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.
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.
In contrast to illusionary never-ending growth, small, agroecological farms (good farms) focus on slower but deeper growth and leave space for nature to thrive — and in turn benefit from the activities such as pollination that nature provides without charge. However, due to limits being respected and embraced, small farms sometimes achieve lower yields3 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 line4, and in our perverse economy, this bottom line is all that matters. In this competitive, limitless world, the small 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 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 is dependent on fertilisers, pesticides, and industrial practices if it is to continue to bring forth life. Eventually, the abuse may win, the land 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.
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 can be seemingly infinitely “intelligent” (though not wise). But, 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 (even when the robot has artificial intelligence). 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 avoid 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. The 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 also be impoverished of wisdom, affection, beauty, and skill. It begs to be asked, 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 robots and AI 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 farmers, be they Good Farmers, are nether-the-less limited — and we forget this at our collective peril. We must embrace these limits, let our farmers be Good (limited) Farmers, and watch the land flourish under their care.
Wendell Berry, Quantity Versus Form.
And now that these farmers are ruined, their lands can be bought and consolidated by the big agricultural firms and farmers.
Again, not always, and often only during transition periods to more ecologically-friendly farming.
Though this is far from always the case, and many small farms are more productive per unit area.
“Due to limits being respected and embraced, they often achieve lower yields than industrial farms, whose lands have been pumped with the seemingly limitless ‘performance-enhancing drugs’ of fertilisers and pesticides.”
That’s exactly right, isn’t it? These are to the land what testosterone and other anabolic steroids are to bodybuilders and athletes. They produce the appearance of ideal form, of strength, of health, but in the end they replace the natural functions of the user who ends up dependent on them.
Great insight here.
I have just come across this on Twitter and I love it Hadden! Thank you.
Just a question of language: we often talk about ‘respecting’ or ‘accepting’ limits. As an ex-doctor I’m aware that’s what we encourage patients to do with a terminal diagnosis.
Is there something more positive to be found with limits? Since they have existed since before Genesis 3 could we even celebrate them?!