Regarding Plowing of San Joaquin

Find quote from The Octopus describing the huge scale of the plowing (for wheat at that time), even as early as the 1880s when trams of ten horses each drew wide plows not one but whole batteries of them in ordered ranks side by side thus [drawing], turning infinite diversity into monoculture, even into purgatory, beauty into money (or more often bitterness).

But even then—imagine this—even such mass-scale earth-churning as that had a feature to it that makes it almost quaint.  Quiet!  Except for the strain of the horses against the machinery and the commands of the foreman, those tillers of the soil could still hear the singing of birds (or, the high twitterings of Horned Larks overhead).  And they could still see the endless tapestry of flowers stretching to the horizons even as they plowed it under—because there still were songbirds in the valley—and maybe even the hum of insects.

Now, of course, we have denied ourselves even these amenities.  Now the plowboy is cocooned inside the air-conditioned cab of his monster combine, shielded from the roar and the heat and the stench of burning fuel and pesticide, with headphones to take the place of the songbirds and help to relieve the soul-eroding boredom of the new, improved scenery [strike the sarcasm].

How many million tiny flowers translate into enough cotton to make any one of those shirts that fill our millions of closets?

What did that plowboy of a century past think about the effect he was having on his landscape.  No doubt the thoughts were as varied as the plowboys.  No doubt most of them had the same attitude as that mastodon-hunter we talked about.

Besides, that first plowing was not necessarily the end of the show forever.  After all, the wheat-farming of those days was dry-farming, and by today’s standards, “organic” farming.  That all meant that the small, native plants that had painted the valley for all its millenia were able to coexist along with the wheat, as a kind of understory.  And depending on the season and frequency of repeat plowings, a pretty satisfactory balance COULD have been struck between this sort of dry-farming and the native flora—maybe even most of the native fauna.

Nature is resilient, and more than ready to work out symbiotic deals; after all, that is exactly what the whole “balance” thing is all about—it’s her stock in trade.