, visibility for miles and miles. There were tractors breaking ground in field after field that we rode by. Perhaps the most tractors that I have seen in a day working at the same time in many years.

And there was not a single sea gull devouring the worms in the broken soil. Seagulls use to flock by the hundreds to eat the bugs and worms that the plows and cultivators would deliver to the surface. Not now. The feast is gone. 

Modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides have turned living soil into sterile death beds. With an altered and nearly non existent subsoil biome the only way that we can grow crops on such land is to force feed more poison into the soil. Farmland no longer consists of soil in much of our nation. Farmland is merely an enormous pot that holds the seed and poisons that must be replaced annually if the seed is to grow. 

And then on the way back from the ride an even more chilling sight struck me. First I noticed that the cotton stalks had not rotted although we had had one of the wettest and warmest winters of my life. As we went by a cornfield I saw that the lower ten inches of each dead cornstalk was still standing. 

Then I looked between the corn rows. Much of the remainder of the stalks were simply laying there. They had actually lay there, in contact with the soil, since last fall yet they had not decomposed and returned their nutrients to the soil.

The soil was so poisoned that decompositional microbes did not exist in sufficient numbers to rot the fibrous, pithy corn stalks. 

We use no poisons on our land. The picture above is of land that we slowly transformed into silvo pasture from mixed pine and hardwood growth. We did it by hand and much of the work was accomplished by using multispecies grazing to strengthen the soil. We practice and teach soil and water conservation, microbial pasture development, and wild life habitat production. I have been delighted (and surprised) at how much young children love to learn about the importance of a diverse and healthy biome beneath the soil if we are to produce healthy life above it. 

Our program is multifaceted from music, to horse training, to riding, to heritage breed  livestock preservation, to alleviating the effects of trauma--but teaching kids that poisoning the earth upon which they walk is a bad thing to do might be the most important aspect of what we do.

If you want your child to be a part of our program send me an email at msindianhorses@aol.com