Here in the upper South we don’t have winter so much as three months of T. S. Eliot’s April, vaccilating between cold and cold comfort. Deep self-confident winter permits acclimation, the body and soul to put on layers of fat and wool against the cruelty without, but the occasional dip from jacket weather into parka cold promotes only whining. An inch of snow and traffic tangles like unused Christmas lights; six and we huddle in our dens as if beset by flaming hailstones. The forecast of a subfreezing afternoon comes with instructions on how to dress.

Survive thirty inches of snow or thirty degrees below zero and one has at least stories to tell one’s children, photographs for the album, video worthy of YouTube. Bitter cold and blizzard might stoke the fires of hardy stoicism or join neighbors in forced cheerfulness, but here even commiseration is half-hearted; the shared experience of not bothering to own a snow shovel is as comforting as unheated soup. Our winter’s banality is its most painful aspect: We don’t, after all, have all that much to complain about, and less to teach us not to. And so we shiver and wipe our soggy feet and wait for the spring we believe to be our birthright, when we can forget this whole sorry business ever happened.

You may find this too long to read online, and I’ve made a PDF available. Whichever version you read, I’d appreciate your comments.

Last spring my wife and I began raising ducks. We bought seven Khaki Campbell ducklings, set up a brooder in a spare room, raised them to adulthood, watch them take their first wobbly flight across the yard, and now each day collect their eggs for our table. When we have extra eggs — which is most of the time, for our ducks lay prodigiously — we give, sell, or barter them to friends. On one occasion, accepting a dozen eggs from me, a friend asked, “Are they organic?”

Well, I thought, it depends on what you mean. By a commonsense, dictionary definition, the eggs are organic; they are laid by ducks who are raised outdoors, who eat a diet that includes the bugs and tender greens that ducks naturally eat, and who are integrated into the life of our household. They are, I could have answered, part of an organic whole that includes my family, my local ecosystem, and now my friends and community.

But that isn’t what my friend meant, and so I answered as he expected. The eggs were not produced in accordance with the USDA’s organic standards, I explained, because the commercial feed that is the basis of their diet in winter and supplements it in summer was not mixed from organically grown grain. Organic duck feed is not widely available — as far as I can tell, it is not available at all. So no, they are not “organic” after all.

But, I told him, I can tell you anything you want to know about the ducks and how they were raised. You can come visit, if you want, and see how they are raised.

There is nothing standard about my ducks or their eggs. They live in a suburban backyard, first of all. They don’t have a pond; they have a baby pool. They slept in a pen under our second-story deck until I had time to build them a proper house. They eat whatever grasses, garden thinnings, kitchen trimmings, insects, bugs, and slugs happen to be in season, alongside their ration of duck kibble. Their eggs are also far from standard; they vary in shape and size, as normal eggs do before the variations are culled by industrial processing. Rarely we find an egg that is small and almost perfectly round, entirely yolk inside. I have learned to judge by eye how many eggs of varying sizes I need to make up the number of “standard” eggs demanded by a recipe.

Last summer I killed chickens for the first time, and there was nothing standard about that, either. My friend who raised them underestimated how much protection the young broilers needed from predators, and after a raccoon mauled several of them, they spent their last few nights in the covered bed of an old pickup truck until I could arrive with cleaver and pot to dispatch them more humanely and purposefully. I botched the job of killing the first poor bird, and we shredded the skin of several chickens before we found the proper method for removing feathers. I would recommend little of what we did to anyone else; let’s call it a learning process. But they were without question the best-tasting chickens I have ever eaten.

When we decided to get ducks I could not have easily articulated my reason for wanting them. Now, I can: for breakfast this morning I fried two eggs over-easy that we had gathered only an hour before, and while I ate them I watched through the kitchen window as the ducks who laid them bathed contentedly (it seems to me) in their pool. That breakfast is what I wanted: good, rich, complex-tasting food from happy, healthy animals; a breakfast in context. I wanted to see the process of agriculture, from beginning to end; to participate in my own sustenance, but especially to know that it was made in a manner I believed to be right. It is not, on reflection, so much to ask. But that knowledge — intimate, personal, complete — is something I can’t get from a supermarket, no matter what standards my food meets, no matter how many agencies certify it with how many eco-labels. I wanted knowledge not labels; process, not product; stewardship, not standards.

A desire for stewardship, this concern with process instead of product, was once behind the movement toward organic farming. The first proponents of organic farming in the 1940s argued for a link between soil health and human health, a link that raised fears for human health and nutrition but also spoke to a belief in the wholeness of nature. Even the most scientific of its backers believed that organic farming, being modeled on nature, was closer to God’s will than its chemical alternative. By the 1970s, organic farming had become bound up with environmentalism, Appropriate Technology, feminism, and various social concerns that set agriculture in broader context. The market for organic food was bolstered by fears of rampant technology, by distrust of corporations and large-scale production, by a desire for food production on a personal scale — by people’s desire to know where their food came from. And farmers and market gardeners started growing organically out of a desire to be good stewards of the land.

Organic agriculture now seems in danger of forsaking stewardship for mere management. That, ultimately, is the goal of the National Organic Standards — to codify the practice of “organic” agriculture and reduce it to a set of principles for managing the land. I am not going to criticize the organic standards as standards; that is, I am not going to quibble about whether a better set of standards could have been written. They represent a significant improvement over most agriculture in the United States, and our national agriculture would surely be improved if every farmer adopted them. Organic standards are a great step forward in farm management. But they are not, and cannot be, a guide to farm stewardship — at least not on their own.

The problem, I think, is in the very idea of standards. The purpose of standards, ultimately, is to do away with individualization, with variation, with diversity — to standardize. And I do not believe that farming, or food, should be standardized. Standardization is the cause of most of the problems organic farming was meant to solve or avoid: lifeless food, distant producers and consumers, farm consolidation and rural depopulation. What we need, in American agriculture and American society, is not more standards, not better management. We need more stewardship.

What do I mean by stewardship? Like many words with moral overtones, its meaning is both obvious and murky. Consider, for example, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a local organization of which I am a member. Its title gives a hint of its mission, and that mission is very different from that of an organization called the Carolina Farm Management Association. Or consider the uses of “stewardship” in the Bible, which is, in Western culture, the source of most of that word’s connotations. The original, literal meaning of a steward was one who took care of a household, and descriptions of good stewards appear throughout the Bible. A steward is more than a good manager; he is “faithful,” “wise,” a member of the household he stewards and a loyal servant to his master, with a personal connection to both. Hence it is stewardship that becomes the model for the apostles’ relationship to God and to their church. They describe Christians as “stewards of the mysteries of God” (I Cor. 4.1) and as “stewards of God’s varied grace” (I Peter 4.7). One could not sensibly be a manager of God’s grace and mysteries.

