Farming is Hard

How people feel about farming
What is farming / that's not farming
What is hard work / work for yourself vs others

	

"Farming is hard work," goes the common sentiment in our world of industrialized agriculture. The line of thought usually continues that we should consider ourselves lucky because we no longer need to depend on our own toil just to eat. We can work our jobs and live comfortably. Other people, more qualified people with the help of massive machinery, will do the farming and we will buy from them.

Slowly, over the last decade or so, I've come to disagree with this sentiment. In that time, I purposefully flipped my work life from desk to field, working on farms and studying the different approaches to growing food. Some of the practices are surprisingly different from what most people think of as farming. We understand it to be an industrial process. Hulking, insectine harvester machines crawling monocropped plots that span the horizon. Circular fields with a long train of elevated sprinkler piping spinning from their center. Highly controlled soil chemistry and clouds of insect- and herbicide.

This kind of farming is hard. It's a battle to force plants to grow in a controlled environment because it's not what they know. Treating a farm like a factory assumes a headwind that comes with working against nature. Battle the bugs, fight disease, pull and spray the weeds, lock out the animals. It's our western, combative, controlling, and extractive worldview pointed at the land.

Historically farming was not hard in the same ways. It's only in the recent past that farming came to look like this. Permaculture, food forestry, regenerative agriculture are all angles on a different kind of farming, an older kind of farming done with nature, instead of against it. Indigenous growing practices in South America were so wildly different from our own that we only recently came to realize the Amazon is a cultivated food forest.

I now believe our view of growing food is based on an interwoven tangle of untruths we have spun ourselves into little by little. This massive katamari of a lie has accumulated by piling on the the sometimes large but often small dissatisfactions surrounding agrarian life until the entirety of it had been deemed undesireable; our earthly foundation eroded, swapped for products and services. The overall effect has been the unnecessary complexification of our world and a forced reliance on capital for our basic needs.

What do people mean when they talk about farming? When people discuss farming Some of them are

This process isn't exclusive to our relationship to our food― it's how capitalism works; wriggling itself between you and things you need,"Unlocking value" developing a dependence, justifying its existence and its exploitation. Where there isn't a need to satisfy, it sews a dissatisfaction, manufacturing a desire. I am no protestant but I do believe that all work worth doing is hard at times.

If there was anything in this world that I'd describe as having a devlish presense, I'd point to the sewing of dissatisfaction in people as a way to sell a convenience that leaves us dependent on it. This is part of that narrative. I'd rather have a direct path to fulfilling my needs. It's fascinating then to find this account and study of a farm run by a single man that grows all of his food on about 750 m². Ever notice that we're never sold alternatives to being sold alternatives.

Sure, farming is difficult. But its difficulty is pointed in a rewarding path-- a liberating path. Why work for But growing plants is spiritually rewarding— 10x more than any office work could ever be. It connects you to the land. It connects you to the seasons, and our planet. These connections feel deep, like we evolved to have them. And working at a desk blunts the strength, weakening our spirit.

But there's another enormous part to this. Farming is hard because our understanding of it, as modern industrialized farming, assumes a headwind that comes with working against nature. Battle the bugs, fight disease, pull and spray the weeds, lock out the animals. It's our western, combative worldview pointed at the land.

When you shift perspective you also change your direction, then you have a tailwind— nature is at your back.

Notes:

“Just wait five minutes” for nature to establish itself. 
Do-nothing farming Fukuoka.