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at Laverstoke shuttling between the kitchen and a corner of the large room where the twelve men sat around an old English table (King Arthur’s Round Table came to mind) explaining their farming methods and philosophies. They were brilliant, engaging, passionate, and inspiring in a way that you know will stay with you for a lifetime.
    There was Joel Salatin, in the days before he was made famous by Michael Pollan in his book
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, speaking about energy exchange and pasture-based farming; Willem Kips,
from Denmark, who married traditional biodynamic farming with modern technology for high yields; Frank Morton, an Oregon seed breeder who quietly revolutionized American salad with his new varieties of greens; Thomas Harttung, whose pioneering community-supported agriculture program today supplies organic vegetables to more than 45,000 homes in Denmark and Sweden; Fons Verbeek, of the Netherlands, who spoke about animal-vegetable relationships; Joan Dye Gussow, the nutritionist and innovative organic gardener considered by many to be the founding voice for the local-food movement; and Amigo Bob Cantisano, a California organic farmer, adviser, and creator of the Ecological Farming Conference, with a résumé almost as impressive as his salty-gray Tom Selleck mustache. One after another, without pretension or exaggeration, these farmers described their unique contributions to farming.
    No one spoke directly about how their work translated into crops with more flavor, because it was simply understood. I got hungry just sitting there.
    And then Klaas Martens rose to tell his story. Standing six foot three, with his John Deere baseball cap askew and his overalls hiked alarmingly high, he looked more Gomer Pyle than agricultural statesman. I decided to get back to the kitchen, but as I turned to leave, Klaas offered the group a simple question: “When do you start raising a child?” Just like that. It was an oddball opening to a talk about his life’s work, but Klaas’s humble, practical tone drew everyone’s attention. I stayed for the answer.
    Klaas said he’d come to the question through his interest in the Mennonite community, a group he had known over the years and greatly respected. He explained that Mennonites forbid the use of rubber tires on their farm tractors. The Fertile Dozen shook their heads in near unison. Klaas smiled, acknowledging the severity of the decree—steel-tired tractors inch along, slow as oxen.
    He said one day he got up the nerve to ask a Mennonite bishop whyrubber tires were forbidden. The bishop answered Klaas’s question with a question: “When do you start raising a child?” According to the bishop, Klaas told us, child rearing begins not at birth, or even conception, but one hundred years before a child is born, “because that’s when you start building the environment they’re going to live in.”
    Mennonites, he went on, believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It’s that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss.
    Around the table, heads nodded in silent recognition: Klaas had just described the problem with American agriculture.

CHAPTER 2
    I F FEELING humbled in the face of nature is what you’re after, skip the Grand Canyon and stand in a large field of wheat. Or stand in any grain field next to dozens of other, contiguous grain fields. The wide, ripe expanse doesn’t just surround you, it envelops you. It makes you feel small. I once heard the environmental lawyer and activist Robert Kennedy Jr. speak of an epiphany he had. God talks to human beings