The Good Farmer and His Limits

The Good Farmer is a farmer who embraces his limits

A Good Farmer is a wise steward of the land that has been entrusted to him (or for that matter, her). He knows it intimately and is thus keenly aware of its potential — and its limits. He knows what his land is capable of and works hard under the sun to ensure that it performs to the best of its ability — and remains able to do so in perpetuity. The very best of farmers ensure their land not only flourishes for their own and the local community’s needs, but also that it provides sufficient resources and a convivial home for the community of fauna and flora — domestic and wild — that live on and around the farm. The land has multiple members invested in and requiring life from it. The farmer’s calling is to steward, care for, and work the land to bring forth this life-giving potential for all.  

The Good Farmer, therefore, gives himself to the land and provides what it lacks. He pours his work and life into the land, giving it his attention, energy, and wisdom. This wisdom leads the good farmer to appreciate that the land in and of itself is not an inexhaustible supply of riches. It has the capacity to be so, but only if the farmer continually gives back to the land — what Wendell Berry calls the ‘Doctrine of Return’. This giving to the land occurs in both the giving of resources (nutrients, water, and appropriate seed and livestock), but also in the giving of the farmer’s being to the land: his care, attention, knowledge, wisdom, and skill. These attributes of the farmer’s being are expressed and applied to the many duties the farmer has to his land planting, growing, fertilising, regenerating, and protecting. In all these actions, the Good Farmer not only works for the land but also works with the land and the nature it contains. This is the art of his wisdom.

The Good Farmer’s wisdom further leads him to a fundamental recognition that his land has its limits. It can only provide so much life in one harvest; to require more from it than it can give would serve to damage the land’s future capacity to provide. Thus, every few years, the land may need to rest in fallow to recover its capacity to abundantly provide and also to ecologically stabilise again after years of hard use. Further, the Good Farmer perceives that the soil on his land is unique, suited particularly to some plants and not to others. To try and force the land grow something that the soil is not suited for either results in failure and frustration, or a degradation and abuse — the opposite of good farming.

In addition to the limits of the land, any Good Farmer knows his capacity, like that of his land, is also limited. He is a creature, after all, with limited physical strength, time, and expertise. There is only so much he can do and thus only so much he can manage before all the spinning plates come crashing down. In short, there is a limit to the scale of land a Good Farmer can farm before he ceases to be a Good Farmer to part of, if not all, of his land. A farm too grand and large for his limited capacities is a farm that experiences at best neglect, and at worse, abuse. The necessary outcome of both neglect and abuse is degradation — which again is the opposite of good stewardship and the Good Farmers’ calling.

So, the Good Farmer resists the temptation to take on more than he can handle or more than he can manage well. He ignores the calls to “get big or get out” or to build “bigger, better barns”. He knows that to do so would be to jeopardise his high calling. His wisdom and limitations keep him grounded at the ‘humane scale’, the scale where limited humans flourish.

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The tragedy of our modern industrial agricultural age is that small-scale agroecological farms and their Good farmers desperately struggle to make ends meet. What is valued in our national and international food systems is not the production of good food from well-stewarded land — land that has provided a conducive environment to the flourishing of the farmer, local communities and all of creation. Instead, what is valued are the industrial “virtues” of productivity, efficiency, and profit, all driven by the industrial food system’s insatiable appetite for economic growth and cheap food. These industrial virtues, in and of themselves, are not wrong. An unproductive farm is a blight to society. The issue arises when these industrial aims and values are exclusively focused upon. For then, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the formal integrity of the farm”¹ is destroyed, natural and semi-natural habitats are eliminated, soils degrade, livestock suffer. To keep the farm going, the farmer is forced to apply the inputs of industrial agriculture in ever-increasing measure, and thus becomes trapped in a debt-driven system that ultimately may lead to his ruin. Thus, is the sorry end for many farmers who have embarked on the illusionary pursuit of ever-increasing growth.² It is an unforgiving pursuit.