Devine - Growing Food Gods Way: How Paul Gautschi Takes Us Back to Eden and Beyond

Growing Food Gods Way

How Paul Gautschi Takes Us
Back to Eden and Beyond

2nd Edition

David Devine

Growing Food Gods Way, 2nd Edition

Copyright 2021 by David Devine.

First edition published 2014; second edition 2021.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Exceptions made in the case of: 1) brief quotations in educational materials, or reviews, and 2) Look Inside apps in publisher-approved book marketing websites. Also, all scripture references are not only excepted, but readers are encouraged to freely, and frequently, reproduce the verses shared herein. We are, in no way, copyrighting any portion of the 1611 King James version of the Holy Bible.

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ISBN: 978-0-9907552-0-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021904160

All Scripture references taken, or adapted, from the
King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible.

Websites and email addresses listed within were operable at the time of printing, but the author cannot guarantee the URL host will maintain the site(s) in perpetuity. They are a reader resource and not intended to be an endorsement either way.

This book makes no attempt to give readers medical advice, which should be sought from competent doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors, and other healing arts practitioners.

Cover design: Preston Devine

Indexer: Daniel Heila

For information, email David at: .

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents, by birth and marriage:

Marvin and Vivian Devine (a wonderful dad and mom) plus

Chester and Virginia Gelnett (who raised my wife).

To Phyllis, a gifted and wonderful wife, and

our Devine family: Jonathan, with Malcolm; Jason and Hannah,

with Elijah, Lily, Rebekah, Annika and Kyle;

Preston and Casey, with Tobias;

Mallory, Matthew, Elsie, Jared, Seth, Sterling, and Victoria for all their love.

To Lauri Devine (1949-2020), the best sister.

And especially...

to the Savior who loved us before we loved Him.

Contents

Foreword

A s an integrity food farmer, I eventually wearied of audiences assuming that I was anti-God , anti-Israel, pro-abortion, pro-tax just because I embraced earth stewardship. To help cut through the stereotype, I began calling myself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.

During media interviews, journalists routinely appear shocked that someone who lugs a Bible around in his travel bags also promotes caressing our ecological womb. Those phrases are supposed to come from earth-worshipping, free-love hippies, not firebrand fundamentalist preacher-types.

Blaming the Bible specifically, and God generally, for all the environmental ills plaguing the world is a favorite theme from mainline environmentalists. Unfortunately, the perception is based in fact. From the crusaders to the conquistadors, carelessly invoking divine authority more often than not leads to societal and environmental catastrophes.

The Old Testament, which starts with God the Creator, establishes quite clearly His ownership over this planet we call Earth. Further, this Holy instruction manual places human-kind in a garden of abundance to be stewarded, loved, nurtured, and caressed. In the land of Canaan, the Israelites received a specific geographic region with clear earth-care and societal admonitions with the promise of ongoing abundance and health if they adhered to divine instructions... and devastating catastrophes if they did not.

Clearly, God has an interest in His handiwork and assumes that His people will steward this Divine real estate according to a sacred template. He is not a disinterested owner as the deists would have us believe. He is not a doting daddy devoid of discipline and plan as the free thinkers would have us believe. He is not a dispassionate bystander as the dominion evangelicals would have us believe, neither is He a marionette manipulator as the hyper-sovereignty-ists would have us believe.

God caringly seeks stewardship diplomats to be His hands and feet to extend redemption to a fallen landscape. Indeed, if earth stewardship means anything, it means re-establishing the physical world as an object lesson of spiritual truth. He wants our pilgrim footsteps to leave behind farm and foodscapes that illustrate forgiveness, beauty, abundance, order, healing, and righteousness. When visitors leave our farms and gardens, they should revel in having just seen a visceral representation of Gods grace, abundance, and attractiveness.

My family operates Polyface Farm in Virginias Shenandoah Valley. When European settlers in the early 1700s found this verdant silvo-pasture of alpha soils, they inverted the perennial biomass-covered landscape with the plow. Over the next century and a half, some three to eight feet of topsoil washed away into the Chesapeake Bay.
Eventually this rich valley wore out. Grain production headed west. The Shenandoah Valley gradually became an orchard region and eventually a grass and livestock region. Pockets of rich soil still exist, and are still being plowed, but the rock outcroppings dotting most pastures throughout the region attest to the devastation of the plow . Sir Albert Howard , godfather of modern scientific aerobic composting, said:

It is the temptation of every civilization to take what nature took thousands of years to create and turn it into cash.

What an atrocity that the story of civilization is also a story of environmental disaster. God weeps. The earth groans . Despair and pessimism rule our day as this historical record and its guilt, the full import of the damage is now apparent to all. Unfortunately, too often this guilt makes humans afraid to engage the environment, as if interacting with the ecology cannot be done with integrity. This leads to environmentalism by abandonment, locking up areas into parks and wilderness areas devoid of human presence.

But God never leaves us without provision. Into this bleak landscape step stewards who follow a path of truth that begins with humility and culminates in following Gods design . Some of these great mentors do not acknowledge God. Some do. And those who do add a robustness to their findings and a freedom to express the spiritual implications to these visceral object lessons.

When our family put these principles into action on our worn-out piece of earth, it responded like a lover. Water permeated the soil instead of running off. Soil grew. Earthworms proliferated. Vegetation now stays green much farther into a drought. We have far more diversity in both plants and animals. The farm supports many incomes instead of none and hosts countless visitors and customers. Its a place of abundance. Our motto: Healing the land one bite at a time.

That land healing is a remarkable demonstration of what God does in the human heart with the human soul . It is no less dramatic and no less real. As a steward and partner with God, the ultimate landscape architect, I have the distinct privilege and honor to be on the Fathers team.

Paul Gautschi is another of those team members. Author David Devine , in an uncompromising and spiritually aggressive tone, captures the work of this landscape healer with clarity and optimism. While Paul and I are quite differenthe comes from a plant-based scheme and I come from a livestock schemethe basic principles of soil building and healing are identical and spot on. What a delight that Devine leads us down Gautschis path in such outspoken credit to the Author of the design.