Wisdom and Farming

Describing it as one of the most extraordinary and challenging experience she had ever had, our Denise contributed to the Opening Plenary of the 2025 Oxford Real Farming conference (in its 16th year), earlier in January in the Oxford Town Hall, to 3,500 delegates  (in-person and online) on ‘Wisdom’.  Four other farmers also contributed individually on ‘Solidarity’, ‘Resilience’, ‘Resistance’ and ‘Love’, to set a fast-pace for critical discussions on farming, food and our environment.

“When I was invited to contribute to this Opening Plenary on WISDOM, I was very quickly challenged by putting WISDOM into words to share with you, a significant human collective of  ‘Land and Nature WISDOM,’ !

It was like guddling for trout in a fast running burn! Just as you think you have it in your grasp – you don’t at all – it’s slipped away!  Or even seeing the reflection of a star from the Universe in a puddle at your feet – so close that you want to scoop it up in your hands and hold it;  And of course as you move towards it – it disappears.

I then realised what I knew anyway – that WISDOM, isn’t for grasping or catching or having. Its in all life Its here. Its in us, its with us, its through us.

It is the cascade of ‘knowingess’ from source within the spark of sentience in every living cell, within and between all living things, multitudes in multitudes in a collective, connective, continuum with the Universe.   KNOWINGNESS BEFORE KNOWLEDGE.

Feel it – Feel the WISDOM, within you, around you – Can you feel it ? Are you letting the WISDOM, feel you !

This  ‘knowingness’ of WISDOM, is the treasure-chest of imagination. The beginnings of envisioning.

As farmers and growers, You, Me, Us, we have this direct hands-on connection with soil, plants, our farm animals, with nature.  It’s our living!   We have this collective privilege of access to life other than just a lot of other humans!  But we humans as an animal species are consciously destroying our own habitat.  HOW CRAZY IS THAT ?   No other animal species does this.

Our particular human community, farmers, growers  food producers, is at the front-line of this craziness, much of its cause and much of its consequence. It calls for nothing less then the extraordinary, the profound to make-good the harm.

I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU A STORY   About one of us, a land-worker, a farmer which is pertinent in many ways to where we find ourselves.  This Farmer, together with the rocks and soils of his farm ‘TELLING HIM’  evisioned the impossible, the extraordinary,  the profound.

This farmer, James Hutton, actually introduced myself and Colin Tudge (co-founder of the Conference), to each other some years ago at a meal not that far from here.   It sparked an enduring friendship.  It is of no relevance what ever that James Hutton will be 300 years old next year.  He was very present with us in our conversation at that meal.  He farmed in the Eye Valley just over the hill from where we Waltons farm.

In the course of working his farm, he became increasingly puzzled by what he was seeing of the soil and rock, including the washing of soil by rain, from his fields into the burns which feed into the Eye Water and then ultimately into the North Sea.

Following painstaking ‘reading of the rocks’ as he put it  “Gods hand … writ in the rocks”,  he pieced together over some 30  years, a theory with REGENERATION AT ITS HEART;  but Regeneration over a very very long time-scale; that the formation of rocks from soil and the age of Earth could not possibly have taken-place within the timescale dictated by biblical chronology (some 6000 years), but must be much older.

And so in 1788 against the odds of the perceived truth of the time, and a belief-system which exacted retribution for contradiction considered heresy PUNISHABLE BY HANGING, he presented his ‘Theory of the Earth’  to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  ‘WISDOM-KNOWINGNESS’ gradually prevailed amongst his peers and his theory was eventually accepted, setting the pace on concepts of time and profoundly changing science.

THE ULTIMATE IN REGENERATION, that of Earth itself through the recycling and uplift by  its own processes of its own materials (with knowingness), was WORKED-OUT BY A FARMER who sensed the wisdom of this knowingness and followed his vision through, unfettered by the prevailing knowledge systems of the time.

James Hutton envisioned the extraordinary from that spark of sentience.  We all of us have it, the ‘wisdom-knowingness’, which has IMMENSE COLLECTIVE POWER  to make the magnitude of change needed for repair, restoration, healing.

I KNOW FROM WORKING ON OUR FARM  for  many years now, how easy it is to slip into mechanical responses to the relentless pressures of production, breeding cycles, weather, cash-flow, exhaustion.

And when at that peak of exhaustion, of diminishing hope …. It filters through – the knowingness carried ON that moment of Silence IN a cry from the fields, or a flutter of wings in a hedge, or the first suckle of a calf colostrum smeared over its nose,  or that delicate scent of new steaming afterbirth, the first germination, the smell of earth – that shaft of clear knowingness.

THAT CLEAR CALL OF RIGHTFUL PURPOSE.

Earth Regeneration with Wisdom-knowingness;  Our collective strength to do the profound, to Restore and Regenerate as part of the multitudes in multitudes in us and between us, of which to quote the farmer James Hutton “… we see no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”  to the regeneration of our Earth of which we, this collective are such an integral part.

Remember Fellow-farmers, Growers, Friends; The next time you calve a cow, lamb a ewe, have your hands deep into the soil as you plant – look up even only briefly and know that you are as a much a part of the Light as you are the Earth “