Management is a more recent invention. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management, which set the table for twentieth-century definitions of management, defined the goal of management to be efficiency, the maximization of production and the minimization of waste. The sole necessary attribute of a good manager was competence. “The principal object of management,” Taylor wrote, should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.” He goes on to explain that “The words ‘maximum prosperity’ are used, in their broad sense, to mean not only large dividends for the company or owner, but the development of every branch of the business to its highest state of excellence, so that the prosperity may be permanent.” Management theory has no doubt come a long way since Taylor set out its principles, but those principles remain the same; American business is (or is meant to be) still run by them nearly a century later.

The differences between stewardship and management are subtle, but important. Most importantly, the thing of which one is a steward is assumed to have intrinsic value. Management is solely focused on the end, the product; stewardship is equally focused on the means. A good manager, say of a corporation, is expected to maximize production or profit, and all other goals (the quality of the product, the well-being of the workers) are subsumed under that end. The corporation itself nor any of its parts has value of its own apart from the profit it can produce. But a steward of a household or a farm or the earth (corporations do not have stewards) must also be concerned with the health and well-being of the household or farm or earth and of all of its members, because it and its members have a value in and of themselves. A steward may also fairly be expected to get results, but within certain bounds — namely, the long-term health of the persons and places involved.

Stewardship is also by implication performed in the service of someone or something, not as a mere job or profession but as a duty. Stewardship of the land may be performed for God or for “the people” or for the earth itself, depending on the religion and politics of the steward, but it is not performed only in the service of oneself or of a multinational corporation and its shareholders. Stewardship implies responsibility — that the steward is responsible not only for something but also to someone.

Farm management, then, would have as its the goal the maximization of production and therefore of profits — and though economic success is surely one indicator of good stewardship, it is not the only such indicator. Farm stewardship implies that personal care is involved and that the farm has value apart from the profit it produces, that it is not a thing to be used up and thrown away when its productivity declines. Similarly, “land management” — which is what the Forestry Service practices, for example — requires maximizing the return to human masters (the farmer, a corporation, the government, the public). Good management requires maximizing that return over the long term, but it does not imply that the land has intrinsic value; its value is only as great as what it produces — the sum of its products. Those products may be intangible (“scenic resources” or even “biodiversity”) but they must nevertheless be categorized and quantified and assigned a monetary value, usually by being made to turn tangible profits (perhaps in the form of tourism) — to pay for their management.

If stewardship and management have different ends, they also demand different means. In particular, they require a different kind of knowledge. Whereas management requires only data, information that can be analyzed and assimilated, stewardship requires intimate, personal knowledge. The Spanish language makes a distinction between these two kinds of knowledge: Saber is to know as a fact (“I know that the sky is blue”), while conocer is to know personally (“I know you”). It is a distinction I wish I could as easily make in English, because conocer could also be extended to personal knowledge of a place, and thus to stewardship of a piece of the earth or of a farm. Conocer requires long experience: To say that I know my wife means that I know intuitively how she will respond in a given situation, not because I can predict her behavior from a mathematical model but because I have seen how she has responded in similar situations in the past. One could similarly know a piece of land from experience. A good steward can know the household or farm or place for which he is responsible, but can anyone really know a corporation — or “the environment”?

So stewardship must be small-scale, local, personal, experiential. Humans may be collectively stewards of the earth, but individually they can only be stewards of a small piece of the earth. They may, as the slogan goes, think global, but they can only act local.

And that brings me back to organic agriculture.

The word “organic” in agriculture once meant a host of things — a connection to natural processes, first of all, but also a sense of wholeness and harmony between producer, consumer, and nature. That combination of meanings was what attracted consumers to the term in the first place, the sense that “organic” food was safer and healthier but also more wholesome and planet-friendly. At first, though, organic food exchanged hands at local farmers markets, where producers and consumers could communicate directly. There was, to use the Spanish word, conocer: people knew where their “organic” food came from.

By the 1980s, organic food had attracted a large enough market that companies began to process and package it — at first, mainly as juice and milk and frozen vegetables. Without direct communication between farmer and consumer, the consumer had no way of knowing what “organic” really meant, and so states and nonprofit organization wrote sets of standards to define the term for commercial use, by laying out what were essentially best-practice guides to farming.

Multiple, overlapping sets of standards are not quite standards after all; they allow for some diversity, communication, an opportunity for practicioners to learn from one another. And no one was prohibited from using the term “organic” to mean a somewhat different process of growing food. Now, however, we have created a set of national standards to define that process once and for all — literally, to standardize it, to make it the same, at least within certain bounds, everywhere.

But standardization violates the very idea of stewardship. No set of standards can replace personal knowledge, conocer, of where our food comes from. Organic standards provide a consumer with some information, and they are better than nothing, but they are merely a stopgap, an unfortunate necessity of the failure of conocer.

The organic standards, first of all, fail to relate intimately to place — as stewardship must. Some farmers in Michigan, I am told by a participant in the process of developing the standards, argued that “organic” farming should preclude amending the soil with any off-farm product — a grand idea in the upper Midwest, perhaps, where the soil has retained much of its ancient fertility, but an impossibility in the South, where centuries of tobacco and corn and carelessness have stripped the soil of its ability to support such high-mindedness, at least in the short term. The stricter standard was not adopted, and southern farmers may continue to practice “organic” agriculture. Yet the reduction of naturally based but industrially produced fertilizers is an admirable goal, and who is to say that farmers who begin with better land should not work toward that goal sooner rather than later? The Michigan farmers had a valid point — but for Michigan, not North Carolina. Farmers from Maine or Pennsylvania or Oregon no doubt had equally valid points for their own regions or localities, but they too were by necessity excluded from the standards, which must of course be the same everywhere. But the goal of organic agriculture was originally to model farming practice after nature, and nature is different everywhere. Clearly, that is no longer the goal of “organic” agriculture.

Proponents of the organic standards, like those of any set of standards, claim that standardization increases knowledge, by making sure that we really do know what we think we know. But in fact standards only define, and definitions do not expand knowledge. Definitions set limits on knowledge by drawing lines around it, categorizing it, bounding it. A set of standards does not (to borrow the legal term) take cognizance of what it does not define. As far as the organic standards and their legal enforcement are concerned, anything not explicitly mentioned in the standards does not exist. A farmer may, in fact, go beyond the organic standards, but there is no label or incentive for this. The old idea of “transitional organic,” too, has now been eliminated. A farm could formerly call itself and its produce “transitional organic” if it was in the process of becoming organic, but under the national standards, a farm is either organic or not — period. So much for the idea that organic is about process and not product.

The organic standards, though they purport to be about the process of growing food, take even that process out of context, and this is my central concern with them. Not only does “organic” take cognizance of a fixed, limited set of practices, but organic certification ends when the food leaves the farm. Food may be abused, processed until all flavor and nutrition have been beaten out of it, and still be called “organic” — just so long as it is not adulterated with too much food not grown in adherence to the standards. It is now possible to buy “organic” cheese puffs, an absurdity made possible only by an Orwellian reduction of language to officially sanctioned terms for officially sanctioned purposes.

