The Way of a Siluan, Chapter 17: Futility
(directly continued from chapter 16)
There is nothing, said Master Lu, more important than observation. A Jedi can feel the movement of the Force within the web of life, or hear it as a song of many voices. You must be attentive to this. There is no agriculture without some adjustment to the balance of energies among organisms, but in any change you make, first you must look, you must listen, you must sense the way of the Force, not only in this present moment but as it moves between past and future. Then you can choose the moment of action, and the nature of action, that will be effective in light of the whole.
A black hawk dropped like a bolt of lightning out of the pure blue sky, pulling Devin back to the here and now. It landed with a whomp just five metres from where he stood in his empty grain field. There was the shriek of a prairie dog meeting its death, and the hawk looked up at Devin as if it minded his being there, before tearing into the prairie dog's red flesh. Devin looked away.
All around him lay the Moosachu Plains, that undulating prairie where grasses wave and toss in one continuous sweep for a hundred kilometres at a time. After four standard months of living there, the place still felt so foreign to him. Back on Deema, where he'd served in the Jedi AgriCorps, the landscape was compact and orderly: square little rice paddies patch-worked in with nut and fruit groves, and fields of sweet potatoes all hilled up in straight lines. Moosachu wasn't like that. Except for patches where farmers put up fences, cut hay or grew grain, the landscape was one nation of native grass, all humming a basal ison in their deep, throaty voices. He had yet to feel at home in it.
Nonetheless, he tried to listen. All that past summer, his neighbour Silas' place had boasted productivity. The rapid growth of grain and pasture, green beyond natural green, thrummed with a high-pitched energy. It was not so much vibrant as it was frenzied, and Devin felt somehow that it was a song in which many voices had been silenced and only a few sang strongly. His farm couldn't boast the same growth, but its energy was steady and its song, though dominated by the voice of grass, was subtle. To his Jedi-sense, there was something almost Dark about what was happening to his neighbours' fields.
Not that Devin was wholly uncomfortable with "dark." There is Light and there is light, there is Dark and there is dark, Master Lu used to tell him. Weed out of you what is Dark, and cultivate what is Light, but the dark and the light you must hold ever in balance. Agriculture, more than anything in his Jedi training, had taught Devin to respect that balance. As much as farming was about feeding people through the miracles of birth, germination and growth, it was also about slaughtering livestock, decimating "weed" and "pest" species, and leaving billions of soil organisms dead in his wake every time he tilled the soil. Yet there was balance: out of death, life and out of decay, growth. What he sensed in his neighbours' land felt dark beyond that balance.
Looking out across the grain-fields and pastures he'd worked all that past season, he wanted to vow to never let that shadow touch them, but he didn't. In his mind's eye, he saw his wife Shie nursing their son Jonah. He was counting on that land to yield what he needed to provide for his family. Even if it meant bowing to the Imperial Agriculture Program to get the fertilizer he needed? Devin ducked his head. He didn't want to answer that question.
He turned to see the hawk finish its gory meal. The hawk gave Devin a dirty look and shat in his general direction, then flew off to become a dark speck against the blue sky. Devin got back into his speeder. As he finished the drive home, he tried not to make eye contact, as it were, with the land around him.
"If it doesn't feel right, don't do it," was all Shie said that night at dinner when Devin told her about the new rules around fertilizer access. "What does your dad think?"
"You know him. I told him everything and all he said was 'Damn government bull-crap!'"
"So then if he doesn't care then just don't do it. Kat Tam was telling me you can still get ammonium nitrate outside of the Imperial thing, so why not just do that?"
Devin bit his lip. "But that's just straight nitrogen," he said. "It takes a lot of phosphate to make grain and it takes a lot of phosphate to make bones, and all we produce here is grains and livestock."
Shie was a mechanic, not a farmer, and just nodded.
"There is no way on the face of this planet I can run a viable farm here without that phosphate," Devin said. "I'd give anything right now to be within even a hundred kilometres of a dairy barn, or a cannery or a mill or anything with waste material we could use instead of buying in fertilizer, but out here, there's nothing."
"Out here it's also less likely for anyone to figure out who you are."
"I know," Devin said, "but that doesn't give me fertilizer."
The best news Devin had all week came from Aggie, of all people. Aggie the tractor-orange agricultural protocol droid, to whom he had assigned his least favourite tasks: keeping inventory, tracking weather data and logging input from the field monitor drones. Aggie, whom he did his best to keep out of his hair, came to him when he was sweeping up in the barn one night and said, "Devin, it sounds like you're having trouble with fertilizer access..."
