Farming with Nature
Innovative eco-farmer Bob Cannard on Nature’s economy of generosity
In 1985 Alice Waters and her father went on a quest to find the farmer for the renowned Chez Panisse restaurant, identifying 100 candidates.
In the book Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, author Thomas McNamee wrote, “When Pat and Alice Waters interviewed the finalists, the winner was indisputable. No one could have ever dreamed up Bob Cannard…
“When Alice walked Bob’s fields, the soil was as springy as a mattress, so rich was the organic matter. Bob would clutch a fistful of topsoil and shove it under her nose. ‘It’s delicious’ he would proclaim and pop some in his mouth.”
Another journalist wrote, “This land is so alive it practically vibrates.”
- Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers
Bob Cannard is an iconoclast, a piano player, a great cook, an incredible farmer, and a loyal husband to mother nature at her most intimate, microbiological, reproductive level.
His latest project is the Green String Farm 60 acres in Petaluma where he is mentoring young farmers, teaching them what he has learned from a life-long dedication to the land.
“I want to get one tomato from a well-grown plant and bite into that tomato, suck some juice out of it and feel the energy of that tomato in my blood just as well as if I were drinking wine. I want physical completeness in the foods stuffs that I grow.
“Being a farmer is as close as
I can get to being a responsible mother, of consciously growing foods
that have physical completeness. And offering that physical completeness
to the child that eats it, and that completeness enters their metabolic
system and is possibly carried on beyond my mortality for a number of
generations that actually allow that child to think as a real human
being and quit acting out all this smallness, this avarice, this greed,
this me over thy, all this crappy stuff that forms our culture.”
“In the structure of nature you have an economy of generosity. There is plenty for all organisms.
Why in our culture do we not recognize the foundation of nature and
its steady-state opportunities? Why in our culture have we generated
and sustained this economy of scarcity, an economy that pits some with
much against many with very little. It’s a perversion and if we are
to overcome this perversion we need to start growing foods to
completeness.” ~ Bob Cannard
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