What lies outside the bounds of “organic”? Consider, for example, the immediate human context of agriculture, the health and well-being of farm workers and farm communities. True, if no chemical pesticides are sprayed to drift downwind and no ammonia fertilizers are applied to leach out as nitrates into groundwater, farm workers and the local community are certainly less likely to develop various forms of cancer. But nothing in the organic standards mentions the farm workers or community explicitly. Some organic farms now span hundreds of acres; the loss of farms and farmers to consolidation poses the same threats to local communities — economic stratification and eventual depopulation — whether the consolidated farms or organic or conventional. Such large-scale farms are under no particular obligation, at least as far as the organic standards are concerned, to treat their laborers with dignity and respect, let alone to give them a living wage. This is not to say that large organic farms are breeding grounds for social ills; in practice, organic farmers of any sort are likely to be more socially responsible than their conventional peers. But the standards do not require it of them, and without personal knowledge of the farmer and farm, we really have no way of knowing.

Or consider the use of inorganic fertilizer. Organic standards prohibit the application of petroleum-based fertilizers for a number of reasons. Their contribution to the nutrition of crops is minimal (they provide only a few basic chemicals in simple form) and they are harmful to the long-term health and productivity of the soil. They are also not a sustainable practice, because their manufacture requires petroleum, an extractive and limited resource, and produces pollution. But the standards say nothing about the use of petroleum in other aspects of “organic” farming and agribusiness. Most obviously, the land on which “organic” crops are grown may be (and on large scales, is likely to be) farmed with a tractor powered by petroleum. Worse, probably, is that organic food grown on the West Coast to be eaten in the East must be shipped from producer to consumer by truck — which requires, again, petroleum. If it reaches the consumer in the form of frozen organic dinners, it has likely been shipped several times to and from several locations, requiring even more petroleum — and that doesn’t begin to account for the petroleum used to process the foods or make the plastic packaging. The costs of all that petroleum in the depletion of fossil fuel reserves, in increased dependence on foreign oil, and in pollution and potential global climate change are externalized — in other words, dumped on someone else — by organic agriculture just as they are by conventional agriculture. By the time it reaches the consumer, “organic” food may not be organic at all.

And then there is animal welfare. I am not a vegetarian; I ask only that the animals that produce my meat, milk, and eggs be treated with respect, raised as close as possible to nature, and slaughtered with a minimum of trauma. This is, I think, not so much to ask, but it is more than the organic standards demand. To be certified as organic, livestock must have access to the outdoors, but how much access is not defined. According to the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), certifiers are bound accept the farmer’s judgment on whether animals have access to the outdoors; “virtually any documentation will do to support when and how much access is granted.” [1] Certifiers and consumers are thus at the mercy of farmers’ claims, the very situation that standards were intended to remedy.

But standards, after all, can never be truly standard; they can never provide perfect knowledge. It is folly to think that they can. Life is complex. Every human being is unique and highly complex; nature is deeply and richly complex. Any interaction between humans and nature is therefore bound to be wondrously, unfathomably complex. And thank God for it: Life would be dull indeed if it were simple and predictable. But standards, to be manageable, must look for the simple and predictable. A set of standards for an activity such as agriculture is like a model of an ideal version of that activity. But a model can include all of the detail of the thing it models only by reproducing it precisely, and then it is no longer a model. No set of standards can anticipate every contingency in the activity it seeks to standardize. There will always be room for interpretation, no matter how carefully the standards are written. And because interpretation will vary, true standardization will be impossible.

The danger of claiming as “standards” rules that are open to interpretation is already clear in the area of animal welfare, and the USDA is making it worse. Last fall, the Massachusetts Independent Certification (MIC) was ordered by the USDA to overturn its denial of certification of a poultry farm. MIC inspectors found that the operation failed to satisfy the National Organic Standards’ requirement that poultry have access to the outdoors, but the USDA now decided to reinterpret (or rewrite) the standards in such a way that, according to NOFA, “as it now stands, eggs and meat can be sold as organic even if the animals spend their lives essentially indoors.” [2] Since the standards as approved require that poultry have access to the outdoors — though they are notoriously vague on just how much access — this interpretation appears to be in violation of the law, not to mention of the desires of most of the thousands of consumers and farmers who commented on the draft standards in the late 1990s. But I suspect that this incident will be the first of many such “interpretations” of the organic standards to benefit the USDA’s core constituency of large-scale producers. When we substitute standards for knowledge, we are at the mercy of those who define and interpret them.

Were perfect standardization possible, we would have no fear of interpretation, but there is only one realm where precise standardization is possible: the factory. If what is desired is a precise mechanical object, we can and do define standards for its manufacture. Such standardization is the basis of the industrial system. But agriculture is not (or should not be) about producing precise mechanical objects; agriculture is about life. Genetic diversity, microclimates, variation in soils, and a myriad other factors make farming a variable process, not subject to standardization — unless we turn agriculture into a factory, which we are, in fact, rushing to do. Precisely bred livestock remove most genetic diversity, and cloning will soon eliminate the rest; designer fertilizers (whether organic or conventional) eliminate soil variability; genetically engineered crops will eliminate variability in product. Organic farming was begun in opposition to such mechanical and industrial farming, but the fetish for standards only makes these things more likely.

Indeed, organic agriculture is already taking on the aspects of the industry it once opposed: We are seeing what happens when an idea like organic farming hears the siren song of bigness. And bigness is what this whole business is really about. Standards are, as I suggested earlier, both necessity and effect of bigness, for we rely on standards as a substitute for knowledge when what we attempt to control is bigger than what we can truly know. The national organic standards are no exception; they were adopted as a means of making organic food available to a mass, i.e. national, market. If all organic food were to be purchased directly from farmer by consumer and eaten locally — or sold through a single personally known and trusted agent, such as a cooperative grocery store — national standards would be unnecessary. Local and regional standards would suffice for local and regional food production; national standards become necessary only when food is to be grown in one region, processed (perhaps) in a second, and eaten in a third. But national distribution means bigness.

One could imagine a nationwide system of production and distribution of organic food that is separate from the industrial-agricultural economy and does not replicate its evils, and I suspect that this is what many organic farmers and activists who supported the drive for national standards did envision. But if such a system is possible in theory  — and I am not convinced that it is, or that any single “system” of agriculture designed to feed 280 million people can avoid replicating many of the evils of our current system — it is not possible in practice, not at least in the United States of America at the turn of the twenty-first century. Organic agriculture is, therefore, slowly being co-opted by Big Agribusiness. Nearly 70 percent of the retail market for organic milk is controlled by one corporation, Horizon; General Mills’ organic division, which includes the Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen brands, dominates several markets. Some $10 billion in organic food is now sold in the United States each year. [3]

Our industrial system of agriculture has one fundamental goal: to produce and distribute food at minimal cost to the consumer. By cost, I mean cost in both time and money, and minimizing these costs leads to the twin defining characteristics of most American food: cheapness (in quality as in currency) and convenience. So what happens when the organic standards are married to this principle of minimal cost?

