What Plants Teach Us About Being Human w/ Jack Algiere
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01:14:10
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Jack Algiere is Advisor and Chief Agroecology Officer at Stone Barns Center in the Hudson Valley, where he was the first employee back in 2003, when the place was a cattle operation and not much else. He is the author of Seeding Hope: What Plants Teach Us About Being Human, published this month by Chelsea Green.
Most of us go looking for nature somewhere else. Jack makes the case that the most dependable way back is the thing on your plate, because you can go most of your life without walking on bare soil, but every day you eat something that was grown on this planet.
We talk about observation as a skill you have to practice, why your hands and eyes are still the finest instruments in farming, and what gets lost with every degree of separation between a person and the soil. We get into land races and the flint corn he keeps deliberately mixed, the difference between seed security and seed sovereignty, why a seedless watermelon is closer to a parlor trick than an invention, and what Goethe and Rudolf Steiner still have to say to a working farmer. He closes with the food memories that actually stayed with him, none of which are meals.
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Episode 10
