Three Strands of the Farming Life

In the first post, I tried to put some words to the question ‘What is a farm?ʼ The paths I followed were grounded in the day-to-day work of a farmer (me, anyways) and were also aspirational - if we pursue the hope and beauty of what a farm can be, if we listen closely and well, what might we receive? It involves a common life, a relational life between farm and farmer, in which our attention and care are gladly given and we are in turn gifted with abundance from the earth. Donʼt be misled though: on occasion, our plantings also fail. Sometimes epically. Maybe a virus descends upon our cucumber plants, ruthlessly turning hundreds of healthy climbing beings into hanging corpses in a matter of days. Maybe cabbage moths banish our broccolini into off-grade purgatory. Maybe rats shit on our cauliflower and maybe we get more rain than we thought climatically possible, drowning our onions.

This, too, is farming. Such death and failure offer less proud-plant-parent vibes than does abundance, but farming insists that they have equal standing in the world we inhabit. To avert our eyes from their formidable power is to live incompletely; it is also a disrespect of the primeval rhythms and balance of the earth, our only home and our greatest teacher.

What lessons can we learn here? In the wake of a grim reaping, what can be gleaned?

At its heart, a farm is in a constant state of conflict, a forever-cycle of life and death and life and death—not always in the ways we wish. It is the duty of farmers to manage that conflict, to see to it that the farm to which they are responsible continues to produce vigorously and efficiently within the boundaries and constraints the place itself imposes. A small, simple example: we rotate our crops religiously, almost fanatically. When we harvest a bed of, say, purple daikon, weʼre not going to plant anything else in the radish family in that bedʼs next succession. This ensures that we are offering our seeds and starts the best chance they have to flourish in the absence of the microorganisms that love to eat them. Because, you know, WE love to eat them! Crop rotation can be thought of as a response to this constant state of conflict; it is one way to, in a sense, allow for the inevitability of conflict—in this case an underground, microscopic battle. Let them duke it out. Your only intervention is non-action. Restraint.

Farming, from this perspective, is an exercise in continually renegotiating your relationship to forces outside your control. Those examples at the top are very real, and very frustrating. Harvests—and dollars—just withering or washing away, thanks to too much wind/rain/pests/the Fates from Greek mythology yanking you around just for fun. (And that doesnʼt even take into account human error.) These troubles are in large part why a diversity of crops is so important to us at Lapaʼau. There is a flexibility and a capaciousness within the small farm that grows many things; poor germination of one crop during one seeding means one bed, maybe two, wonʼt yield a good harvest. What do we do when this happens? We try to learn from it what we can. We re-prep the bed and plant something else. A little time lost, a little seed lost - itʼs not nothing, but itʼs a manageable cost. Even the more painful ones, the epic fails, are tolerable within the context of a diversified farm strategy. We understand that itʼs part of the deal.

The deal? When you make an agreement with the earth, that agreement will be binding; she will exact something from you, and it may wound you. Accepting those wounds is not something that comes easily. Seeking retribution is a pretty natural human response when youʼre hurt. You taste the iron on your tongue, feel your bloody lip after getting popped in the mouth. Of course you want to hit back. But—of course—a farm is a farm. You are not dealing with another person or the built environment, youʼre dealing with essentially a stalemate between the wild world and your little cultivated one. It is, as a good friend wrote to me, “a place that defies control yet responds to stewardship.” So: When fighting with weed pressure or pest pressure, itʼs all about thresholds, not absolutism - can you contain them below a certain threshold you find aesthetically and economically acceptable? When struggling with soil fertility, are you willing to properly replenish the nutrients lost to your harvests - will you allow the microorganisms in the soil to flourish and do their best work, or will you exhaust their efforts through starvation? And when a storm is approaching ...can you pray? To any and every god who will listen, who might listen, those who have never listened to you before but maybe-just-maybe tonight they will? Farmwork drives home the truth again and again that this world is not ours to simply do with as we please. The world forever eludes our grasp, at least a little. In fact, if it appears we have our farm in a visegrip of control, we are most probably just asking the future to hold the debts we are presently incurring. The bill always comes due.

You can never take the conflict out of farming; you can never control the totality of a farm. The workings of any given ecosystem—and a farm undoubtedly is its own ecosystem—are unimaginably complex. There was an effort in the twentieth century to circumvent that complexity by synthesizing and manufacturing inputs like fertilizers or pesticides; organic chemistry had cracked the code, so the thinking went, and now farming would be simple, easy, certain. Then, with an arrogance that would make the builders of Babel blush, Nixonʼs Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, told American farmers to “plant fencerow to fencerow” and to “get big or get out.” By any honest accounting, that effort has been a trainwreck of shame and sorrow: soil erosion on an incomprehensible scale, chemical runoff into our planetʼs waters, massive concentration of agricultural wealth in only a few hands and an economy where the price of food is tragicomically low. (But always we must be honest and humble - itʼs easy to cast blame with the benefit of hindsight. If a credentialed, thoughtful, earnest scientist had come to me back midcentury and said, “Hey, farming is really really tough right? Well, weʼve developed a fertilizer that has exactly the right amount of what your crops need to grow, and weʼve also created this stuff you can spray on your fields to stop the weeds and pests, AND hereʼs a big olʼ tractor so your job is less back-breaking...” ehhh, I canʼt say I would have been smart enough or principled enough to resist that Siren song.)

The opportunity for us today is that we can receive those discoveries—the ingenious and creative methods and tools from our recent past—and apply them with more wisdom, restraint, humility, and context. We must ask where they fit into the life of the farm, not the other way around. How can we do what humans do best without straying into our worst impulses? That is to say, how can we creatively use tools to satisfy our needs and curiosities without falling prey to our sloth and avarice? How do we create mutuality with the living farm rather than seek a power over life itself?

Collaboration not control; the artful use of appropriately-scaled tools; a diversified farm strategy that accepts losses as an inevitable aspect of material, bodied reality: These. Are. Necessities. They engender faith not only in the rhythms and plenitude of the earth, but also faith in our own capacities and wisdom - and as we learn to trust these three strands of the farming life, we can begin to sense traces of the same threads throughout the wider world and indeed throughout the rest of our lives. Those traces, it seems to me, will set us free.