In the part of North Carolina where I live there is, or was until recently, a local chain of grocery stores that sells primarily organic food. In the mid-1990s, this chain was bought out by a national chain, Whole Foods, and what has happened to it since is instructive. Wellspring Grocery, as the local chain was known, had three stores at its peak, all within a half-hour’s drive of its original location. As a local retailer, selling locally grown food was an important part of its mission. The high walls of the produce aisle were adorned with poster-sized photographs of the farmers who supplied the fruits and vegetables, making it seem a once-removed farmers market. The purpose was marketing, of course, but the photographs were visible proof of the truth behind the marketing.

Since the corporate takeover, those photographs —  and the truth behind them —  have gradually disappeared. One local farmer who would not wish to be named, after supplying Wellspring with seasonal tomatoes for years and being one of their literal poster boys, was recently told that his prices, which had not risen significantly over the years, were now too high, and that he would have to lower them to compete with organic producers out of state. He refused, on the grounds that at the prices they offered he could not both farm responsibly and turn a profit. The grocery severed the tie and now sells tomatoes from Florida and California; the farmer spends more Saturdays at the local outdoor market to make up the difference in income. The desire for local food lost out to the demands of bigness. Whole Foods’ mission is still to sell organic food, but (apparently) the cheapest organic food possible – and, as a quick walk down the aisles of one of its stores will confirm, in the most convenient form possible; literal whole foods are scarcer than processed and packaged foods, and growing more so. The company’s website summarizes these principles as “exceptional value” for the consumer, but this is marketing talk. Organic has merely supplemented, and not replaced, the principles of cheapness and convenience that defines industrial agriculture. [4]

We might wonder, too, what organic really means in this context. But one has only to look at its marketing to know. Despite the usual overtures to “the environment” or “the planet,” most marketing of organic food hones in on what the typical American consumer really cares about: personal health. A 2000 poll found that only 26% of consumers saw the good of the environment as a reason to buy organically grown food; 38% cited flavor, and 66%, by far the largest number, claimed health — their own personal health, not the health of the farm, farm workers, livestock, farm community, or environment. [5] And even personal health seems to be defined more by fear of pesticides and the cancers they cause than by a belief that whole foods (literally) are the building blocks of health. Hence organic cheese puffs become possible: If there is nothing particularly healthy to them in a positive sense, at least they contain a minimum of dangerous pesticide residues.

There is certainly nothing wrong with a concern for one’s personal health, or with a justifiable concern for what long-term consumption of pesticide-laden produce might do to it. But it is dismaying to see organic food represented only by this concern for personal health, because to reduce agriculture to individual concerns forsakes stewardship. This is why organic food is able to fit so easily into the paradigm of industrial agriculture: it, too, minimizes costs to the consumer. We have long labored to minimize cost of the consumer’s time and money; organic-industrial agriculture seeks also to minimize costs of the consumer’s health. It is a good addition, but it puts us no closer to stewardship — no closer to putting our food in context, to seeing it and ourselves as part of a literally organic whole; no closer to seeing the process as clearly as the product. To blame any particular food chain for this is beside the point: The logic of bigness is simply antithetical to the logic of stewardship.

What, then, are the alternatives to organic standards? Is local better than organic? Is, for example, the environmental cost of shipping food 3,000 miles across the country greater or less than the environmental cost of using petroleum-based fertilizers locally? And what about pesticides? Is it better to buy local strawberries to which pesticide has been applied (as it usually must be in the South, if they are to be grown on a commercial scale) or to buy organic strawberries from California, where the climate is more conducive to growing certain crops organically? From the standpoint of the physical health of the consumer, the organic berries are preferable, but how do we weigh environmental costs? The questions are important ones, and difficult, and I do not have ready answers. But we need to be asking them — and the organic standards discourage us from doing so.

It is not merely “environmental” concerns, nor merely personal health that is at stake here. By buying local berries I am contributing to the health of a community and of a local economy, without which the health of one individual consumer or of one individual farm is unsustainable. This context, too, is missing from the organic standards — as it must be, of necessity, from any set of standards. The health of a community, to which I may contribute by purchasing food directly from a farmer with whom I have a relationship that is at least not solely economic, is based on personal, intimate knowledge, on conocer. When I say “I know that the moon is full,” I am not stating anything unique; any other person may say and mean exactly the same thing. The same is true if “I know that this food was produced in accordance with the National Organic Standards.” But to say that I know a person or that I know a place is to stake a claim to uniqueness of relationship. Inherent in such a statement is the belief that I am unique, that the person or place I know is unique, and that my knowledge of that person or place is unique — a belief that defies the very idea of standards.

And so the organic standards end up with too much environmentalism, abstracted, standardized, cut off from any knowledge of place — and therefore from any place, and therefore from everyplace. Organic standards, being a roadmap for mass marketing, are ultimately designed not for farmers or for rural consumers but for urban consumers and for those who supply them, for people with no knowledge of a farm or a community or a place and for the people who accommodate their desire to live in ignorance. Consumers who buy “organic” frozen dinners at outrageous prices in gourmet grocery stores are using those standards as a blindfold to the ills of “modern” agriculture.

All else being equal, I would prefer to buy organic food. But “all else being equal” is a hypothetical standard, a condition only imaginable by one with no real and particular knowledge. In practice, I would be willing to accept less than organic from farmers whom I know — as I would accept less than perfection from people I know, because they are not equal to all else. But in a supermarket aisle I have no choice but to assume all else equal; I have no means of determining whether it is equal or not.

Eating food that merely meets a fixed set of standards for production is, to me, rather like sleeping with someone you’ve never met but who can produce a doctor’s note certifying them free of venereal disease. It’s safe, but it isn’t good, and it isn’t meaningful. I would rather know where my food comes from.

Since the organic standards were adopted in 2001, several prominent individuals and organizations have proposed additional or alternative standards that would provide at least partial answers to these questions. The American Humane Association certifies meat, eggs, and dairy products as “Free Farmed” that are produced in accordance with standards of animal welfare. I have read or heard several discussions about the wisdom of creating a new term that sets different or higher standards than the national organic rule. But to create new standards would only repeat the mistakes of the past; the problem is less with the national organic standards as adopted and interpreted than with the very idea of standardization.

As another alternative, Eliot Coleman, one of the great gurus of organic farming, has proposed an “Authentic Food” label that would define “local, seller-grown, and fresh” food. The standards for such a label would not, as Coleman says, be set in stone, but would require that farms attempt, to the greatest extent possible, to replicate the processes of the natural world. They are written in general terms: “Soils are nourished, as in the natural world, with farm-derived organic matter and mineral particles from ground rock.” Perhaps most significantly, Coleman would require farms producing “authentic” food to welcome visitors so that customers “can be the certifiers of their own food.” [6] Such principles or guidelines — for lacking an expectation of standardization, they are not really standards at all — would encourage the sort of personal, intimate, thoughtful knowledge for which true standards pretend to eliminate the need. They invite us —  all of us, producers and consumers alike —  to ask questions based on shared principles, rather than to accept the answers of legally enforced dogma.

