What the Land Cries Out For

Our rural and farmlands need to be populated with more people, not fewer.

“[Farming is] that vital moment when we come up against the natural world.”

- James Rebanks¹

Nature is all around us. Whether it be the fields and forests that surround our cities and encapsulate our rural communities, or the tiny flower pushing its way through the cracks of the concrete jungle — nature is always there. Leave any patch of land in the city alone long enough and nature will start to reclaim what was once under its dominion. The abandoned city of Pripyat near Chernobyl² is a vivid example of nature’s ‘rewilding’ of the urban.

Nature is always with us.

More so than that, nature is always something we have to “come up against”, whether directly as farmers and gardeners, or indirectly as eaters. We cannot escape it. Technology, modernism, and urbanism may try to sever the ancient bond between food and the land, but it is a fruitless and worthless endeavour — a mere “chasing after the wind”. The same ancient Text that contains this saying also states “There is a time for planting and a time for harvest”³ — and thus shall be until the end of time. We may believe that ours is the first “post-agricultural society”,⁴ or that we shall soon globally reach this “pinnacle of development”,⁵ but such a belief is as arrogant as it is deluded. We shall always be dependent on nature for our sustenance, clothing, and shelter — natural products have no artificial rival — and aesthetic, cultural, economical, and energetic requirements and desires will serve as immovable stumbling blocks for eco-modernists who wish to replace farming altogether with artificial creations of our own making⁶. It is incumbent and urgent then, for humanity to learn how to interact with nature rightly and convivially — for we shall always have to “come up against it”.

Stewardship is the term many use to describe the healthy relationship of mankind with nature. The earth is to be stewarded by Good Stewards, for the benefit of all mankind, and for the benefit of all our fellow creatures, through healthy soils producing healthy and abundant food, and healthy landscapes providing abundant habitats for creatures great and small. Overlooking, for now, the criticism that has been levelled at this term (some warranted and others not), stewardship of nature for the benefit of all life — human and wild — is the great, ancient, and unending task of humanity. It is one we will never get perfectly right, but one we must forever strive to improve our undertaking of. If we are to ‘come up against nature’, we must come up against it rightly — and good stewardship is how we are instructed (and commanded) to do so.

The last 60 years (and more) of agricultural history have, however, been anything but good stewardship⁷. Old traditional ways and practices have vanished from the landscape, along with the creatures who depended on the habitats and resources created by such practices. A classic example are traditional hay meadows, which have all but disappeared in the United Kingdom due to intensive industrial agricultural pressures enforced by farming policy in response to the scarcities of World War Two. Specialist species such as the Corncrake who depended on these traditional habitats, are now confined to isolated marginal pockets where traditional practices persist against all odds. They are not the only casualties of the abrupt and far-reaching changes that have taken hold in our formerly ‘green and pleasant lands’. Pesticides have decimated both pests and friendly insects; artificial fertilisers have washed into rivers and choked them of oxygen; and mechanisation has disturbed fragile habitats and eroded precious soil. These destructive forces have pulled apart and broken the very fabric of the ecological relationships that hold together our farmed environments, and as the habitat and wildlife surveys show, we inhabit nature-depleted lands.

Other hostile forces have taken root on our farms, exacerbating the destruction. The doctrines of efficiency, hyper-productivity, and immensity of scale have taken up permanent residence in the minds of agricultural policymakers, most evidenced by Earl Butz the US agricultural secretary's clarion call to farmers to “Get big or get out” in the tumultuous 1970s. His call was answered in earnest by the emergence of Big Ag: the mega transnational corporations which have dominated the agricultural scene ever since. These companies are made up of the ‘hyper-growthists’, their entire agricultural philosophy premised on the necessity for never-ending growth. They require an ever-upward trend in profit growth to keep their shareholders happy and to uphold the egos of their CEOs — and they will stop at nothing to achieve what their desires demand.

Thus, the doctrine of limitless growth has been forced upon agricultural lands and rural communities. This is a hostile doctrine, an invasive doctrine, and a thoroughly damaging doctrine. Agricultural environments, being nature-based systems, are fundamentally limited: limited by soil and nutrients, limited by the biology of plants and animals, limited by seasons and weather, and limited by their limited human farmers with their limited capacities, wisdom, and energy. Unending growth is an alien concept to the natural world (however, it is, as someone once mentioned, the doctrine of the cancer cell). When it is pursued, destruction and degradation are as sure to follow as night follows day.

