The practice of farming — preparing the soil and planting some seeds and eventually harvesting a crop — dates back thousands of years and long has been romanticized. As Masanobu Fukuoka, a renowned Japanese farmer of the 20th century, once said: “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”It is highly unlikely that Fukuoka knew it at the time, but he very well could have been talking about Clark County’s Heritage Farm when he spoke those words. Because there, in an area now surrounded by housing developments and thoroughfares, the land is being tilled and the people are being cultivated.
As described in a recent article by Columbian reporter Erik Hidle, the 79-acre complex in the Hazel Dell area holds promise both as an agricultural outlet and a rehabilitation center of sorts.
Take Dee Rogers, a Marine Corps veteran who was suffering from alcoholism, got connected with the farm through veterans’ services, and discovered the healing power of working the land with your own two hands. She now is the program coordinator for Partners in Careers, which helps veterans learn job skills in agriculture while giving them a serene place to heal. “Some things that happen to you can make you feel dead inside,” Rogers told The Columbian. “This is the opposite.”
As farmer and novelist Wendell Berry once wrote: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”