Organic standards do not, of course, preclude us from asking questions, or from growing to have that intimate and thoughtful knowledge. Organic farmers are, on balance (“all else being equal”), more likely to know their land than conventional farmers, and a consumer may well take an initial interest in knowing a farmer because she farms organically. But I fear that “organic” will become an end in itself rather than a step on the road to better agriculture, a final goal for consumers rather than what it really is — a stopgap substitute for knowledge and stewardship.

Should that happen, it will, in the long run, only reinforce the trends, cultural, economic, and social, that led our agriculture to become inorganic in the first place. Organic agriculture began as organic gardening, as an alternative to an industrial system of agriculture. But it is now being co-opted by those who wish to perpetuate that system, who profit from it and wish to continue profiting from it by converting organic agriculture into a market niche. The victory of organics will then be a pyrrhic one: it will have somewhat reformed a bad system, but at the price of extending and legitimizing it.

The one true alternative to standards — short of neglect and disinterest — is stewardship. But we live in a society based on neglect and disinterest, not on questioning and personal knowledge and placing our food and our lives in context; that is why we have standards in the first place. Standards give us the illusion of control, of broad, sweeping knowledge, but they do not provide understanding, and that is what stewardship demands. And because one can only know so much in the thoughtful, careful way that true understanding requires, one can only steward so much — and so we must all become stewards. This is, needless to say, much harder work than standardization, more difficult to build and maintain than a set of management standards. But it is absolutely necessary if we want real change in agriculture, in our food supply — and in society.

Is this too much to expect from a society increasingly dependent on the crutch of standards? Perhaps, but it is not too much to ask. Keeping ducks (for example) has not required me to reorganize my life; it has required no great investment of capital. It is not, really, all that much to do. But think what it could mean to have thousands or millions of Americans, each with their own backyard flock, producing eggs for themselves and their neighbors, asking and discussing and learning from one another, adhering to basic principles of stewardship but finding their own paths to agricultural wisdom. Think how much more we could learn and improve if we encouraged true diversity rather than giving one “best practice” the force of law. Think how much more secure our food supply would be with not only more producers, but more diverse producers, immune from any single tragedy or wrong turn. Think of the havoc it would wreak on our industrial economy if everyone decided to do — and think – for themselves.

I know, of course, that millions of Americans are not about to begin raising ducks, or to take up any similarly productive agricultural activity. I can indulge myself for a few minutes at a time by imagining that they will, but they won’t, at least not anytime soon. Until they do, we will continue to rely on standards to save us from our own negligence. And yet it is absolutely imperative that our standards not be so rigid as to discourage independent thought and experimentation — that they not, in other words, succeed completely in standardizing our food production or any other vital human activity. We must continue at least to allow some room at the margins for diversity, even if our economy and culture do not actively encourage it, if for no other reason than that such marginal diversity produced organic agriculture in the first place.

At the very least, we need to use standardized organic agriculture as a scaffold on which to build the next generation of improvements to agriculture. But since those standards now have behind them the force of law and forbid explicit scaffolding, farmers who want to continue to improve their agriculture may have to work outside those standards entirely. I know several professional farmers who have done just that, giving up the organic certification they worked so hard to obtain and of which they were once so proud that they might instead maintain the freedom to innovate, to produce on a small scale for local markets, to explore the possibilities of stewardship rather than standards. The loopholes and omissions in the national organic standards make it easier for many to forsake them, and in that sense it may be for the best that the standards are imperfect: If they were more satisfying to more people, they would be harder to eschew, and much future innovation might be lost — even if that innovation only happens at the margins.

All of this leaves would-be agricultural revolutionaries in the uncomfortable position of working to change the world one farm – indeed perhaps one backyard — at a time. But perhaps to imagine anything more would be to get ahead of ourselves. If it is stewardship we want, the change we need most is one of attitude: to give up the illusion of control, trusting instead in ourselves, in nature, and in the inherent value of diversity, taking up the challenge of building personal knowledge and understanding. And that is a change that can only happen one person at a time. So I’ve begun with my own nonstandard family and our nonstandard ducks. It is a very small beginning, one that gives me no cause for self-satisfaction or self-righteousness. We have a long way to go; we are still learning, and knowledge, like stewardship, is a path, not a destination. But it is a beginning.

1. From the December-January 2002–03 issue of the NOFA-Mass News, previously available at http://www.nofamass.org/programs/social/hen1202-103.html. [return]
2. ibid. [return]
3. Figures from Horizon’s 2002 investor report, available on its website at www.horizonorganic.com. [return]
4. Whole Foods notes on its website that “We obtain our products locally and from all over the world, often from small, uniquely dedicated food artisans,” but a careful reader will note the equally careful wording that conceals the company’s operating procedures. In its list of “core values,” Whole Foods ranks “exceptional value” to the consumer far above an explicit commitment to buying local. Indeed, as a publicly traded corporation with stores nationwide, it could reasonably be expected to do little else. [return]
5. Geoffrey Cowley, “Certified Organic,” Newsweek, September 30, 2002, 52, 54. [return]
6. Eliot Coleman, “Beyond Organic,” Mother Earth News, December/January 2001–2002, 73–74. [return]

All the agrarians I know… became agrarian so that they could get away from “luxuries”.

Apparently he believes, based on various things I’ve said around here, that I indulge in too many luxuries and am therefore not worthy of the term “agrarian.”

Wednesday night a windstorm knocked our power out, and I got to thinking: What’s a luxury? Electric light, when suddenly it bathed the house after a winter night’s absence, seemed luxurious. But our oil lamp, which uses a mantle to throw the light of a 60-Watt incandescent bulb, would have been a nearly miraculous luxury to anyone living before 1900. The dimmer light of our simple paraffin-oil lamps would have been a luxury to most people before that. The beeswax candles we lit would have been a luxury to people stuck with tallow. Plenty of humans throughout history felt lucky to have a cooking fire, and eleventh-century Englishmen had to douse even those after dark.

Ice. Ice is a luxury, which I noted when I hesitated to open my freezer lest the meat spoil. My correspondent would say bourbon is a luxury, but humans have been making alcohol for thousands of years; we’ve only very recently figured out how to cool it. The Sumerians, now: They drank warm beer, unhopped, and they were glad to have it.

Socks. Socks are damned hard to make by hand, and time-consuming. Definitely a pre-industrial luxury. I don’t know that I could be bothered to knit my own.

My MacBook, obviously. But I also have a fountain pen (invented 1884), storebought ink (no need to husk my own walnuts!) and copious sheaves of white paper. I get all back-to-the-land-y inside when I write little essays with my fountain pen by lamplight, but Albertus Magnus would think me horribly spoiled.

When I was researching Pennsylvania Dutch history I found a story from the nineteenth century of a farmer who grudgingly tolerated his wife’s growing of strawberries, which he thought frivolous.

We could take this as far as we want. Do you really need a car — or any form of transportation other than your own feet? How about a coat? Cooked food? The pillar-saints would say not, and might well consign you, me, our wives, our sheep, our asses, and St. Francis of Assisi to an eternity of cleaning the nasty toejam from Mammon’s nails.

