Manny Howard’s new book, My Empire of Dirt, is haunted by the living ghost of Wendell Berry.  First there’s the epigraph by Berry in which he instructs us on how to “use land well,” and it includes knowing and loving the land, and using the right tools. (To paraphrase a master, poorly.)

Then, early on in Howard’s recounting of a season spent trying to turn his south Brooklyn backyard into a homestead, the voice of Wendell Berry comes to him, offering further wisdom. Only problem is, Howard confesses in the epilogue that “On the Farm, Wendell Berry girded me.  Not that I had ever read a word he’d written until I was back at my desk, trying to make sense of the year.” Huh?

As a gimmick for a magazine article—which this book started out as–I suppose this premise makes sense. “You like locavorism New Yorkers, well locavore this!” Smart, quirky journalist, looking for a new drug, seeks quixotic project sure to provide (mis)adventure and a cover article, all while basking in the local-food-cum-DIY zeitgeist.  If the piece that resulted a few summers back in New York magazine made you squirm, then I hate to think what you’d make of the long version. Howard enters into his project recklessly, voraciously, cluelessly. Many animals were harmed in the writing of this story. He sawed off his own finger, too.

For me (a first-time grower trying her hand slowly at windowsill tomatoes and basil as well as some Kentucky Colonel Mint) the core lesson here is about new farmer development.  What does it take to learn how to farm and do we have a system in place right now for people to do so? One can try to learn to farm Howard’s way, flailing about with expensive hydroponic systems but no instructor, or one of his other trials and subsequent errors.  It’s no surprise, though, that at the end of the book he is no farmer.  He has relinquished most of the endeavor and is a man with a couple of backyard chickens and a vegetable patch. I am somehow reminded of something I heard Will Allen say: that he wanted apprentices at Growing Power who plan to be farmers. That he doesn’t want people there dicking around for a summer (once again, to paraphrase a master, poorly).

A person who truly wants to learn how to farm in this country has some pathways to begin, but I think we can all agree that there are not enough of them.  Apprenticeships are a good start for many new farmers–but they are just a beginning, and in some places, like California, they are under threat. How can we help new farmers find mentors? And find the time to continue their pursuits until they have not only found knowledge but also the meaning of their work?

Berry’s final words to Howard are about the place of knowledge, the importance of work, and the necessity of taking one’s time while working and then again afterwards to understand the work’s meaning and worth.  Howard’s experience bears out the need for mentorship (knowledge, work) and the need for duration (time).  He was a stranger in a strange land and because he did not have knowledge, instructors, or an experienced growing community to support and guide him in his work, he was not able to sustain it (nor sustain himself; for a variety of reasons, including a freak Brooklyn tornado, his farm produced little food).

I wish he had found Berry before he set out in his backyard.  But there is only so much you can learn from a book.  Even beginning with a conversation with a knowledgeable friend can help—that’s how I got this windowsill experiment started. Perhaps I wish Howard had found one or more of the many Brooklyn urban farmers and gardeners who have spent years now learning their way and teaching it to others. It would not have made for an article or book full of escapades and hijinks but he may have begun to root himself to the land and to the rich traditions of growing in that once-rural Borough, in that county of Kings.

In much the same way that Michael Pollan has told us in recent years not to trust our nutrition to the nutritionists, essayist, sage, and father of modern agrarian thought, Wendell Berry, instructs us that we should never have trusted our economy to economists. At least not to the ones who have been (mis)handling it for the last hundred years or so.

In his collection of new and renewed essays, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, Berry lays out clearly and concisely the hows and whys of our modern system’s failures, but far from being all doom and gloom, he points the way to a properly prioritized economy. It may at times feel a bit Utopian, but it is perfectly plausible, sustainable, logical and, in the end, necessary.

Right from the start (in fact in the second sentence) he explains that “In ordering the economy of a household or a community or a nation, I would put nature first, the economies of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth.”

In this list of priorities it is easy to see – and no accident – that the economy that has failed us so miserably at least twice in the last century is ordered in precisely the reverse. It has relegated its citizens to the status of mere consumers, duping them into confusing wants for needs, and “the gullibility of the public thus becomes an economic resource.” It’s a meager stumble then from Plutocracy to Idiocracy.

Berry is a farmer who sees the world from a literal ground level. In one of the essays, “Faustian Economics,” he contends, “The real names of global warming are ‘waste’ and ‘greed.’” He has no tolerance for the conspicuous consumer, accusing him of not only “Prodigal extravagance” but also of having “an assumed godly limitlessness.” These are accusations that would not sting so much if they weren’t true.

The irony bears noting, by the way, that in our energy deal with the devil – only the most recent downside of which is the horrendous catastrophe now killing the Gulf of Mexico – the dirty, pollution-prone fuels come from the depths, while the sustainable, clean fuels come from the heavens. Yet we insist upon more of everything now, guaranteeing a whirlwind harvest, a condemned future. A Faustian bargain indeed.

Also noted here, parenthetically, is a thought on biofuels, or what fellow deep thinker Raj Patel calls “the preposterous notion that we should grow food in order to set it on fire.” Berry says, “Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production, we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but – Thank God! – still driving.”

