第一篇英译汉
Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.
Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.
The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses.
It was a precarious operation at the start — as all farming was in the new colonies—and it became precarious enough again in these past few years to peter out at last. The land is protected by a conservation easement so it can’t be developed, but no one knows whether the next owner will farm it.
In a letter on their Web site, the Tuttles cite “exhaustion of resources” as the reason to sell the farm. The exhausted resources they list include bodies, minds, hearts, imagination, equipment, machinery and finances. They do not mention soil, which has been renewed and redeemed repeatedly.
It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.
尽管导致农民破产的原因有很多，但很少农民仅仅是因为土地失去肥力而破产，这可以算是一个农业奇迹。如果能很好地料理土地，那么它几乎可以永远保持持续的产出。而对美国这样一个年轻的国家而言，人们很少能意识到这点。在我们历史的大部分时间里，人们有土地去耕作，而且不停地开垦新的土地似乎土地资源是无穷无尽的。
然而，还是有一些老农场破产了。其中历史最为悠久的便是位于美国新罕布什尔州丹佛市附近的Tuttle farm。同时也是美国最顾老的商业公司之一。在上周的新闻中，公司的所有者，原始移民John Tuttle的直系后代，宣布公司破产。Tuttle farm成立于1632年的。我听说他的鲜玉米非常出名。
1632年，遥远的让人难以置信，那一年，伽利略还在准备出版他的著作，而洛克才刚刚出生。美洲大陆当时大概只有一万移民，其中生活在新罕布什尔州的估计还不到一百人。那时Tuttle的耕地可能和2010年一样被团团包围着，只不过那时是被森林包围，而现在是被高速公路和房子。 |
