High Country News reports:In 1916, Jack London invited a friend to his ranch in California's Sonoma Valley: "Come to see what I am trying to do with the soil, and with hogs, and with beef-cattle, and dairy-cows, and draft-horses." Who knew that the adventurous, womanizing, hard-drinking public celebrity spent the last years of his short life building a humane "Pig Palace" for his livestock and pouring manure down a slope to avoid using chemicals? London was best known then, as he is now, as a writer. But he wanted his legacy to be in land, not words. He wanted to "leave the land better for my having been," and so he pioneered what we would call today sustainable agriculture on Beauty Ranch, his 1,400-acre farm in Glen Ellen. The ranch, now home to the Jack London State Historic Park, shatters stereotypes...
No comments:
Post a Comment