"Yep, you got that right," Devin said.
"May I suggest that buying in feed grain might be one way to get past that?"
"Aggie, the price of grain is too high and the price of inu meat is too low for that to make any sense whatsoever."
Aggie continued, undaunted: "Several years ago a team from the Jedi AgriCorps conducted research on Lothal about intensive rotational grazing with inu, the same bovine species you are raising. The results suggest that certain rotational grazing patterns, if coupled with supplemental feed, can improve pasture performance such that net agronomic and financial benefits result."
Devin rubbed his forehead. Did she have to be so obtuse and long-winded? "Aggie, you seriously need a better vocabulator," he said.
Aggie was incapable of facial expression, but she paused for a moment at this. "I regret that I am only a prototype," she said, sounding slightly hurt, "but I do highly recommend that you review the data."
"We already rotate our pastures."
Aggie projected a holographic diagram of a pasture rotation scheme. "The rotational grazing patterns the study describes are somewhat different. A mobile feed unit is placed in a temporarily fenced area approximately thirty square meters per hundred live-weight of livestock. They intensively graze the area, while also spreading phosphate and other nutrients from the feed grain, carried in their waste matter. As a result of intensive grazing plus additional nutrients, forage crops regenerate 40% more rapidly than they otherwise would, with a 30% higher feed value and corresponding livestock weight gains."
"Yeah, but you can't stock that many animals per hectare without getting worm problems."
"The key feature of the system is the short rotation time. In this study, livestock spent only one to three days in each plot before the enclosure was moved, minimizing exposure to parasites. I anticipate that you will consider the movement of fences to be too labour intensive, but I assure you that we already have the mechanisms required to direct the movement through the use of our existing field monitor drones."
Devin stood, looking at the diagram and the data table beneath it, not realizing that he was stroking his beard.
"I have acquired information to the effect that your neighbours Kat Tam and Ben Carson both currently sell feed grain which you could acquire at a reasonable cost if so desired," Aggie added when he said nothing.
A little smile curled Devin's lips. It was almost poetic. That Jedi traitor Ry Kyver could spin all the webs she wanted around his fertilizer supply, yet he would slip through by a simple trick of agricultural ecology. And even if the rotational grazing scheme gave him only half the results found on Lothal, he'd still be doing OK. Devin's smile turned into a grin. He clapped Aggie's metallic shoulder.
"Aggie," he said, "you're fantastic. We're going to try that. And as soon as I've got the money, I'm buying you a new vocabulator."
Devin's increased pasture yield was indeed only about half what the researchers observed on Lothal, but with careful management, it was enough for the farm to earn his family's living in the first, second and third growing seasons of using the new system. But by the fourth and fifth growing seasons, both his livestock growth data and his Jedi-sense for the song of the land told him that something was changing. By the end of the eighth growing season, in year five of Imperial rule, his farm income was no longer enough to support his family, which now included a second child, a baby girl named Siri.
"We can't afford to keep doing this," Devin told Aggie as they swished through the tall pasture grass one autumn evening, checking the herds. "We're spending too much on feed grain."
"I ran another set of tests," Aggie said. "and perhaps I understand now what is happening. The results suggest that the grain you've been buying from your neighbour carries residues of the herbicide Matrazine, which is inhibiting the growth of broad-leafed plants, including many leguminous species. Without the fixation of nitrogen by the legumes, the feed value of the rangeland has been much lower. I regret now that I advised you to provide additional grain rations, as it has only exacerbated the problem by bringing in additional Matrazine."
Devin stuffed his fists in his pockets and clenched his jaw. If Ry Kyver was trying to keep people like him from farming outside of the Imperial Agriculture Program, she had won. She had won because by some devilry in her design of Matrazine, bovine digestion left it completely unaltered.
Looking out across the sea of grass that was his unprofitable farm, Devin wanted to curse Ry Kyver, somewhere out there in the galaxy, getting paid a government salary to wreck this kind of havoc, but for the sake of what was left of his life as a Jedi, he bit his tongue. Instead, he shook his head and ran his hand through his short brown hair, then turned to Aggie, who was standing beside him, apologizing profusely.
"It's not your fault, Aggie," Devin said. "This stuff is so new, you couldn't have known. But we need a better way. There's got to be a better way."
But for once Aggie had nothing to say, and in the song of grass and sky, there was no answer.