Another perspective on sowing and reaping...

The following are excerpts from an essay by Wendell Berry called 'Conserving Forest Communities' in a book of essays named Another Turn of the Crank (1995).

...The history of these now-forested slopes over the last two centuries can be characterized as a cyclic alternation of abuse and neglect. Their best hope, so far, has been neglect-though even neglect has often involved their degradation by livestock grazing. So far, almost nobody has tried to figure out or has even wondered what might be the best use and the best care for such places...The soil, though not so deep as it once was, is healing from agricultural abuse and, because of the forest cover, is increasing in fertility...

... And so as I look at my home landscape, I am happy to see that I am to a considerable extent a forest dweller. But I am unhappy to remember every time I look (for the landscape itself reminds me) that I am a dweller in a forest for which there is, properly speaking, no local forest culture and no local forest economy. That is to say that I live in a threatened forest... woodlands as I have been describing are now mostly ignored so long as they are young. After the trees have reached marketable size, especially in a time of agricultural depression, the landowners come under pressure to sell them. And then the old cycle is repeated, as neglect is once more superseded by abuse...The economy of this kind of forestry is apt to be as deplorable as its ecology...

And so Kentucky forestry, at present, is mainly of two kinds: the casual and careless logging that is hardly more than an afterthought of farming, and the large-scale exploitation of the forest by absentee owners of corporations. Neither kind is satisfactory...we have never understood that the only appropriate human response to a diversified forest ecosystem is a diversified local forest economy...

...in the summer of 1982, according to an article in California Forestry Notes, three men, using five horses, removed 400,780 board feet from a 35.5-acre tract in Latour State Forest. This was a "thinning operation." Two of the men worked full time as teamsters, using two horses each; one man felled the trees and did some skidding with a single horse. The job required sixty-four days. It was profitable both for the state forest and for the operator. During the sixty-four days the skidders barked a total of eight trees, only one of which was damaged badly enough to require removal. Soil disturbance in the course of the operation was rated as "slight."

At the end of this article the author estimates that a tractor could have removed the logs two and a half times as fast as the horses. And thus he implies a question that he does not attempt to answer: Is it better for two men and four horses to work sixty-four days, or for one man and one machine to do the same work in twenty-five and a half days?...

A good forest economy, like any other good land-based economy, would aim to join the local human community and the local natural community or ecosystem together as conservingly and as healthfully as possible...
A good forest economy:
would be a local economy,
would be a decentralized economy,
would be owned locally,
would preserve the local forest in its native diversity, quality, health, abundance, and beauty,
would be properly scaled,
would be locally complex,
would make good forestry attractive to landowners, providing income from recreational uses of their woodlands, markets for forest products other than timber, and so on...,
would be much interested in local education,
would be a long-term economy,
would be patient,
would be unselfish...

...for good foresters must always look toward harvests that they will not live to reap.