But from high up in their corporate skyscrapers — as far from the land as it is possible to be on Terra Firma — these ‘hyper-growthists’ cannot see the damage their policies and products are causing to the land and its steward caretakers. Not that they care. Any damage to the land requires solutions — which the ‘Big Ag’ corporations are very eager to provide. More inputs, chemicals, machinery, and technology — these are the ‘solutions’ to the problems of their own making. This may sound hypocritical (it is) and it may sound counterintuitive (it should be) but the problems caused by Big Ag’s practices are great opportunities for higher sales of their chemicals, technology, and machinery, and thus greater profits and more of that coveted growth.

Farmers have thus become trapped into one-sided contracts and a stranglehold dependence on these slick agents of destruction — the Big Ag corporations and their salesmen — to fix the problems of degradation that have ravaged their farms (I will repeat, problems caused by the very same individuals who are selling them the solutions). The machines and inputs that were advertised as “liberating them from hard work and enabling greater yields” (as the agrochemical companies love to say), have instead attacked farmers at the very core of their identity. They have locked them into toxic dependencies and prevented them from fulfilling their ultimate aim — the stewarding and care of the land for the flourishing of all Creation. It is a crying shame that farmers have become unwilling sub-agents of destruction and must work their lands into a spiral of decline just to put enough food on their own plates. Bare survival, rather than flourishing, is the only achievable aim for most of our land stewards.

---

Another perversity is caused by the agrochemical revolution, which threatens the heart of the rural social culture. Inputs and machines have replaced the once numerous farmhands leading to a rapid and severe depopulation of our rural places — with far-reaching and seemingly permanent effects. As Wendell Berry rightly points out:

The absent farmhands have had to be replaced by machinery, petroleum, chemicals, credit and other expensive goods and services from the agribusiness economy, which ought not to be confused with the economy of what used to be called farming.⁸

Today’s farmers are mostly solitary workers out in their fields. Whereas in the past, ‘many hands would have made light work’, now ‘many chemicals and machines make lighter work’. Lighter and faster work but not necessarily better work⁹. The hand of a farmer or farm worker may be slower than the machine or chemical but is gentler and more skilful, more convivial to the life not only of his crops, but also of the beneficial creatures that also call the farm their home.

The farmer has powers of attuned and studious perception. He is able to notice the subtle changes and differences in his land and respond accordingly as the needs present themselves. Not only that, he is also able to differentiate between a weed and a wild flower, a bee and a pest. The pesticide and machine are incapable of this. Instead, they annihilate almost everything in their path. They simplify nature into what is of ‘ultimate productive worth’ and ‘everything else’.

This ‘everything else’ consists of creatures of immense beauty and productive use to the good and healthy farm. But beauty has no worth to the machine and the productive ‘ecosystem services’,¹⁰ provided by the beneficial creatures, are in competition with the services the machine and its corporate owners can provide. There is no neutral ground. ‘Everything else’ is to be destroyed or degraded for the sake of efficiency and competition or, at a minimum, suffer abuse and neglect.

Eventually, this trajectory of degradation will result in a land unable to yield a harvest, a tragic moment that represents the sorry end of the farmer’s work. But, as that moment is still a while off yet, “there is no need to panic” Big Ag’s salesmen say, “why worry about concerns that future generations will face? And anyway, they will be able to mitigate this disaster with advanced technology. The pressing concern of our shareholders is all that matters in the here and now.”

Or so they say.

---

Through the smoke arising from the destruction wrought upon our rural lands, a proper and right ‘solution’ seems now to be coming clear for those “who have ears to hear and eyes to see” and a wish to be wise. The Big Ag companies and their subservient politicians and policymakers need to be ignored and resisted. We need more — many more — Good Farmers. We need more hands and feet on the land working convivially with it, not fewer as the corporate liars would have us believe. In an age where the land bears the deep scars of our misuse, where species that once featured in our great poems and literature are being lost at an ever-increasing rate, and where the fabric of our relationship with nature is fraying to threadbare, the urgent need of the day is for a multitude of Good Farmers to be raised up from our communities and agrarian landscapes to take on the great and ancient work of stewarding the land.

But first, to raise up the next crop of Good Farmers, the modern and seemingly entrenched belief in the undesirability and disgrace of working with your hands deep in the soil must be utterly refuted. There is nothing menial or disgraceful about being a steward of the earth — few jobs could be more important and valuable for the entirety of society. How we treat the soil and the life it contains will have effects that reverberate down through generations yet to be born. Feast or famine, and abundance or scarcity, both for our generation, and those hereafter, hinges on how well (or not) we steward the soil and land today.

