Friday with Wendell Berry

It’s a day for a little Wendell Berry. These two excerpt come from “Solving for Pattern,” found in Berry’s collection of agrarian essays, The Art of The Commonplace, where he proposes 14 solutions — more like guidelines — to current problems in food production and farming:

6. A good solution embodies a clear distinction between biological order and mechanical order, between farming and industry. Farmers who fail to make this distinction are ideal customers of the equipment companies, but they often fail to understand that the real strength of a farm is in the soil.

And:

11. … An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism.