There’s an oft-used visual representation of farmers depicting them chewing on a stem of grass. The wardrobe managers for films and photoshoots depend on old tropes, probably under the assumption that the audience is too dense to recognize the hayseed farmer character without a well-gnawed stalk planted firmly in the middle of a wrinkled face. But have you ever wondered what’s behind this depiction, why humans would be munching grass?

One simple answer is that old farmers didn’t have access to machine made toothpicks and flossers, but they did have grass. We’ve probably all noticed that mature grass is pretty tough. So grass stalks could function as toothpicks and gum stimulators. But my experience leads me to believe this pattern of grass eating might be about more than just oral hygiene.

It occurred to me a few days ago that wherever I go on the farm, I’m always feeling, smelling, and especially tasting. And more than grasses, as I go through the fields I’m chewing leaves, stalks, bark, and flowers. I’m rubbing plants between my fingers to feel the moisture content and to release the odors. Without intentionally setting out to adopt these behaviors, I’ve gradually picked up the habits of using a more complete assortment of senses to understand the state of the farm.

I’m confident that my cattle know much more about each pasture than I ever might know. But I’m pleased to realize that there’s so much more I can continue to learn about this place just by approaching it in the same way the cattle do.

While this multisensory approach is informative, it stretches the bounds of our ability to communicate our findings to others. The academic literature on farming primarily engages with observation by the empirical means of lab testing soils and plants. More practical guides to farming or gardening rely heavily on visuals (think, “when the leaves turn yellow and the outer leaves begin to curl, then …”) because we have photography and vocabulary to describe color and shape. But we don’t have many tools to share information on taste, smell, or texture. I could describe the taste of spotted knapweed as astringent, but beyond that I run into the problems common among wine tasters, where reviewers describe notes and hints of flavors that don’t reliably correspond to the tastes that other people would observe. So the knowledge I am gaining is a kind of private knowledge, something I can know by an internal mapping of tastes and smells to location and season. In a world increasingly dominated by public knowledge disseminated by algorithmically mediated communication, it is a curious practice to develop a private knowing that cannot easily be generalized, automated, or shared.

So maybe I’ve typecast myself as a stereotypical hayseed character, the farmer chewing on grass. I guess I’m OK with being a bumpkin.