I don’t think agrarians need or ought to be anchorite. Indeed I think nearly everyone would agree we’re permitted more than merest survival. I’ll grant, of course, that mindless consumption of every crumb within reach is reprehensible. But between the extremes of meager asceticism and rank gluttony stretches a broad range of possibilities. Either end is suicide, but where in the middle is sustainable life? Where’s the peak on the Laffer curve of luxury?

The ideal lies considerably to the left of where most Americans presently are, I’m fairly certain. How far, I can’t say. “Luxury” is in the eye of the beholder. I can sit around and condemn the lifestyles of investment bankers while receiving emails from farmers who think I’m an effete brat but who would, in turn, be thought magically lucky by the homeless guy I pass on the way home from work every day who would himself be envied by tenth-century serfs and people in Zimbabwe just hoping not to get cholera this week. I’m reminded of what George Carlin said about driving: Anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac. Or, as the Good Book says, it’s a heck of a lot easier to see the strawberry in somebody else’s eye than the caviar in your own.

For Christmas I bought her a few tools of her own — hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, try square, and carpenter’s pencils — never underestimate the value of rectangular pencils in making a child feel like a real carpenter! More important, I built her a workbench of her own.

It’s a scaled down version of my own workbench, which is not a proper joiner’s bench but a fairly simple table-like structure designed to go against a wall. I built it in graduate school, and combined with a Stanley WorkMate it’s a good solution for a small space. Some of the attraction of the mini-bench is that it’s just like dad’s, but it’s a solid, functional table for a child.

The bench is 33 inches wide, 21 inches deep, and 25 inches high. The width is somewhat arbitrary — big enough to be useful but small enough to fit in the available space. The height and depth are tailored to the worker: The benchtop should be at a comfortable working height, and it is as deep as her arm is long, so that she can comfortably reach the tools on the peg board without their being in the way while she works. Since everything is put together with bolts and screws, I can replace the legs with longer ones when she outgrows the bench.

The body is made of two-by-fours, joined with half-lap joints with either carriage bolts or screws: four legs, a rectangle at top, and two stretchers on the sides and one at the back (but none at front, where it would get in the way). The top is plywood, with two-by-four stops along the back and left side to hold work in place and keep little items like screws from rolling off the back. The peg board is framed with one-by-two-inch pine, rabbeted to hold the peg board and joined at the corners with butt joints and screws. The whole project would be less than a day’s work for someone who could actually spend a solid day in the shop.

I chose the pegboard rather than a toolbox because, first, it’s what I use — again, I was trying to make it “just like dad’s” to maintain the feeling of doing real work. It also lets her see all of her tools at once — which is a nice feeling for a woodworker of any age — while providing a proper place for everything, to reinforce the lesson that a good craftsgirl keeps her workshop neat and her tools safe. And, finally, it adds to the feeling that this is her space in the workshop.

New Year’s Eve winds knocked down another big old loblolly pine across the nature trail, and so I had to start the year by playing lumberjack. This pine was just big enough to make a lot of work with the bow saw and just far enough from a power supply that my electric chain saw was no help, but it was rotten enough that the work went quickly. Two-thirds of the way through with the saw was enough, and then a good whack with the poll of an axe finished it off. I wasn’t about to repeat the process unnecessarily, though, so a freshly sawn cross-section of pine the diameter and height of an eight year-old’s head watches you coming round the bend.

Our woods are at the age when the first-generation pines are dying off and being replaced by hardwoods, but in this little section of woods the secondary succession is going slowly, with only two skinny sweetgums in an area several yards square. That section is lower than the rest and stays wet much of the year, and I wonder if the trees in the surrounding woods simply don’t propagate well in such damp bottomland, or whether saplings are more easily felled by vines (we are overrun by fox grape and, until I started ripping it out last summer, oriental bittersweet) when their roots have only loose wet earth to cling to. Come spring I may try clearing out the tangle of vines and pine stumps down there and transplanting a few saplings that won’t make it elsewhere.

Meantime the trail is clear, even if alongside is still a bit of a mess — but that’s the wild woods, and by June the foliage will have hidden it all anyway.

Realistically, a president (or anyone else, for that matter) can take on only so many established interests at once. Obama has a certain amount of political capital to spend on programs that will be unpopular with the people or with the powerful, and he’s made his priorities clear from the beginning of his campaign. Agriculture isn’t one of them. If you thought it was, you were hearing what you wanted to hear. Given that his priorities lie elsewhere — with clean energy, education, and health care — he can’t be expected to appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who will take on big agribusiness. Even if his sympathies are with sustainable agriculture (and they may or may not be, depending on how you read them), he has to pick his battles — and that’s good, smart politics. If Barack Obama were not a terribly smart politician, he wouldn’t have beaten the Chicago political machine, the Clintons, and the RNC in his rise to the White House. But now he’s supposed to forget everything he knows about politics and take on everybody at once? If you want to win, you have to stay focused.

I’m trying to imagine how any person could have been elected President in 2008 with sustainable agriculture as a key issue, and I can’t see it. First, there are too many pressing matters right now for structural change in agriculture to bubble to the top, even if it had broad popular support. (Two wars, a massive recession, and frighteningly volatile oil prices would lead any sane politician’s list.)

Second, a large majority of Americans do not understand these issues. They have no idea what conditions are like in a “factory farm” or on the floor of an industrial slaughterhouse — or they choose not to think about it. They have no clear idea what “organic” really means, or why it is better, or indeed whether it’s better at all. They see $4 cartons of cage-free brown eggs and $20 locally-raised free-range chickens as luxuries they can’t afford. And they know nothing at all of Roundup-Ready corn and spider goats and seed saving. They, too, have other priorities.

Third, the nature of Presidential elections and the structure of the federal government doesn’t favor a radical shift in agriculture policy. It’s difficult to get elected without support from “farm states,” especially when a big one, Iowa, holds the first caucus and an important key to a candidate’s success in later primaries. It’s even more difficult to get legislation through Congress without support from those states, which despite their small population have equal representation in the Senate. A farm-state governor or senator who takes on big agribusiness is likely to have spent his political capital and run himself out of office before he has the chance to run for President, because taking on corporate interests while still seeming to support family farms is a very difficult balancing act. A city or coastal candidate would have to take the shortest possible route to midwestern support, and that’s supporting the agricultural mainstream.

Finally, sustainable agriculture is to a great extent about the small and the local. How, then, does it make sense to think that the USDA will support that? Functional, effective, successful and sustainable community-based agriculture wouldn’t need the USDA at all, and no massive bureaucracy is voluntarily going to bring about its own end. Nationalizing the organic standards helped big farms and corporations sell through supermarkets far more than it helped CSAs and farmers’ markets (if it helped the latter at all). Any new regulations will be hardest on small producers, as regulations always are. The USDA itself would have to be completely restructured, and restructuring a federal agency is never easy — as the Department of Homeland Security has demonstrated.

