There are several great existential questions we all face. What is my purpose? What is love? How do I understand and approach God? To me, they all come down to a single question: How do I spend my time? All the metaphysics in the universe disappears at the moment I choose what to do next. Nothing counts until I take an action. That is how I fulfill my purpose, show my love and approach the infinite. The motto of the Benedictines is instructive: “Ora et labora”, prayer and work.

For the past forty years I have tried to answer those existential questions within the framework of my crop consulting business, where I spent half of my waking hours. That path is closing off to me as I turn the business over to my successor, Arne. While Arne is remarkably tolerant of my continued attempts at guidance it is steadily becoming his business. I am working about half time this year, and will retire completely within another year or two. How will I spend my time now?

There is the siren song of retirement: I can travel, visit the kids and have a kick-ass garden. For me there is the added factor of dealing with my health issues. Between tube feeding and trachaeostomy care it is pretty easy to blow an extra two to four hours per day. I have also made contact with the Minnesota Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy, and will begin volunteering later this summer. Already it sounds like a full retirement.

Except that it isn’t. The core frustration is that at 64, through my work history as an adult, I have accumulated over forty years of knowledge, forty years of connections, forty years of history and forty years of watching how things fit together so that good results can happen. How can I waste that?

And so, as always seems to be the case lately, we come back to my restoration and the rest of the 590 acres of the farm where I grew up. I did a little math and it seems that there are four acres for every person living on the planet. That’s four acres of tundra, taiga, temperate forest, prairie, savanna, tropical rain forest, desert and farmland available to grow food, fiber and provide the ecosystem services we need for life to be full and abundant. I am tremendously fortunate to own and control those 590 acres, but with great fortune comes great responsibility. This is a weight I must bear, a grand task I need to give myself to.

The task is to come up with a vision that can turn into actions that elevate the ability of those 590 acres to sequester carbon and harbor Dakota skippers, but also to produce wheat, corn and cattle, clean water and wildlife habitat, and perhaps solace to those who want to wander there. The components of such a plan are staring me in the face, inherent in the resources of the land. Sometimes the action that needs to be taken, though, is just to ponder, to allow for wise choices. Covid 19 is good for something, it seems.

Spring now envelops us with its roller coaster of weather, and the last snow will soon melt. What actions do I see being taken this year?

Much time needs to be spent documenting and evaluating progress on the restoration. As I wrote in a recent post, “Counting Carbon”, I plan to establish baseline data for what I hope will be a long term study on changes in carbon in the soil as the restoration matures. I have the opportunity of receiving help form a wonderful young Brazilian woman who was recently hired by Arne, and I need to make the most of it. If we establish reference points and get soil carbon data this year so that an interested party can continue the study in the future even if I am not able to do so.

There will be twenty new acres to seed down this fall which I need to continue to plan for. That will include gathering seed from my prairies again, a prospect that excites me greatly. I’ve actually been out twice this past week and gathered a couple handfuls of overwintered seed while I took my first spring jaunts in my prairie hills. The twenty acres to be seeded is part of a cooperation with Ducks Unlimited (DU) which will include fencing and water source development to graze more acres than I do now.

Those actions of gathering and spreading seed, taking soil samples, weed control and fencing need to be subservient to the vision. however. My job is to provide a robust and flexible, yet fairly detailed plan the someone else (like my daughter) could follow should I be unable. This doesn’t mean that I believe that anyone has an obligation to follow in my footsteps, rather that I have an obligation to create a vision that has the clarity of purpose and implementation to draw others down the same path.

Life, full and abundant, is my mantra. And this is my manifesto: The land is important. The land can feed, clothe, shelter and heal. It provides meaningful work and purpose to literally billions of people in the world. As the line from “Death of a Salesman” says, “Attention must be paid!” Attention will be paid to my farm; life will flow from it; food will come from it; lives will be improved by it. I will both experience and contribute to life, full and abundant, for as long as I am able.