Last night I dreamed that I lived in an agricultural community where all the buildings were attached together into one long, continuous, unbroken structure. Some sections of the building were old and some were new. Some were residential housing while others were barns, stables and food processing centers. You could literally walk for ten miles from one end of the building to the other without stepping outside – all while gazing out various windows at the rich farmland and agricultural infrastructure stretching for miles in every direction.
When we fly across the country, we see something that we never notice from the ground: Many of the crops are cultivated in a circular pattern. This is because the irrigation is provided from a central pipe with a pivoting arm that turns 360 degrees. Like a collection of whirlygigs meticulously displayed on the landscape, arrogantly one-upping mother nature by spraying MANkind’s toxic hubris and petrochemical queez onto GMO crops, the circles are typically laid out in a grid with the considerable space between the circles being neglected. It’s done like this because it requires less human labor. Human labor costs money. Humans use money to purchase and eat food, but that apparently doesn’t factor into their business model.
As modern, industrialized civilization spits and sputters and comes to an end, many of us will return to farming. We won’t be happy about it, but we won’t starve either and we will have no choice but to acknowledge reality for it will be slapping us in the face. We’ll work the fields using our physical strength to replace our one-time allotment of fossil fuels that our magnificent leaders are pissing away on the stupidest of shit. The circular fields and the rectangular fields will transition into irregularly shaped, free form plots. Like a pastiche of Van Gogh’s harsh and tormented brush strokes, the various farm plots will be reflected in the furrows and scars on our skin, as we, a people made of soil, slowly return to from whence we came.