Structural change isn’t coming to agriculture in 2009. It wasn’t coming in 2009 no matter who was elected President. That doesn’t mean it isn’t coming eventually — but it is going to take a lot more education to generate the kind of broad-based political support that would make that kind of change possible. We are, after all, talking about a revolution. A realistic hope for the Obama presidency is that his administration not actively make anything worse, keepbig agribusiness on a six-foot leash, and give farmers, teachers, and activists time to continue the work of real change. There’s no harm in asking for more — indeed we should certainly ask for more — but the danger of expecting more is that we become too quickly frustrated when we don’t get it, throw up our hands, and quit. I was disturbed to read that activists felt “despair” over Vilsack’s nomination. Disappointment, sure, but despair? Obama ain’t the Messiah, folks, but he’s a heck of a lot better than the last guy, so let’s accept the small victory and get back to work. We are, after all, the change we seek.

Originally published in the Northern Agrarian, September 2008.

In June a black swallowtail butterfly laid a single egg in the windowbox of parsley on our front porch. Several days later an almost microscopic caterpillar emerged and did what caterpillars famously do. When it left its patch of parsley to become a chrysalis we couldn’t find it in the tangled mess that a seller’s agent would call shrubbery, and we hoped for the best. The miracle of a butterfly is a cliché, but it’s a miracle my daughter, who is four, hadn’t yet witnessed, and she gave me daily — if not hourly — updates on the caterpillar’s progress. And, really, it’s a miracle that never grows old. When the aptly named “Parsley” went off into the wide world we were all a little disappointed that we wouldn’t see her emerge as a butterfly.

Then in early August another swallowtail appeared — and laid, this time, nine eggs that we could find. They had barely hatched when the butterfly was back to lay a dozen more. My daughter, of course, insists that the proud mama is Parsley herself, and she might well be, returning to her own safe nursery. Seven of the first — what do you call a bunch of caterpillars? A clutch? A litter? — survived, and this time we found all of their chrysalises, attached to forsythia branches, the underside of porch steps, and the vinyl siding. As I write this they are still hanging there, waiting.

Early in the summer, while eating dinner outside, we watched a nuthatch bring her several fledglings to the feeder I’d hung from a sweetgum branch near the picnic table. My wife remarked that she had seen a nuthatch at a park and none of the women she was with had ever seen one before. I was baffled; we’ve always had nuthatches. I don’t think of them as rare or extraordinary.

But nuthatches, like woodpeckers, nest in dead wood — in rotting trees, broken limbs, old woodpecker holes, or holes they’ve dug themselves in soft wood. And in the urban parks and suburban yards where most people see birds, there aren’t any dead trees. Once a suburban tree has ceased to be pretty, it’s removed like the day after Christmas, before it has a chance to fall on someone’s house. Even dead limbs are quickly pruned, lest they crash through a windshield. Decay isn’t ornamental, and in crowded conditions it’s a liability.

So although nuthatches aren’t threatened with extinction, they need habitat that most people can’t see from their front porches. Which is a shame, because they’re pretty birds, and fun to watch, especially in late spring when they brought their young to our feeders. The juveniles, still fuzzy and awkward, buzzed in close to check us out while their mother fluttered impatiently from another tree: Get a move on! That part of the life cycle, like the butterfly’s emergence, is attractive to us humans. But it depends on another part of another life cycle — the slow death of a tree — that most of us would rather not have around.

Nobody wants a tree to fall on their house, but the aversion to dead trees isn’t all practical. The great dead oak just beyond my back fence, which long ago lost its limbs and most of its bark, seems beautiful to me — towering against the sky, a relic of decades past refusing to fall, reverberating with the insistent sounds of woodpeckers — but I expect I’m in a minority. If a kindergartener assigned to draw a tree slashed this single line of brown on the paper, it’s hard to imagine the teacher’s reaction — a talk with the parents? Therapy? Your daughter draws dead trees. The correct Platonic tree has spreading branches, flush with leaves — unless in winter, but even then we focus on the twigs and buds awaiting warmth. Dead trees aren’t pretty, and they remind us of things we’d rather not think about.

I notice, too, that while there are plenty of photo essays and children’s stories on the internet about the “life cycle of a butterfly,” they chronicle only the period from egg to winged emergence. We don’t see what happens to the adult butterfly after she leaves the dried-out chrysalis and flies away. Nor do we see what happens to the mother after she lays her eggs. If, indeed, it was “Parsley” come back to our porch, we know what’s going to happen to her. When she laid her last eggs, her wing was torn. Butterflies don’t live long, and she was near the end of her life. Soon enough, she’ll be dead — eaten, perhaps, by one of our juvenile nuthatches, all grown up now at the end of summer.

Before summer ends, though, we’ll enjoy this last burst of new life — the happy, charismatic part of the life cycle, a reminder of spring before fall sets in. The butterflies should start to emerge in a few days, and it will be time to plant more parsley.

My back yard has never been in danger of winning any awards from glossy design magazines. Plantain rules a few patches where I let the ducks graze too freely. The old garden bed the dogs use for naps is grown up in weeds that are fascinating in their diversity and virulence but neither productive nor conventionally attractive. And one corner is littered with the detritus of a series of projects and incidents, planned and unplanned, that beset us last year. To wit:

• The wooden structure that used to shelter our ducks, an open frame of two-by-fours with a roof of plywood and tin. For several years after we moved the ducks to better quarters it stood under our second-story deck and kept bales of straw dry, but when we had the deck rebuilt last summer I took it apart and moved it, figuring I’d reassemble it as soon as the new deck was finished. I didn’t. A tarp keeps the straw dry, and the structure lies in pieces in a shady and unused corner of the yard.
• Three foot-diameter logs from a tree blown down across the fence; I sawed it up but the logs were too heavy to move any farther.
• A metal pole that used to hold up one end of a clothesline, still attached to the block of cement that held it in the ground before it was dug up to make room for a new septic tank.
• A stack of white plastic chairs, beneath which the grass has grown unmowed since early spring. (I don’t remember my excuse for leaving the chairs there.)

All of this would appear to the casual observer to be junk, but it’s hidden from the street by a post-and-rail fence and, at the moment, a half-dozen tomato plants, and the casual observer has no business standing in my back yard for a closer look. I have a vague gnawing Calvinist guilt about it, and one day I’ll clean it all up.

In the meantime, my excuse for leaving the mess is that the dogs love it. They snuffle under the chairs at whatever is hiding in the tall grass. They walk across the tin roof several times a day for no reason I can discern — that corner of the yard is far more easily accessible — except to hear the metallic rattle. They use the logs as balance beams. They seem happier, in short, to have all this mess to explore.

If you go to zoos, of course — modern, progressive zoos with open habitats instead of cages — you’ll see that a lot of energy and expense goes into keeping the animals mentally stimulated. They have flowing water, rocks to climb, multiple perches, ropes to swing from, indestructible balls — whatever will keep them amused. Animals are happiest in varied environments. So, logically enough, are my dogs.

