Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 2 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Of course, the Seymours' thesis is not new to a growing sector of American farmers and gardeners—not after Louis Bromfield, Edward H. Faulkner, Rachel Carson, Ruth Stout, J.I. and Robert Rodale, along with Ralph Borsodi and many others, have experimented with and written about the decentralist, organic, on-to-the-land movement.
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The Seymour record represents a distillation of the wisdom of all these writers and many others. Any devotee of the best in what some Americans now call the organic "green revolution" will see that the Seymours have read, digested, experimented with, and often improved upon earlier organicists. And the reader gets all this, not in a scholarly, stilted way, but as in a friendly, honest chat with neighbors. Picture John Seymour in dungarees, hat pushed back, at ease In some spot during chores, perhaps with one foot atop a fence rail, telling you about the day's experience—or last week's or last year's.
Certainly Farming for Self-Sufficiency comes out of the Seymours' experience, out of long years of the experience of unusually intelligent, honest and healthy human beings, who not only understand but love and enjoy their life-style. Here is a couple—a family—who farm for the fun of it! For the health, the diversity, and the sheer interest and satisfaction of it.
John lived and worked on farms as a boy. But this fact and his and his wife's eighteen years of homesteading do not make John and Sally just country people in any provincial sense. They are cultured people-college-educated, well-read, authors of many articles and several books. They have had plenty of professional and city experience. John was in World War II and later had a government job in A frica. But they are really more urbane than urban, with their true natures manifest in their life on the land. Their farming and their living are sound and authentic, honest, humorous, and human.
My background and experience is—as may be that of many a reader—somewhat parallel to theirs, a circumstance which only adds to my delight in and welcome to the book.
Long ago I put in my appearance on a Nebraska farm and was part of an early parental migration to a small town "where the children could have it better than we did. " In high school and college, I was "educated" away from a rural heritage to a profession in religious education and social work. Some years in authoritarian schools and in the salve of teaching handicrafts and (of all things) ballet to children of unemployed families during the Great Depression turned me to seeking better answers. I found Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford and This Ugly Civilization By Ralph Borsodi. To me these works contained strange doctrines for that time—critiques of modem industrialism, and in Borsodi's case, of modem farming. By 1939 Ralph Borsodi's School of Living, organized to deal with the response of his readers, had already been formed. To it I went forth with. There I found and experienced a new philosophy and practice of living—the normal, human, creative pattern of self-maintaining family homesteading.
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