Tomatoes and Horses
Tomatoes are one of my favorite foods. I especially like tomato sandwiches. There's just nothing like a good, soggy, tomato sandwich in the summertime. I've been thinking about tomatoes lately and realized that there's a good parallel between tomatoes and horses. We can learn something important about horses by thinking about tomatoes.
The kind of tomatoes I like are the really red, ripe, juicy home-grown tomatoes that have a lot of bold flavor. To me, there's nothing better for a summer lunch than a tomato sandwich made out of one of those home-grown tomatoes, combined with some peanut butter crackers and a big hunk of cheddar cheese. I look forward to having those lunches every summer.
When I was growing up, my father used to grow some tomatoes in the edge of an unused field behind our house. It wasn't high-tech at all. He'd just till up a little corner, throw some 10-10-10 fertilizer down and set the plants out. And then you took what you got. It was too far from the house to water the plants, and besides, our well never had enough water to spare to water them. He never sprayed them or did anything else to them ... tied them up a little, kept the weeds pulled out, and hoped for the best. If we had a fair amount of rain, we'd have tomatoes. And boy were they good! What we didn't eat, my mother would can or freeze as tomato soup or base for vegetable soup.
After the fields became a housing development, we found an older man about a mile away who grew his tomatoes the same way, so we bought our tomatoes from him. His were just as good. But he died years ago. Things change and life gets busy and complicated, so as an adult, I tried to take the easy route and just buy tomatoes. But they're not the same, and so this year I've sworn to myself that next year I'm going to take the time to grow my own tomatoes, the old-fashioned way.
This year I heard that a man I know was growing tomatoes. So I went up there one day to pick some. He was growing tomatoes the high-tech way, the way all the production farming publications tell you to grow them. It's all backed by the latest scientific research from the best known and most respected laboratories and university research departments, all staffed by people with extensive education and impressive credentials. The plants were hybridized to the hilt and set in little holes in black plastic. An irrigation system insured that the lack of rain wouldn't be a problem and made possible weekly feedings with soluable plant food. The weeds between the rows of black plastic were killed with herbicide and the plants themselves were sprayed with various pesticides and medications. They had plenty of water, plenty of plant food, and were protected from weeds, insects, and many common tomato plant diseases. The plants looked healthy, nothing like the scraggly plants we had years ago, and were absolutely loaded with tomatoes.
But eating the tomatoes was a disappointment. If you didn't let them get ripe to the point of almost rotting, they were almost as crunchy as an apple. Even ripe, they were mealy and practically tasteless...nothing like the tomatoes we had years ago. Although technically "home-grown," they actually weren't much different from the tomatoes you can buy year-round in the supermarket. The extremely hybridized plants, set in black plastic, irrigated, fed, and sprayed could produce mountains of tomatoes ... but they were nothing like the ones we used to grow. All the artificial stuff had basically produced an artificial tomato, a tomato in name only, something produced in quantity to make money, produced to look good on the outside, something that looked somewhat like a tomato but on the inside was almost cardboard. Well, they are tomatoes ... I guess.
And you know, I feel sorry for the people who have never had a REAL tomato and who think that tomatoes are supposed to be the crunchy, mealy, tasteless things that come out of the production fields of black plastic.
A lot of horses today are like the "tomatoes" that are grown in the fields of black plastic. From the first hour of their lives, they basically live like those tomato plants. The black plastic is stalls, paddocks, and manicured pastures. The irrigation and plant food is their hay, horse feed, and supplements. The spray materials are their vaccines, wormers, and medications.
Many people today think you're "supposed" to grow tomatoes in fields of black plastic. They've placed their absolute trust in the recommendations coming from the laboratories and university research departments and the manufacturers of the various products they apply to their crops. And the result of all that is tomatoes that are not really tomatoes.
Sadly, many people also think you're "supposed" to keep horses in a similar manner. They've also placed their absolute trust in the recommendations from the manufacturers of the products they give their horses, and those whose version of "health care" basically consists of being middlemen and selling the products produced by those manufacturers.
Have you ever eaten a real, natural, home-grown tomato and experienced the difference between it and one of the production tomatoes from the supermarket?
Does your horse sometimes remind you of one of those tomatoes grown under black plastic? Wonder why ... ?
