Reflections on the controlled wild of the lands and animals we cultivate...

“An enduring agriculture must never cease to consider and respect and preserve wildness. The farm can exist only within the wilderness of mystery and natural force. And if the farm is to last and remain in health, the wilderness must survive within the farm. That is what agricultural fertility is: the survival of natural process in the human order.”

Wendell Berry, 1977


Despite our best attempts to harness the productivity of nature, the farm remains a place where the untamable courses just below the surface. The ordered banality of crop rows in summer conceals the inevitability of change, the ultimate sterility of winter. As the flowering fruit of our labor cascades toward an inexhaustible horizon, the perceived permanence of man’s structures becomes feeble before an awesome sky. In these agricultural landscapes lie innumerable expressions of human control over nature accented by the whisperings of our transience. Yet it is here, in the shadow of our own impermanence, where personal wildernesses are discovered. The sweat and toil reveals us for what we are: animals, ultimately reliant on our environment.

Perhaps it is expressed most fully in the creatures we raise on these cultivated lands. In the wildly expectant eyes of a goat lie suggestions of our own zealous desires for more. The vulnerability of a sleeping duck encourages our dominance as an assertive ram challenges it. The pompous stance of a rooster belies our egoism, while the curious stare of an inquisitive hen returns us to a sense of humbled wonder. These animals, perhaps due to our natural desire to anthropomorphize them, become a lens through which we once again see ourselves in the land. While we have worked since our beginning to exert control over these landscapes, the ever present reflections of our transience and inherent wildness remind us of our undeniable dependence on that which we attempt to control.

Emily Gray Koehler, 2011