Your pigs are ill? Your cows are mad? Don't feel too well yourself?  Plant trees! Stem global heating!  Act as Luther would have done. For those that may, or may not, come after you - and for yourself.

A Talmudic story is told about Honi, who saw an old man planting a carob tree. His grandchild was helping him. Honi laughed: "foolish man", he said, "do you think you will still be alive to eat the fruit of this tree?". The old man replied "I found trees in the world when I was born. My grandparents planted them for me. So, too, I am planting for my grandchildren".

JUST WORK THAT SOIL.
"Not much these people seem to be doing with their soil here". Those two tourists from Friesland, Netherlands, both of farmer's  descent, had rapidly got the picture.

Disorderly littered backyards, some pathetic loquats and fig trees, fallow lying fields and no vegetable gardens anywhere. What had struck me years ago and why I had stayed - so much space, so much yet to be done! Especially around Tamazulapam, my wife's village in the Mixteca Alta, a mountainous area nearly the size of Belize. Fertile and prosperous once, in pre-Hispanic times, then populations grew, forests were cut, topsoil washed away, and people moved on, leaving behind an pitiful remainder, eroded like the destroyed limestone subsoil, "tepetate".
But that limestone can be reclaimed: break it up, bring back the humus into it, and it becomes moisture-retaining clay again, the best soil you can have. That is what

Nixon Smiley said in her book "Florida Gardening" (1979), and that is what she did with the limestone there. Just work the soil.
The problem: Mexicans don't do that. The weight of 300 colonial years:  manual labour, field labour specifically, is looked down upon. One of these days a politician, of the leftist PRD this time, said it again: - "we need a productive country, not a country of small shops and gardeners" (Excelsior Dec. 28). Americans may like gardening, here peons and "boys" do that, and you get your vegetables on the market. 

After two years that dawned on me. My vegetable garden, by then, had failed: the vegetables did well, but no one watered them when I wasn't there: watering vegetables and trees just isn't the habit. Scattered plucks of celery here, a few tomatoes, chillies, calabash and herbs over there and that is plenty enough. 
Fruit trees were a failure too: trees for semi-arid limestone highlands have yet to be invented. Grapes from Aguascalientes would do but Oaxacans don't prune them, so they don't yield, so people don't plant them. Zanates, magpies, eat the apricot blossoms, and a never analysed branch borer insect (Azuchis grypusalis) makes figs dry as carton, absolutely inedible. Only "nísperos", loquats, remain, but most people don't very much like their apple-sour taste and they won't conserve them for marmalade. Finally, my compost heap with unpalatable insects brewing inside was burned down, and weasels finished off the chickens, and also the gallo.

INIFAP. NO TELEPHONE.

Something else, therefore. Agroforestry! Dry-land farming, tree farming: growing hardy, plague- and drought resistant trees for fodder, wood and soil on the world's replantable lands, altogether more than the size of Australia. As forests or as hedgerows, sheltering farmland, pasture and cattle, retaining the water, improving climates.
Wastelands abound in the Mixteca, and suitable trees too - leucaenas, mesquites, acacias, white sapotes, more. 

CONTINUE PAGE  2