From the City to a Cornfield by Mrill Ingram

from 2022 Farm/Art DTour Guide

Farming Conversations

From the City to a Corn Field

“I thought, ‘How could you separate yourself from this glory?…Do you see what the clouds look like when they are coming so strong over here, they look like a wave? Have you noticed? What is that? Who did that? How did that happen?’ ” —Alice Walker in conversation with Kai Wright, May 30, 2022

Photo by Katrin Talbot

Over the last several years I’ve been working on a particular way of seeing the world around me. As I move through space, often in a city, but in suburban and rural areas too, I work at trying to see every single bit of open space and exposed piece of land as special, energized by a unique history and a potential new story to tell. As I walk from my house I acknowledge the street terrace I cross, and think about how it’s changed in the last few years since the road was rebuilt. As I ride my bike I observe the paralleling green strip, notice new saplings, and remember the trees cut down when the city widened the path. As I move past a giant warehouse, I note the shaggy strip of land separating it from a road. The open space is bristling with honeysuckle and ditch lily, and a good sized mulberry stump sprouting a crown of hopeful suckers. How big did that tree get before it was cut down? Who might have enjoyed its plump, plentiful berries every summer? I pursue this thought exercise as a way to resist a habit of mind that disappears land. Many of us are so familiar with the notion of land as an anonymous commodity, something with minimal history and a future decided by someone who is often far away, we don’t ask questions. I think of this disappearing as a kind of “orphaning,” a severing of connection between people and the Earth they inhabit. We have our special, revered places, but many of us are surrounded by territory we routinely ignore. By seeing anew large and small spaces—the overlooked abused vacant lots, neglected back edges, or fenced off and mowed right of ways—I can feel a sense of expectation. All these places, in their ugliness and sometimes elusive or gritty beauty, all of them can expand a little, with a promise of an alternative reality. Because, of course, tremendous energy resides there. Think about the fencing, mowing, herbiciding, asphalt and cementing, tiling, channeling, lighting and other ways we “discipline” places so they don’t become full of life and activity that doesn’t fit in with our infrastructure needs. In the noticing, and in the asking of questions, and in paying attention to the feelings that different spaces can elicit, I’m attempting to shake off various strictures or blinders that foreclose possibility. Walking one early spring day with my friend John in a farm field, I observed the uniform rows of dried corn

stubble, emerging from pale clods of soil. My “orphan space” exercise worked here too. I could see easily the lay of the land; the field was bare except for the foot-high stalks that threw my feet off course with each stride. John was ahead We have our special, revered places, gesticulating, talking about land “beat to but many of us are surrounded by hell.” He showed me a giant gully created by territory we routinely ignore. heavy rains falling on bare earth, carrying away topsoil. It was full of big boulders and old rusty iron things. Then he started on about glaciers, and I began to grasp how massive ice created the remarkable undulations of the landscape, leaving a cap of cobblestones atop one hill. And there it was, an opening in my mind to expand on a “you’ve-seenone-you’ve-seen-’em-all” way of looking at a corn field. What I could so easily disappear, as I zipped past in a car, gained history and possibility. John talked about the woman whose family owned the land before, how long her family had farmed it, and how she donated it to support agricultural education. The new caretakers are planting an heirloom orchard and experimenting with agroforestry, alternating strips of hazelnuts and other woody perennial crops with annual row crops like corn and soybeans. In place of an anonymous corn field, I came to see glacial sculpture, a place

shaped and connected by flows of water from here all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I considered who walked here long ago, what happened to them. I think about the new stewards and all their ambitions.

Frankly, attending to how we physically and mentally “orphan” Earth can be exhausting. I rarely have answers to the questions that pop up, and much of the time I’m left uneasy by all that I don’t know, or by what looks to me like nothing going on. Uncomfortable histories can emerge whenever we ask questions about land: people violently removed or prevented access, bankruptcy, fights, abuse, pollution. But still, I feel stronger for attempting to tell fuller stories.

Many who work with the land are well aware of Earth’s generative energy as they manage it in specific, productive directions. Closely attending to land is what good farmers do. I think about something a farmer told me recently about the nutrient management plans that he submits for approval each year. Sometimes my plans don’t match with the guidelines, he told me, but when the agronomist calls, he can explain that while the recommendations are based on 100 acres, there is one 20-acre section that needs to be managed differently. “After a while she understood that I was doing a more fine-grained analysis,” he said. “I didn’t match the recommendations all the time. But she knows I’m paying attention.”

That paying attention resonates. I feel empowered entertaining questions that pull my attention outward, require more of my senses, and insist I acknowledge a particularity, something special. Why is that water pooled there? Look how it reflects the sky. And how does the sun move across this space? Who and what else might have taken in this view? What did it mean to them? These are good questions to ask. Even some of our most unremarkable landscapes can become an opening to think about a long, complicated history and a mysterious future. Places everywhere of reckoning and possibility.

Closely attending to land is what good farmers do.

Mrill Ingram is the author of Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth. She is a participatory action research scientist at UW-Madison working on sustainable and integrated agricultural systems.

Mrill Ingram

STORM

We all carry a storm inside He said to no one in particular Everyone at once Gathered in polite distances tempests spinning in our bellies

Our conversations a symphony of thunderclaps and howl electricity and torrent We trade glances, opaque with glacial cold and slow molten gurgles of stone

Ravaged by wind and wishing We are sand and secrets Broad acreages of intention and expectations devastated by unrelenting rains We are littered with fallen trees and debris Relief may never come maybe came and went maybe some will adapt to this rubble Some have already perished in depths of apocalyptic rains

We all carry a storm inside rainbow dreaming for a new, clear day

—Dasha Kelly Hamilton