Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
James 3. 1-12; Mark 8. 27-38
“Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?”
The harvest comes at the end of a long process. Some of the seed for next year’s wheat will probably be planted in the next few weeks, to benefit from the last weeks of autumn warmth and sunshine, so it can develop a stable root system before the winter, and be less vulnerable to drought in spring.
Yet at the same time, this year’s harvest still isn’t complete. There are still, for example, a few fields of maize around that might not be harvested until well into October. The late apples and pears still won’t be ready to pick for weeks yet. And many of our root vegetables and leafy greens reach their prime in the middle of winter – the parsnips don’t taste their best until they’ve been through their first hard frost.
Managing all this takes enormous skill from our farmers and a lot of education in science and, if they want to make a living from it, business. It also takes machinery, and electricity, and fuel. And also, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, pesticides. Of course, the weather plays a major role, especially in a year like this when the spring and first half of the summer were so consistently cold and wet. In fact, during the first summer I spent in Devizes, between the lockdowns in 2020, terrible storms came in August and ruined much of the arable harvest, and I spent the autumn walking past fields left in a terrible state. Viruses can also ruin a crop; they hit plants in waves just like they hit humans.
Most of all, much patience is needed to take the crops from sowing to harvest, and while agricultural knowledge and technology makes us much less vulnerable to crop failure than our ancestors, even now there is no guarantee of success. Yet despite the risks from storms and disease, a crop can’t be harvested early—the crops aren’t fit for consumption until they are ripe.
