Imaginative Engineering
Three inches of topsoil.Very acidic: 4.5 pH to be exact.Glacial rock scattered throughout.Heavily forested.“You can’t farm vegetables on this ground,” he was told by, well, everyone that lived nearby. (For reference, a good soil for farming annual vegetables has twice as much topsoil, 6.5 pH, and no rocks. Oh, and no trees.)Eliot Coleman, the father of the modern organic farming movement, has not only farmed his plot of land for 30 years, he has set the standard for what is possible to produce from one acre of land.How’d he do it? (He has three books published, if you want to know the details.) He referred to it once in an interview I read as "imaginative engineering”. That’s it. Every challenge he faced, he followed these three steps toward a solution:
- Identify the problem, challenge, hangup.
- Acknowledge the prevailing wisdom, the common solution, what the “experts” say is the solution.
- Turn the problem around 180° and see if a different possibility emerges.
This is so cliche it’s almost painful. But something happens between #2 and #3 that takes this cliche and turns it into something profoundly applicable to all of us.Prevailing wisdom doesn’t work for Coleman because it doesn’t work in the world he dreams of, the world he's convinced ought to exist. #3 is possible because #2 is not. An alternative has to exist.Imaginative engineering is not first the result of brain power; it’s the result of conviction.From your commitment to how you believe the world ought to be will arise creative ways forward.And when people tell you, “You can’t ______,” you can tell them that it’s impossible until you do it. It’s idealistic until it happens.Just remember: There are people like us that are unwilling to continue like this.