Trauma Farm by Brian Brett

rabbit—is the richest shit, far more nutritious than cow or horse manure. It’s the gold that enriches our garden, providing ample phosphorus and more potassium and nitrogen. We still collect the horse and sheep manure, but that’s mainly for texture and colloids to sweeten the soil. As you may imagine with a regime like this, the garden grows wealthier every year and even more abundant, especially since we rotate our crops of peas and beans to fix the nitrogen in the soil. A surprising number of gardeners aren’t aware that if they don’t manure but use only chemical fertilizers, they can lose up to an inch of soil a year; their gardens turn to sand and dust. Farmers have destroyed some of the great soils of the world with bad practices that led directly to erosion and salinization. The plow can be a weapon of mass destruction, depending on how it is used.
    Over the years I’ve met a few gardeners who seem to irrationally believe that seeds contain everything necessary to grow the entire plant. I like to think of the seed as a trigger for a process that thrives on water and minerals, millions of organisms, and organic matter, all powered by sunlight. Gardening is a technique for turning sunlight into carrots, and once you eliminate a participant in the process you begin the inevitable destruction of your garden. Bad irrigation practices are the main reason why the Garden of Eden (which became the green fields that once surrounded Baghdad) is now a salinized wasteland that will take thirty thousand years to recover. We are working toward the same fate in factory farms around the world.

    LIFE IS COMPOST — A PROCESS that goes back to ages before the first mutant child now called Homo sapiens squirted out of the womb. Yet we obviously caught on to compost long ago in the history of the garden. Most impressively, our mothers even discovered their placentas will feed not only the child in the womb but the garden after the birth, and thus began another time-honoured fertility rite—the burial of the placenta.
    As soon as our hunter-gatherer ancestors stopped moving, they had to think about compost. In the beginning, it was natural gaps in the forest—burn-downs, decayed wind-blasts— that could be used a few times before exhaustion. Then some genius discovered that you didn’t have to wait for lightning. You could “slash and burn” the forest or the grasslands yourself, and the soil was temporarily rich. Shortly afterwards, an old corral or coop sprouted richer greenery than the land surrounding it, and we discovered manure.
    This year I noticed unusual size patterns among our garlic. We make our beds about twenty feet long. One of these beds contained three circles of enormous garlic heads. Early in the fall, I had dumped my wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure on those spots and then got distracted (small farming is all about distraction). I never managed to dig it in until planting time. I rushed the job and did a poor tilling before we planted. The nutrients remained in a cluster, creating my prizewinning garlic bulbs. Those fat bulbs, and their runty neighbours, were a lesson in nutrition. Like Thomas Jefferson, I might be growing into an old man, but I’m still a young gardener.

    HISTORY — IF WE ARE NOT approaching the end of it—will remember our era as the Oil Age. It’s a short era among the many eras of our species. It began around 1850 and it should last until 2050, two hundred years. After that, all bets are off. Maybe before then. These hydrocarbons took more than 500 million years of creation in the long song of the earth. Currently, we are consuming them about 2 million times faster than they were produced.
    The polyculture and permaculture we naturally practise at Trauma Farm have been displaced by industrial mono-culture. Vast amounts of energy are now spent on both the production and the ingredients of oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and their distribution. It’s so strange when you