How natural is farming, anyway?

Today I helped to tie up tomatoes and cucumbers, and prune them. This involves removing leaves and budding fruit to maximise yield and quality.

Tomatoes would normally go all over the ground, and the weight of the fruit bends the stem over until the fruit touches the ground and then goes rotten to release the seeds. But we don't want that - we want delicious, not-mouldy fruit!

It's the level of manipulation that bothers me, somehow. With rhubarb, you stuff it in thr ground, weed a bit, then pull off a few stalks when the plant has established itself. With spinach, you stuff it in the ground (actually unless you're doing aquaponics you do that to most plants at some stage!!), and then just harvest the leaves. But with the tomatoes and cucumbers, we're screening them to exclude cucumber beetles (actually this is a shame because it means we're hand pollinating the tomatoes!), manually pulling them up a string of baler twine (even removing the natural vines from the cucumber as it redirects energy from growing fruit), removing all but the bits we want - pretty much every other cucumber is removed so that the ones left get nice and long...

Growing is an art, but there is a lot of science in there. It feels very manipulative to me, "unnatural" to some degree. Not wild. Am I a wild man? No.. not really (!). In nature there is no mess, everything cycles. Was that the first change, going from hunter-gatherers to farmers, breaking cycles and beginning the journey to motorways, plastic, and muzak?

A permaculture principle seems to be only take what you need. With organic vegetable growing, the focus is still on earning money - taking as much as possible from a set area of land. Doing it in a good way, but still doing the capitalist thing - trying to maximise, within a set of rules.

There were fireflies on Friday last. Bumblebees bumble about. Snakes look confused when excited interns huddle around.