The Bad Farmer
The Bad Farmer lacks imagination and affection for his land - and suffers as a result.
The “Good Farmer” has been the constant subject of the words I write and type. Central to this has been a prolonged exploration of who the Good Farmer is and what characterises his or her relation to their land. One could quite rightly say the “Good Farmer” is the field of study I have devoted myself to. In an age of rapidly worsening ecological degradation, sporadic food scarcity, and ever-continuing rural depopulation, the worthiness of this field becomes plain and clear.
We live in a world of opposites, of contradictions, competition, and rivalry. The existence of the Good Farmer thus necessitates the existence of his opposite: the Bad Farmer. Otherwise, there would just be Farmers. Period. With no distinction differentiating between them concerning skills, morals, and care. One does not need to consider the topic of agriculture for long to deduce that farmers are not a uniform “breed” with no distinctions between them. The various states of health (or decay) in the lands they steward bears sombre testimony to this.
Farming is not a morally neutral vocation. A farmer is either a blessing to his land or a curse. Granted, there are many farmers — perhaps even the majority of farmers — who are those I call Trapped Farmers: men and women who wish to be a blessing to their lands but are unable to escape the trap of conventional or industrial methods of farming which cause long term damage. It is all too easy to sink in the grossly unfair market they find themselves in — a market where they are paid a pittance for their hard-earned produce. The looming spectre of financial ruin compels them into survival mode; a perverse state which, as we will see, leads them into greater indebtedness and ecological degradation.
Operating in this survival mode, the short term takes precedence. Thus, Trapped Farmers force their land to produce ever increasing yields through the increased use of heavy machinery, agrochemical inputs, and continuous cropping — all in order to stay financially afloat. Perversely, though, these activities slowly destroy the long term productive capacity of the land, and the trapped farmers can see this. But the substantial debts incurred from purchasing machinery and inputs need to be paid off. The only means of doing so is to ramp up production even further: more horsepower, more chemicals, more monocrops — and greater yields. And greater destruction. The trap tightens its grip. These Trapped Farmers would farm a different way if they could. The issue is that without immediate financial support, change would cause their ruin.1
Not all farmers degrading their lands are trapped. There are some farmers who are downright bad: land destroyers, profit extractors, livestock abusers. They carelessly degrade their soil, viewing it solely as a productive medium2 and nothing else, taking no time to heal or repair the scars that they cause. They ignore the limits of their land, pushing it to perform well above its means and force it to produce what it is not designed for. They are heterodox in terms of the Doctrine of Return; theirs is a Doctrine of Pillage and Take. They cramp their livestock into veritable concentration camps, depriving them of sunlight and the ability to move. In short, they wilfully abuse and destroy the creatures and the land they have been entrusted with — while expecting them to liberally produce abundant profits all the same. They only see profit; they don’t see life.
The Bad Farmer is the one who views his “right” to pollute as sacrosanct. Never mind the costs levied to those downstream suffering from the anoxic and toxic rivers, nor the local community who live and breathe amidst the putrid cloud blowing in from the wastes of their local tyrant. The air is his garbage dump, the rivers are his drains. Only one man benefits from these supposedly “common” resources — him. If anyone dares to protest that they have a right to a clean river or stench free air, the Bad Farmer will get on the phone to the Governor or the local MP and remind them of his “generous donations and support in the past” and thus the favour they owe him now. Mysteriously, pleas from the community to higher powers go unheeded. Mystery indeed.
Thankfully, the community is not wholly helpless. It has a mighty ally: The land itself. As a Polish peasant once remarked: “Every field knows its owner, the earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face.”3 The land knows its friends and its foes. Those farmers who come and pillage the land will one day come to rue their folly. Their folly will be their ruin. The land will not constantly yield to those who abuse it. Eventually, its productive capacity will be spent, its soils lost, and its biotic communities destroyed. The land will turf out these abusers and degraders, and they, in turn, will forsake it. Though the local community suffers the consequences of a degraded land in the short term, a glimmer of hope kindles. Now that the agent of degradation is gone, the hope kindles that the slow and patient work of land renewal will ensue; an endeavour which has led to significant healing in many parts of the world.
The fatal flaw in the Bad Farmer is twofold. A lack of vision and imagination; and a lack of care and affection. They firstly fail to perceive and know what is in front of them. As Wendell Berry says4, they only deal with abstract numbers: yield statistics, input ratios, profit. Qualitative matters of quality, condition, and limitations are illegible, if not invisible to them. They treat all lands as broadly the same. Yes, they may know that their soil is clayey or sandy and adjust their practices accordingly, but they ignore local variation and the essential work of adaptation to place. They seek to conform the land to the logic of standardised industrial practices, rather than seeking to adjust their practices to conform to the land itself5 — its contours, scale, shape, land mosaic, wildlife, surrounding culture, and endless other particularities.