The essays in What Matters? are at once lyrical and concise. The author’s meaning is so unimpeachable and his logic so solid that I defy an economist of any stripe (in the unlikely event that they would read the book) to refute his contentions.

The sort of economy Berry envisions, indeed the sort of local food economy that so many of us are working toward, will undoubtedly come to pass. It will come the easy way or the hard way, but it will surely come. Make no mistake, the easy way is by no means easy – things worth doing rarely are – but the hard way is desperately, dustbowl hard. We fail to heed Mr. Berry’s warnings at our children’s peril.

On a cold, sunny Kentucky day at a solar-powered livestock gathering, otherwise known as the American Grassfed Association’s annual conference, I began to feel something like nostalgia. I say “something like” because it was an ironic reminiscence for a past agriculture I’ve never known yet at the same time feel connected to. Maybe this experience was not nostalgia, but instead an apparition of a sensibility returning to sow the seeds of posterity’s stake.

Inspiring this apparition was the contrarian and prophetic voice of Wendell Berry, a farmer, a poet, a lover of grass, a lover of sod. The Unsettling of America, his critique of the myopic “get big or get out” agricultural model that dominated the 1970s, was far ahead of its time, yet seemed and still seems to sit, collecting dust, on the shelves of those who’ve made major agricultural policy decisions since the 1970s. And with the same awareness he shared in The Unsettling of America, Berry now offers a concise and declarative message for agricultural planners and farmers alike—“all farmland needs to be under perennial cover.” This is the message he’s written in the forward of a forthcoming book called Grasslands by Fred Kirschenmann.

In his address at the conference, Berry expanded on that message to describe how a spongy sod under perennial cover benefits the health of our land, watersheds and people. He elaborated on the consequences of the present, temporary and highly specialized agriculture, which is based on cheap fossil fuels and chemicals and treats living organisms as machines. This agri-industrial model is predestined to be a relic for the simple fact that it uses up to produce. Enter perennial grassland. In contrast to this agri-industrial approach, which undermines soil fertility and food security, a perennial plant-based agriculture builds, through deep and extensive root systems, a healthy, responsive sod that is more adaptable in times of drought, disease or flood. A perennial plant-based agriculture is also more supportive of natural ecosystems, increased biodiversity and soil—our common ground and connection to all.

The benefits of a perennial agricultural approach are manifold, and will significantly increase under the devoted care of young and new farmers. As Mr. Berry states, these farmers will need to have complex and extensive minds, unlike the simple minds of the agri-industrialists. They will need to fit their farming to the nature of their farm and to understand and honor soil fertility. They will need to know their neighbors and respect their debt to nature. They will need to conserve, through husbandry and artistry, the balance of plants and animals on a diversified farmland. They, first and foremost, will be friends of grass and will, with humility and courtesy, remain true to the land.

Furthermore, this new generation of farmers will recognize this need not as a back-to-the-land folk agricultural recollection, but a call to action for a new era of growing that will all at once be demanding, desirable, delicious and down-to-earth. And like they to their land, we, armed with a considerable power of choice and resistance to standardless salesmanship, will remain true to them by what we choose to buy or not to buy. This, as Mr. Berry maintains, will impact the health of whole communities—ourselves, the place where we live, and all the humans and other creatures who live with us.

Yesterday, two of the sustainable food movements great leaders, Wes Jackson, plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, and farmer/writer Wendell Berry opined on their growing concern for the havoc we are wreaking on our soil.

They talked about the long term damage of even normal rainfall, “by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland” — should there not be practices in place to consciously rebuild the soil — and went on to state outright the other great threat, “degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.”

Those alien technologies and procedures? Our current industrial agriculture system, which promotes a one-crop-at-a-time policy, and ignores the lessons learned over 10,000 years of agricultural practices (inter-cropping, small-scale farming using minimal oil inputs), instead promoting the discoveries from agribusiness-funded labs over the last half-century.

Most chillingly, Berry and Jackson reminded us that “Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland.” For further reading, see Jerad Diamond’s best-seller Collapse.

But they didn’t stop there.  The authors throw the gantlet down on the theory and values behind our economy over the last 50-60 years, when “we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food.”  They go on:

“If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.”

Their suggestions included increasing acreage in perennial plants and long term thinking in our next Farm Bill.  But will Obama stop taking the limp approach to food that he has so far (see Vilsack) and finally recognize the centrality that food has to all other issues?  We shall see.

The authors credit the growing interest of producers and consumers for beginning to change our unhappy fate.   I for one don’t know enough about soil, but I’m learning.  I’ve decided to begin composting in my basement — I’ll be picking up my worm house from the Union Square farmer’s market on Saturday.  And I’m hoping to set up a composting station on the roof for myself and my neighbors in the springtime, hopefully to produce some good soil for our garden.

I know for most people, the word soil alone is enough to make your eyes grow heavy.  But it is time to wake up to the fact that our whole life is dependent on good topsoil, and we are slowly but surely sealing our own fate.