The Art of Raising Farmers

Wisdom From the Agrarians

Photo by Warren on Unsplash

“Good farmers, like good musicians, must be raised to the trade.”

- Wendell Berry, Farming and the Global Economy

We in the modern world are experts in the folly of getting rid of things we need. We replace artists with AI, habitats with parking lots, flood plains with housing developments, and skilled workers with machines. Above all, we seem to have fallen for what Wendell Berry calls “the prejudice against country people”: that anyone who is working with the soil needs to be liberated from their undignified work. Policymakers thus labour mightily to solve the “economic problem” of their being too many farmers.

In response, pronouncements like “Get big or get out”, and “We don’t need small farmers”¹ have become political dogmas and societal goals. Those small farmers who remain in the fields (having disobeyed these commands) have been instructed to “do more with less [help/support/encouragement/money]” and told with a mere half an hour’s warning that crucial long-term funding is being cut.² And perhaps most severely, in the UK at least, farmers have been confronted with of a tax policy which threatens to upend the tradition of generational transfer of family farms, a policy which has driven some farmers to suicide.³

Ultimately, our politicians and economists, have deemed it economically rational to reduce the stock of farmers and to siphon young talent out of rural areas into the cities where they can be more “productive” members of society. And in spite of all this rural pillaging the consumer is told, “Not to worry, we have done the modelling. We can assure you the land and our food will not suffer.”

It is a delusion we will all have to pay for…