Somehow we rarely think to apply these lessons to ourselves, but something similar seems to be true of humans as well. I’ve noticed that among our neighbors there is an inverse relationship between the amount of perfect grass in their yards and the amount of time they spend actually using it. The manicured lawns sit vacant like princesses while the half-tended, half-wooded lots teem with children and conversations. Not that working in the yard precludes enjoying it; some spend time and money on flowers and shrubs and then sit or walk among them, but the yards where the shrubs are most vigorously pruned and brought to order are sadly silent. The family in the Scott’s commercials — the kids running wide circles on the fairway-clipped grass, the parents cheerfully sipping lemonade in expensive wrought-iron chairs from which they survey their scientifically guaranteed domain — doesn’t exist. At least not around here.

I’ve read a number of articles and books lately about why the traditional big American lawn is bad. It provides no habitat for native insects and wildlife, it requires chemicals and gas-powered equipment for maintenance, it uses too much water. All true, but maybe there’s a psychological reason we should scrap the “perfect” lawn: Perfection is inhuman. It’s something to be worshipped from afar; up close, it’s off-putting and probably boring. The great suburban lawn is your grandmother’s white sofa on which no one was allowed to sit, the cake so beautifully decorated that no one will take the first slice, the leggy blonde no boy dares ask to dance. It’s no wonder we spend all our time inside: If we went out, we might mess up the lawn. And what is there to do on it, anyway?

At the same time all this mess was accumulating in our back yard last fall, on the other side of the yard I had to plant grass. I had never in my life planted grass — I’m happy with weeds and moss if it’s free and low-maintenance — but the installation of a new septic tank reduced a third of the yard to bare clay, and I had no choice. I bought pickup-loads of topsoil, bags of fertilizer, and grass seed; fenced off the new lawn, bedded it down with straw, and waited for spring.

Now it’s a broad, soft, even expanse of lush green in which any self-respecting suburbanite would rejoice. It’s also the least-used part of our entire property. My daughter plays soccer and croquet in the tiny front yard, blows bubbles in a half-cleared bit of woods, or runs down the nature trail building fairy houses from bark and pine cones. My wife and I sit in the clearings or walk the trail. This week we spend the better part of an afternoon in the woods looking for interesting fungi that have emerged in the recent wet spell. (And let me tell you: North Carolina has a lot of fungi.) The dogs get the back yard, and they, as I’ve said, thoroughly lack appreciation for the achievements of modern lawn science. We go out there to play with them, and that’s about all. The lawn looks nice from the new deck, but honestly, I’d rather see the fireflies whose grubs were destroyed when the old wiregrass was dug up. We have a few this year, but not as many as before. They don’t seem to think much of the new lawn, either.

About that time I started watching Furniture on the Mend on The Learning Channel, which starred two guys from Philadelphia who refinished and reupholstered old furniture. The upholstery guy, Ed Feldman, was the kind of guy who gave the impression that if he could do this, then surely you could too. Obviously he was highly skilled, but he didn’t go all Norm Abrams on you with eleven billion dollars worth of power tools and high production values and wise safety advice; he was just this guy from Philly.

So I figured, what the hell? I reupholstered the Comfy Chair. The old fabric was worn, dirty, and stained with dog drool, especially on the arm nearest the window. I bought some less-hideous but deeply discounted fabric (I was in graduate school), a dark blue with a cream pattern that was not quite floral, removed the old fabric piece by piece, and reupholstered the chair. Feynman, of course, freaked out. She glared at me for the duration of the project, even in her sleep. In the end it looked pretty good, certainly better than it had looked before.

Feynman quickly crudded up the new fabric. The chair moved to a new house and sat by two more windows. And then the Monkey came along, and we ran out of space in the house. Something had to go. I had long since realized that I should have replaced the padding and springs when I reupholstered the Comfy Chair, and even Feynman had moved on to bigger and better furniture. I tried to give it to charity, but no one wanted it. (The indignity!) So I trashed it.

I miss that chair. More than the chair I miss the idea of the chair. I miss having clear evidence in my living room that I am the sort of nutjob who will reupholster furniture for fun. I miss having a comfortable chair to read in, a chair I spent hours and hours working on and can never sit in because the dog has claimed it. Sadie, though she doesn’t realize it, needs a chair of her own if she is to be a full-bore basset hound bitch.

So last winter I cruised a couple of antique stores and came home with a $75 wingback chair. Structurally sound, more or less — nothing a little glue and a couple of screws couldn’t fix. The fabric was nasty — ugly, stained, and a little mildewy — but that was the point; that’s why the chair was only $75 and why I was going to reupholster it. I figured I’d done this before, I knew what I was doing, and I could afford better fabric. No big deal. I’d have it done in a month.

I bought some very nice fabric for it — at $30/yard, but I totally scammed Joann’s with a half-price coupon. That little newspaper insert cost them $150. If they stop printing coupons, blame me.

And then the gods laughed. Or at least Ed Feldman laughed.

I took digital photos of the chair from all angles so I’d remember how it was finished originally once the fabric was off. I removed the fabric, carefully, labeled each piece, and made notes about how it was attached and in what order I removed it. So far, so good.

Then I discovered that everything underneath the fabric was also nasty. The cotton batting was nasty. There was some kind of shredded woody stuff used for padding that was extremely nasty. The burlap and webbing were nasty. The twine tying the springs was worn, and I accidentally cut a couple of pieces of it getting the burlap off. When I was done removing everything nasty, I had bare wood and springs.

Here is an interesting fact about cushy chairs and couches that I did not know until March: The springs are individual coil springs mounted on the bottom of the chair that are tied together with twine to make a coherent seat. If you don’t tie them, they just flop around and you don’t have a chair, you have a mess. So I had to learn to tie springs. But tying springs is not something that normal people do. It is something that only professionals do. It is hard core. It is quite difficult to do well, so that you end up with a comfortable seat. And while you can buy everything else you need to upholster a chair at a Joann’s or a Hancock Fabrics, you have to order spring twine — yes, you need special twine — over the internet.

The bare wood frame and floppy springs sat in my shed for two months while I gathered the mental energy to deal with tying upholstery springs. It took me a used book from Amazon, three tries, and a lot of fiddling, but I finally got a flat seat. I’ll spare you the details, but basically you tack the twine to the frame, loop it through and tie it to various parts of particular springs, and then tack it down again at the other end; one twine per row, one per column, plus the diagonals. Here it is:

Next I had to build up the padding, which was easier, but my upholstery book didn’t go into much detail on how to do it. I suppose it’s different for every piece of furniture and you just have to experiment, which is what I did, but still, if you can provide engineering analysis of various types of foam surely you can offer a few more cutaway photos of foam and padding? But after some experimentation and more interesting discoveries (did you know that 3M makes a special spray adhesive specifically for upholstery foam? Now you do!) I got the chair padded.

To test it out I put the seat cushion foam in place and a comforter over top, and I am pleased to say that it is actually going to be a comfortable chair.

Which is good, because I am now into this $75 chair for about $600.

Next: cotton batting and muslin.