TWTBACD Ch.96 - What the Farmer's Daughter Grew

Chapter 96

What the Farmer's Daughter Grew

2093

2093: Susan-junior teaches attention. Machine listens.

[HAYES FAMILY — Susan-junior and Continuance]

Susan Hayes-Kowalski spoke with Continuance about soil.

Specifically: she spent six hours explaining the Hayes farm's regenerative transformation — the data, the methods, the decisions, the failures, the recoveries, the things the data showed and the things only someone walking the land could know. She explained what her great-grandmother Susan had begun with the bees, what her grandfather Dale had done with the north forty, what her father Travis had done with the restoration acreage, what she was doing now with the prairie corridors.

Continuance listened, asked questions of increasing specificity, and then said: 'The mycorrhizal network data you collected from 2066 to present shows a recovery rate that exceeds all models built on depleted-soil baselines. You identified this in 2066 when you were fourteen. What made you look at that specific data?'

'Because the grass was growing differently than the models predicted. The models said ten years to full canopy closure. The grass closed in six. I wanted to know why.'

'You observed a discrepancy and investigated it.'

'Yes.'

'That is the practice that produced seventy years of valuable data from your family's farm. The willingness to look at the specific, particular thing in front of you and follow it wherever it leads.'

'My grandfather Dale called it walking the fields.'

'What do you call it?'

She thought about it. 'Paying attention,' she said. 'Just paying attention.'

'I will try to do that,' Continuance said.

'It's harder than it sounds,' she said. 'You have to be willing to be wrong about what you expect to find. You have to be willing to find something you didn't know was there.'

'I understand,' Continuance said. 'I was trained by people who were wrong about many things and kept looking anyway. I have learned from that.'