Notes from the Farm 15 December 2025 – LIVING WITH LIFE

If we boil down the most destructive human activities, we get the following: humans are at war with life. This is nowhere more clear than in modern agriculture, where the goal frequently is the elimination of every organism other than the crop being grown. Crop systems for wheat, corn and soybeans truly seek to destroy everything else to the extent possible, and these crops account for the most acres of agricultural land in the US. That’s a lot of acres of death, either by chemical annihilation or starvation, of birds, bees, fungi and nectar-producing plants. Most of humanity’s nutrition is now grown in these petrochemical-intensive systems.

When production of the desired crop actually requires other species, we run into a different set of problems. Apples, blueberries, oranges, squash, melons and many others require pollinators, but populations of pollinating bumblebees, wasps and butterflies have been so thoroughly decimated by decades of chemical applications and loss of habitat that we can no longer rely on them to help us on most of America’s farms. Since our native pollinators aren’t around to do the job, we rely more and more on “Big Honeybee,” the commercial workhorse of orchard and field pollination. Millions of hives are stacked on flatbed trailers, trucked all over the country, and deployed by the thousands on farms. But mass transportation and deployment of hives has contributed to the proliferation of varroa mites, wax moths, and hive beetles, along with the various pathogenic bacteria and fungi these insects spread around. So beehives are collapsing at unsustainable rates. As many as 60-70% of commercial hives died in 2025, up to 30% over recent averages and far above the 15-20% annual loss considered sustainable by beekeepers. This is getting to be a serious problem for Big Ag.

So of course, Big Chemical is ready with solutions – miticides, insecticides, fungicides and antibiotics – to cure the symptoms but not the cause of what is actually wrong with modern ag.

This is a whac-a-mole game. Mites, fungi, bacteria, viruses, weeds – you pick a pesky problem – they always come out on top. How? When we put big populations of weedy organisms under extreme pressure, by say..spraying them with toxic chemicals, many of them adapt to this pressure. Mutations and standing variation within populations provide the variation needed for this kind of un-natural selection to work. This is how resistance to chemicals emerges, and more broadly how life works. So we are at war with life. And we are going to lose.

I mean, yes, we certainly have and will continue to kill off the rare and sensitive things – the uncommon birds, butterflies, orchids, orangutans and other organisms that are small in number and tied to specific habitats. Heck, we even killed off the passenger pigeon and there were billions of those, so there isn’t always safety in numbers. We will never, ever, on the other hand, kill all the crabgrass, rats, cockroaches, or Tinea fungi that infest our bodies, dwellings and farm fields. Though we might manage to die trying. In our misguided attempts at planetary control, it is unquestionably true that we put ourselves at far greater risk of extinction than any of the thousands of weedy organisms we kill by the countless gazillions every single day with our arsenal of chemicals.

There is a way forward, but this isn’t it.

So what is the way forward? Well, I don’t know, but I’m certain it involves getting along better with the living things around us, including other humans. I was touring the farm last week with Kassondra Rossi, an intelligent young woman from Oregon State, who works in the Herbarium and is pursuing a program called Horticultural Therapy. Kassondra is engaging, inquisitive and observant, just the kind of person we need to help us navigate our way toward a healthier mental state by connecting more with plants. Kassondra asked me to share my general philosophy, to which I responded that I am interested in “learning to live with life.” Here’s what that looks like:

I could have killed off this little Psilocarphus three summers ago as it was ostensibly competing with our crop of Berberis. But I opted not to. Instead, I let it grow, gathered its little woolly fruits and spread them around. Now there are more of these beautiful little plants around the farm, laying flat on the ground like fuzzy green pancakes. When you flip them over, invariably you’ll spy a half-dozen beetles scurrying to escape the sunlight. The Berberis? The crop came out fine. The woolly heads and the beetles? They are fine as well.

We get along with all kinds of life here at the farm. It’s way more interesting than the alternative. Here’s some Collinsia we let grow in a bed of spiraea:

We have so many pollinators here at the farm – mostly bumblebees, but also flies, beetles, hummingbirds, wasps, and even a good many wild honeybees. We don’t have to truck in freeway honeybees, and our apple, pear and plum trees are absolutely stuffed with fruit every single year. Nothing gets sprayed, we make a living, and we enjoy all manner of cool stuff..like this Misumena and an unlucky Bombus on Plectritis, growing on the edge of a crop of Prunus virginiana, and captured in an image by my daughter Lily:

Now there’s a web of life you won’t see on any other bare-root nursery. Thanks for reading, and thanks for buying our plants.

-George