Context: The Importance of Connecting All the Dots

Navigating a world without context is like finding your way out of a dark room. It’s disorienting, confusing, and problematic. Information is essential, but knowledge is “information in context,” which allows us to connect all the dots accurately and effectively in any given situation. Context is everything outside a specific idea, thought, event, or situation. Context includes the circumstances—the situational factors—that can help us form specific ideas, solve problems, or recognize situations that may spiral out of control.

Unfortunately, most of us ignore context in our day-to-day lives and management decisions. It’s easier to maintain a sense of simplicity and order that way. Reducing our information and circumstances into smaller, singular events is more accessible than viewing our world in holistic, multi-dimensional, interconnected ways. We often ignore the bigger picture because we believe we can “solve” a problem quicker, move on, and forget it ever happened. However, this approach stifles our thinking and blurs our perspective.

Giving Soil Health Principles Context

In the last two decades, soil health educators have taught five basic ecological soil health principles that are based on Biomimicry (to mimic life). Natural, healthy soils function and express the five soil health principles independently without human intervention. These self-healing, self-organizing, and self-regulating principles enabled ecosystem health and function before humans were on earth. As farmers and ranchers become more conscious and observant, the more critical “context” plays a role in understanding our relationship to the natural system. From a human perspective, without the principle of context, the other five principles have no purpose. Humans are deeply interconnected to the natural system—a relationship that cannot be separated. Yet our Western mindset wants to isolate, delineate, and reduce our relationship with nature—absent of context. This statement builds my point: “The problem with ecologists—they separate the human from the natural system. The problem with economists—they separate the human from the ecology.” This thought process creates a world of confusion.

For this reason, Understanding Ag added “context” to the original five soil health principles. The principle of context gives us a framework to understand human nature and be more situationally aware of farmers’ and ranchers’ various contexts: ecological, economic, community, and spiritual situations.

Bottom line: humans are part of the natural ecosystem, and they impact it. While not intended to be definitive or exhaustive, the following list provides an overview of some of the ways you can consider context in your farming and ranching operations:

Ecological Context

• How much rain do you get?
• Is your farm located in a northern region?
• What are your soil types?
• What local vegetation grows in the area?
• What are the native insects or animals in the area?

Community and Social Context

• What cultures (German, Native American, Italian) dominate in your region, and what are the social norms for farming or ranching?
• Is tillage a cultural norm in the area?
• Do the neighbors judge you by the weeds on the farm? Are you weedy?

Economic Context

• Is the farm paid for?
• Is the farm passed through generations of family?
• Does your ranch or farm have multiple streams of income?
• Do you depend heavily on government help?

Spiritual Context

• What is your spiritual understanding of earthly stewardship?
• What is your “Why?”
• What is the spiritual mindset of your local community?
• What is your religious background and experience? What you believe impacts your context.

Summary

In life, context informs everything around us. Understanding how the world works and how people act comes down to context. A world without context is meaningless and lifeless. Context, on the other hand, provides design and purpose. By paying more attention to context, we can better perceive the world around us, connect ALL of the dots, and make better decisions in our lives and in our farming and ranching operations.