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.¹ He knows it intimately and is thus keenly aware of its potential — and its limits. He knows what his land is capable of and labours hard under the sun to ensure 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 their 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 call he farm home too. 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 gives himself to the land, providing what it needs, and in some cases, lacks. He pours his work and life into the land, lavishing it with his attention, energy, and wisdom. This wisdom leads the Good Farmer to appreciate that his 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 it obeying 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 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 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. It would be a form of abuse. 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 use.

Further, the Good Farmer perceives that the soil on his land is unique, suitable for 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 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 large for his limited capacities is a farm that experiences at best neglect, and at worse, abuse. The unavoidable 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 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 and sustainable land; 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. We do need productive farms and farmers do need to turn a profit. The issue arises when these industrial aims and values are focused on exclusively. For then, in the words of Wendell Berry, “the formal integrity of the farm”² is destroyed, natural and semi-natural habitats are eliminated, soils degrade, and livestock suffer. To keep the farm going, the industrial 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.³ It is an unforgiving pursuit.

In contrast to illusionary never-ending growth, small, agroecological farms focus on slower but deeper growth and leave space for nature to thrive. In turn, nature rewards them with its service as bees pollinate crops and earthworms labour away in the soil — all free of charge. However, due to limits being respected and embraced, small farms do sometimes achieve lower yields⁴ than industrial farms, whose lands have been pumped with the seemingly limitless “performance-enhancing drugs” of fertilisers and pesticides. In purely financial terms, ‘good farms’ are sometimes less profitable at the bottom line,⁵ and in our perverse economy, this bottom line is all that matters. In this competitive, limitless world, the small, the beautiful, and the good struggle to survive.

Thus, simply to survive, the small farmer may be tempted to take on more land than he knows can manage well. For a few years, throughout the “wonders” of economies of scale he does indeed obtain greater total yields and profit (though often still only meagre). But he does so at great cost — at the cost of a now degraded land under his control, and a land that over time will need to be abused more and more through greater chemical inputs, fossil fuel-driven power, and ‘cut corners’ to simply continue to be propped up and able to provide. A land that starts to produce because of actions of degradation, will eventually and perversely require the agents of degradation to continue. Like a drug addict dependent now on that which is killing him, the land with its degraded and overworked soils and depleted biodiversity, is dependent on high use⁶ of fertilisers, pesticides, and industrial practices if it is to continue to bring forth life. Eventually, the abuse may win; the land is simply unable to take anymore abuse, its soil spent or eroded away, and it becomes a desolation — or at the very least, devoid of bird song and beauty and unable to produce good food.

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Some may then say the solution is to remove the limited farmer from the land altogether and turn it over to the responsibility of robots and AI. Robots can farm land of any size, and provided they have enough energy, can do this indefinitely. The robot never tires, can work night and day, and can often do so with greater precision than even the most accurate of farmers, and when coupled with AI, the robot is seemingly infinitely “intelligent” (though not wise). However, although a robot may be able to increase the yields obtained through efficiency gains, one major deficiency outweighs all gains the robot brings — it lacks the wisdom, skill, care, and creativeness of a Good Farmer.

In short, the robot lacks all the attributes and virtues that make a farmer a Good Farmer.

The robot lacks the wisdom and affection to steward the whole of the farm well — creating space for nature and a convivial environment for the whole community and its complex needs. The robot is fixated on improving efficiency, yields — and nothing else. Whereas a good farmer might notice in a small patch of his field that a rare bird has laid its eggs and thus avoids cultivating it, to the robot, this bird is invisible (or an obstruction) and is thus bound to be disturbed. The bird has committed the great modern vice of “getting in the way” of efficiency and productivity — and that which gets in the way will be removed and destroyed.

Indeed, the brains and power behind the robot and the further mechanisation of the land are big agri-corporations, who have proven time and time again to be enemies of the agri-environment and rural communities. These profit-driven ‘corporations of degradation’ have crippled and discarded agricultural communities, have laid waste to local environments, and have taken farmers hostage with small-print-laden contracts with no get-out clauses. Now they send out robots, made in their destructive profit-driven image and programmed for further pillaging and destruction, all in the name of higher profits for shareholders — not in the name of higher yields that will ‘feed the world’ as they altruistically try to claim.

Thus, a land without farmers will be just as desolate and impoverished as a human-run industrial farm. Efficiency-driven robots will make the same critical mistake that ‘limit-ignoring’ (bad) farmers make: they will abuse the land by ignoring and transgressing its limits. But there is another way a land turned over to the robot creates a land of desolation. It will create a ‘wilderness of the machine’, a place where humans are absent, not because of natural wilderness, but because these wildernesses have been created by us to exclude us — a land turned over to the exclusive domain of the machine with all obstructions to profit and efficiency (read, humans) banished. These industrial lands will additionally be impoverished of wisdom, affection, beauty, and skill. Will there be much left that we truly value in a farm besides the “food” it produces? Will tradition, ingenuity, beauty, bird song, and footpaths remain? Will even a farm remain? Or will be left with a giant and sterile Food Production Area — a landscape on the road to degradation and desolation?

To avoid this dystopian future of sterile, lifeless, and degraded ‘Food Production Areas’ managed by AI robots and owned by distant shareholders, we need to turn our land back over to Good Farmers — and many of them — by creating and protecting economic and social systems which allow them to fully own small farms that are within their capacities for good management and stewardship. This is one of the greatest needs of the day; so much beauty, life, and goodness depends on it.

But remember, our Good Farmers are nether-the-less limited. We forget this at our collective peril. We must embrace these limits and let our farmers be Good (limited) Farmers. If we do this we shall watch the land flourish under their care.

1. Or, for that matter, her.

2. Wendell Berry, Quantity Versus Form.

3. And now that these farmers are ruined, their lands can be bought and consolidated by the big agricultural firms and farmers.

4. Again, not always, and often only during transition periods to more ecologically-friendly farming do smaller lower intensity farms suffer lower yields (and often they are only lower in intensity in machine and input use. Human work by hand often becomes of a greater intensity. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2

5. Though this is far from always the case, and many small farms are more productive per unit area.

6. I stress high use as I am not against the use of pesticides, fertilisers or machinery where needed and where limits are respected.