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Bottle Lambs: Reality vs. The Cute Factor: Most shepherds have a strong motivation to keep these young lambs alive. 

Going to the Birds!  I learned many valuable lessons that first summer in the chicken business. 

Farm Dogs - See Spot Work  Every once in a while you will find a dog who is completely suited for a job on your farm.

Angora Rabbits:  These little bits of fluff are the the wool industry’s pride and joy.

Farmers of Forty Centuries

by F. H. King

(a free download at  Soil and Health Library )

Review with Musings by Barbara Bamberger Scott

When I arrived at Emerson College, in Forest Row, Sussex, England, in 1979, I knew this about gardening: if you buy a young plant from the garden shop and stick it in some decent soil, you can have all the collards you want.  I’d been living in coastal South Carolina, where the soil was black where it wasn’t sandy, and it wasn’t much challenge to make things grow. 

This was hardly an adequate background for someone who intended studying bio-dynamic gardening.  My background in multi-culturalism was even slimmer; at Emerson I’d be one of the few Americans in a steaming stew of Europeans, Africans and Latin Americans, most of whom despised the United States.  I quickly learned that I was not to use the word “American” to denote only people from my country.  Everyone from Canada to the tip of South American could claim “American” status.  My tacit assumption that I was uniquely American was just another proof that people from the US were cultural imperialists. 

The weather, after South Carolina, was frightful.  The heat was not central; my daughter’s bedroom had none.  The general reaction to our sniveling complaints was “Pull up your socks or get on your bike.” It wasn’t until winter had set in with a vengeance that I learned about something called a duvet, a goose-down comforter that is a sine qua non for life in that damp, frigid climate.

We lived off campus in an apartment with one of the few phones in town and other students, despite not liking us, were constantly coming by asking to use it.  We quickly learned that a half-hour call to Brazil was way out of our budget what with the English pound at $2.50, and chasing down our debtors just didn’t seem to work.  The shops in Forest Row encouraged you to bring your own bags, and closed at five on the nose. 

It was easy in this cold-frame environment to wax cynical about what I was being taught at Emerson.  Sarcasm is the refuge of the culture-shocked, and I felt embattled as well as perplexed.  We’d come to the course because it had a Third World component; it was geared for people who wanted to work with the disadvantaged and oppressed peoples of the earth.  But in the early days at Emerson it was I who felt oppressed.

Emerson College is an adult learning center devoted to the work of Rudolf Steiner.  His world view, called anthroposophy, stressed the oneness of all life.  Steiner’s agricultural method, bio-dynamics, relies totally on natural approaches to plant husbandry.  At its nub the philosophy is idealistic and serene.  But I felt less than one with Steiner, and daunted by the booklist we were given.  Rudolf Steiner wrote or conveyed hundreds of essays, with titles that I found unappealing, such as “The Character of Goethe’s Spirit as Shown in the Fairy Story” and “Theosophy and German Culture – Occult Investigation of History, Reincarnation and Senility.” The Germans at Emerson had the edge in being able to read these gems as written.  The rest of us, whether from Canada, Venezuela, Ivory Coast or Norway, were forced to read Steiner in turgid imitation-German English prose.

It was for this reason that among all the books on the list I seized upon Farmers of Forty Centuries, by Dr. F. H. King.  Though antiquated (it was first published in 1911) it was at least written by a good old American of the United States kind. 

My current copy of FOFC is a modern paperback, its very re-printability a testament to its enduring status in the pantheon of alternative farming literature.  Samuel Fromartz, author of the recently released Organic, Inc, refers to King’s book as “canonical.”

The copy I procured from the Emerson College library (a cramped corner room on the third floor of an old manse) was hardback and first edition, with pages thin yet curiously tough, and black and white photos on glossy paper.  It smelled like a book should.  Though it was long (441 pages) and fact-heavy, I lapped up this chronicle of a man who traveled tirelessly through Japan, Korea and China in 1905, on an agricultural fact-finding mission of his own devising. 

Dr. Franklin Hiram King is a figure of minor historical note.  We know him mainly by his writing.  FOFC, his best known opus, was edited and published by his wife after he died, not long after returning from what was then known as “the Orient.”  As put so eloquently by Dr. Liberty Hyde Bailey in the introduction to FOFC, “at the moment when the work was going to the printer, he was called suddenly to the endless journey and his travel here was left incomplete.”  Did some Asian scourge drive King to his grave at the relatively early age of 63?  By his son’s report, he had financed his Asian sojourn by cashing in his life insurance policies.  Did his wife, who lived to be 100, suffer from this sacrifice? FOFC ends rather abruptly, lamentably without King’s planned “Message of China and Japan to the World.”

Of his character there can be little doubt.  It shines through his clear expository prose.  King was a bean counter (literally) with a passion for statistics.  He once analyzed the contents of 2,000 bird stomachs to understand their eating patterns.  He began his work as a Professor of Agricultural Physics for the University of Wisconsin in 1888 and in 1894 alone contributed the following information to the annual agricultural bulletin: 

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