Conversely, the Good Farmer loves his land for what it is and where it is. He cherishes his inheritance and seeks to honour the labour of his forefathers. He loves the wild species he shares it with and delights in the individual woods, hills, streams, fields, and hedges he has been entrusted with. He knows them all by name. He is attentive to their condition, seeking to repair damage when he observes it and he knows when he is working his land too hard, for he is aware of its limits through years upon years of close observation and record keeping. And when the time comes to pass his land on, he strives to hand it down in a better condition than when he obtained it.
The Bad Farmer “loves” his land only for what it can give him. It matters not whether the land is in North Dakota or California, Essex or Yorkshire, Kenya or China, as long as it can provide him a great profit he doesn’t mind where it is. And he cares little for any damage caused to his fields, provided it does not critically endanger his profits. For the woodlands, streams, and hedges he cares little, if at all. Likely, he views them as impediments — squatters on his land, taking up room away from his crops. Damage to nature matters to him not. It may even be desired.
Having little vision of, and direct hand-in-soil contact with, his land, the Bad Farmer is severely deficient in imagination. As Mr Berry defines it, imagination concerns visual sight coupled with “seeing with the mind’s eye”6. It is about deeply understanding the land and perceiving what its future potential could be when proper work and care is enacted upon it in response to its unique needs. Having imagination allows one to recognise where things are not quite right, where damage is forming and what needs to be done to enact repair and healing. Imagination enables sympathy.7 Sympathy is essential for love.
The Bad farmer has no imagination of his land, only inflated dreams of bumper profits. And without imagination and a proper reckoning of his land, the Bad Farmer lacks any resemblance of care, save the bare minimum “care” that is needed to keep the land in a productive state. They cannot see the scars they are leaving; nor the effects of their neglect of place-based and particular needs. Often, they rarely get up close to the soil at all, either delegating on-the-ground labour to underpaid farm hands or to impersonal machines and huge tractors. What they do not see they cannot know. And what they cannot know they cannot love. Not that they would want to anyway.
Ultimately, that is the chief vice of the Bad Farmer — their total lack of affection and love. For the chief quality that defines a farmer a Good Farmer is love and will always be love.8 The Good Farmer knows that the land is a gift to them, a responsibility to love and to care for. A gift to steward and to bring the best potential out of. A gift to work with rather than work over and against. A gift to know deeper every year and a gift to build one’s identity upon; letting one’s identity become entwined with the humus, the plants, the birds, the fields —the place. A land to look over with pride; a land in which damage is unthinkable. A land to be improved and made more sustainable. A land where a livelihood for a lifetime can be made. A land to love.
“It all turns on affection.”9 and “all” includes productivity. If only the Bad Farmer could see this.
The Two Farmers
Standing with horse and plough,
the little old farmer whispers
softly to his land:
"This might hurt a little, but I'll try to be gentle."
Up high in his tractor -
music and AC blaring -
the man does not notice his land,
nor the scars he is leaving.
(Hadden Turner, Chelmsford, 2023)This essay is free, but any tips given (or paid subscriptions) support my work, help me to write more pieces, and are greatly received by this young writer.
At least in the short term or without heavy subsidies. Ecological or lower intensity farming often (but not always) yields lower or comes with a transition period where yields are depressed. Without financial support, farmers cannot survive such periods.
Wendell Berry, Quantity Versus Form.
Thomas & Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. p.220.
Wendell Berry, It All Turns On Affection.
James C. Scott, first alerted this to me in his two logics of agriculture in Seeing Like A State.
Wendell Berry, It All Turns On Affection.
Wendell Berry, It All Turns On Affection.
Though skill is also needed!
My favourite term from Wendell Berry.
As a college student in a 1980 ecology class, the professor pointed at us young ignorant students and said, ‘In your lifetime, water will be the limiting resource worldwide.’ We all laughed and thought ‘what an old fool’. But here in 2024, water is a precious commodity and more than 1+ billion people do not have access to water let alone clean water. We are all in a sense ‘Bad farmers’ because we each need to learn how to protect and nurture our planet if we are to survive. Soil and water are essential for our survival. There is always hope and our world was created such that it can and does heal. But each of us needs to be aware of our own impact on our natural environment and have care, concern and imagination to protect it to ultimately protect ourselves.
Hadden,
As you likely know from reading some of my posts, my hunch is that the "trapped" category you describe will not be remedied within the market. Have you read David Graeber's book Debt: The first 5,000 years? In it, he offers the simplest description of the emergence of markets: "Cash transactions between neighbors." There's plenty more to say on that, but I'll leave it there for now.
Also, the etymology of the word "farm" is quite telling: "a fixed annual payment for use of land." Meaning that "farmers" only emerged as a category to be called by that name once their ancestral access to land had been taken from them. Thus, what we call "farming" has always been a project of extraction for the benefit of princely or landowning classes--now just your standard consumer. Before that, farming didn't need a name. The activities of field cultivation and pastoralism were as woven into the fabric of a shared life and land as care for the young and the old, community rituals---feasting/song/dance.
Thank you for your work. There's so much work to do in this arena. With care, Adam