The Value of Topsoil
“We cannot speak of topsoil, indeed we cannot know what it is, without acknowledging at the outset that we cannot make it. We can care for it (or not), we can even, as we say, “build” it, but we can do so only by assenting to, preserving, and perhaps collaborating in its own processes. To those processes themselves we have nothing to contribute. We cannot make topsoil, and we cannot make any substitute for it; we cannot do what it does.” Wendell Berry
A lot of what we are doing on the farm right now is repair work on the fields. We have taken the fields out of production and we are grazing a small herd of ruminants rotationally, but there is still much work to be done.
This is a picture of a wash on the north end of the farm. In a single rain event a couple of weeks ago, this head-cut in our creek advanced more than twenty feet upstream, taking with it many cubic tons of earth. It is a strange thing for there to be ground, and then the next morning for it to be gone.
I remember seeing the work of artist Claire Pentecost where she seeks to create a currency of living topsoil called soil-erg. Her artifacts are rectangles of compost stacked like gold bars. I love what she has to say:
“The dollar is an abstraction of value, the ultimate rendering of equivalence enabling all other commodities to be traded and circulated on a global market. Money as we know it has an obliterating function: it lets you forget all the human and nonhuman effort it takes to sustain life.
The important thing about the soil-erg is that it both is and is not an abstraction. Symbolically it refers to a field of value, but that value is of a special nature: it must be produced and maintained in a context. It is completely impractical to circulate it. It is heavy, and because of the loose structure required of good soil, it falls apart. It only makes sense when located in a place. The physical nature of the soil-erg both evokes and denies the possibility of coinage. If currency as we know it is the ultimate deterritorialization, the soil-erg is inherently territorialized.”
