Multiple Intelligences – “Nature Smart” Rotavator For Doubling Harvests And At The Same Time Halving Costs Of Production! FAH Says

Farmers must be learners too. Farmers, yes, everywhere and anywhere on Africa, Asia and the Americas, our cultivators must learn about American professor Howard Gardner’s 9 “Multiple Intelligences” (MI) and practice at the very least being “7. Nature Smart,” from among this alphabetical list of 9 MI:

1. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (“Body Smart”)
2. Existential Intelligence (“Life Smart”)
3. Interpersonal Intelligence (“People Smart”)
4. Intrapersonal Intelligence (“Self Smart”)
5. Mathematical-Logical Intelligence (“Number/Reasoning Smart”)
6. Musical Intelligence (“Music Smart”)
7. Naturalist Intelligence (“Nature Smart”)
8. Spatial Intelligence (“Image Smart”)
9. Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence (“Word Smart”).

Why is that?

Let me tell you about my personal experience of being “Nature Smart” sometime in 1965-66 (although 60 years ago, MI was not even a pigment of the imagination of the MI originator & thinker, as Mr Gardner’s book “Frames Of Mind” was published only in 1983 (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org).

About naturalist intelligence, Ali Garbaex says (wikiHow, wikihow.com):

If you like being outdoors, caring for plants and animals, and observing the world around you, you might have a very strong naturalistic intelligence. There are many different ways individuals take in and learn information, with a unique combination of perceiving and sensing through the natural world being a characteristic of naturalistic intelligence.

If you cannot find a school or course or somebody to introduce you to the principles of MI, in the meantime, simply read the above list again, and you will have the excitement of having to sense the intelligence/s within yourself.

Like me, sometime in 1965-66, I was on our rice farm in Asingan, Pangasinan, when a large Howard Rotavator came by, engaged by my father “Lakay Disiong.” Thinking instinctively, recalling Edward H Faulkner’s logic in his books “Plowman’s Folly” and Soil Development, I told the operator to simply pass the rotavator over the field, setting the depth of cut to zero. I had sensed that thereby the blades of the rotavator will cut the weeds and soil into tiny pieces and mix them well together in one rotary motion – creating a very rich soil. That was not in the literature, but a little bird told me!
(image from kongskilde.com/us)

I must have “Naturalist Intelligence” because what I told the Howard operator, I did not learn at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) where I graduated with a BSA major in Ag Edu in 1965.

That instruction I gave to the operator made him secretly happy – our farmhand Enso Casasos told me many years later that the operator was smiling on one side of his face. Of course! The Howard tractor was using the minimum energy for operating because it was not digging!

But, as Enso later told me, decades later, he had been practicing what I shall now refer to as “Zero Rotavation” and outyielding his neighbor farmers, no matter if they followed everything they saw he did – they did not observe how Enso was using his rotavator to cultivate his ricefield.

Enso was practicing his MI “Nature Smart.” Intelligent farmer!@517