The immensity of the destruction that has gone before us, and the immensity of the task of restoring health to the land we have inherited, requires a multitude of Good Farmers to be raised up willing to get their hands dirty. The belief stemming from our “government offices, universities and corporations that there are too many people on the farm”¹¹ and that farm work is undignified for the modern hyper-educated man is totally false and will have disastrous consequences for the land and rural people if we let it persist. We mustn't.

---

A landscape populated full of Good Farms, worked by Good Farmers and Good Farm Workers, will allow a return to some of the old traditional ways — ways of farming that proximate man close to the earth he is cultivating. Tools and machines with a lighter footprint on the land, such as scythes and little twin-engine tractors, need to become prominent in our rural lands once again. Tried and tested wisdom passed down from generations must take precedence over the prescriptions from Big Ag, and an expectation of Good husbandry along with a sense of responsibility for the condition and health of the land must return. Traditional forms of Good Agriculture can be incredibly productive while at the same time being conducive to the long-term health of the land — thus meeting the twin urgent needs of modern society. As an old farming sage once said, “the health of the land comes before mere productivity” — and for this to be so, traditional, low-intensity practices and wisdom must return.

The travesty and arrogance of the modern age is that we have discarded as worthless so much of this well-matured land wisdom. What is new, modern, and scientific is the only knowledge worth having in our age. Anything which smacks of folklore, tradition, and intuition is to be confined to the scrap heap, or — if it holds some aesthetic or historical merit — to the rural museums. Under no circumstances do we want to return to these “old ways”. Scientists and politicians have said the truth cannot be found there.

But one must ask, if our new ways are so good, so right, so true, then why is our land in such a sorry state? Why are the extinction rates so high? And why are the scars so deep and the wounds so festering? Those age-old farmer-sages would stand aghast at how we have collectively desecrated their inheritance; an inheritance more valuable than any diamond or masterpiece: ‘the gift of good land’¹². We need to listen to them, not ignore them with our fingers in our ears.

---

What then are we to do? First and foremost, we need to properly value those Good Farms which shine as jewels in the barren monocultural deserts. We need to treasure our Good Farmers, get to know their names, put their produce on our plates, and feast on the delights their hands have nurtured. Further, we need to make Good Farming pay again, turning it into a desirable vocation once more. Then for some of us, we must return to the land and commit to participating in its healing.

Land is never too far gone. It can always be restored — though the task may outlive us. The builders of ancient cathedrals began a work whose finished state they knew they would never behold with their own eyes. It is perhaps the same with the remediator of the land. He may never see the good and plenteous crop or the land teeming with life in all its diversity and abundance. But each year that he works to restore the goodness and health of the piece of the earth under his care, he will see improvements. And within time (be it time beyond his time on earth), his fields will be productive again.

James Rebanks recounts the story of his grandfather taking on the care of a field that had been “let go” and festered with weeds, thistles and ragwort¹³. Over many years, and with hard backbreaking work, his grandfather restored the field to some level of productive use. But the work was never done. The weeds had gained a foothold and always had to be beaten back year after year. Thus, the work of the Good Farmer, indeed of all Good Farmers in our wounded landscapes, must go on.

And go on it must. Until the end of time, we will always have to ‘come up against nature’ and work with it for our daily bread. It behoves us all, therefore, to ensure that we have many Good Farmers populating our landscapes who are committed to the ‘long road of obedience’¹⁴ of stewarding and caring for the land on our behalf.

It is what the land cries out for.

---

Explore further

No Longer With the Eyes to See the Land

1. James Rebanks, English Pastoral. Penguin.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat

3. Both quotes are from the book of Ecclesiastes.

4. Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, Cambridge University Press. Ellen shows the fallacy of such a statement on page 28.

5. Rostow’s influential Stages of Growth represent the development of societies away from traditional agricultural-based societies to Mass Consumer Societies built on services and financial economies. One can easily see how this can be integrated with the eco-modernist ideal of bio-fermenters from business start-ups providing our food as mapping onto Rostow’s theory.

6. Such as bio-fermented proteins and foods, artificial wood, plastic clothing and wool.

7. See, Richard Hawking, At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside. Hale. for an excellent overview of the post-war changes to UK agriculture.

8. Wendell Berry, What are People For?

9. Wendell Berry, Horse Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labour Saving.

10. Services (or better, functions) such as pest control via natural pest predators.

11. Wendell Berry, What are People For?

12. Title of a book by Wendell Berry.

13. James Rebanks, English Pastoral. Penguin.

14. To borrow from Eugene Peterson.