We Must All Be Farmers

Justice, Farms and Victory Gardens
by Sharon Astyk
Published on 11 Jan 2007 by Energy Bulletin

[C]reating a new agricultural model and implementing it is both a moral imperative and an absolute necessity.

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Through most of human history, a minimum of one fourth of the population has been farmers, and many more than that have been engaged in personal food production. The only way to ensure food security is to replace the disastrous industrial model with one in which many of us are farmers on one scale or another.

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Small scale agriculture is, in fact, at least a partial solution to many of our most intractable problems. For example, David Holmgren points out that a realistically achievable rise in humus in soils around the world would sequester an enormous quantity of carbon, reducing total carbon build-up in ways that could potentially be comparable to getting rid of a large portion of the world‘s auto fleet. For most Americans, the single act that would reduce their fossil fuel consumption, carbon output and ecological footprint the most is not to buy a more efficient car, but to cease buying supermarket food. And small scale, sustainable agriculture can produce outputs of dramatically more food and fuel than industrial agriculture can. If we move away from the large farm model, we may be able to feed the world, despite declining fertility and rising costs for fossil fuel inputs.

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[W]e need to become a nation of people who see themselves as creators rather than conquerors or consumers, people who see our central work as the maintenance and sustenance of the earth and human cultures.

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What we are talking about, then, is a return to human norms, in which many people are involved in a subsistence economy, producing most of what they need, with enough to create a small outside income for the things they cannot grow or barter for. Now subsistence, however, does not mean “struggling along in terrible poverty and suffering” – it means self-sufficiency, having enough. A subsistence economy does not require eternal growth, or expansionist political and military policies. It does not have dramatic differences between rich and poor. Its wealth lies in communal resources – the aid of neighbors, the pleasure of community, social and cultural wealth and a strong identification with one‘s local community.

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We do not lack a willingness to do the right thing – instead, what we lack is a unified understanding of what is right, and a collective energy to work in unison towards a single set of goals. But that can change – in fact, it is changing. For the first time the environmental movement, conservative Christians and justice movements are all headed in the same direction, due to shared concern about global warming. There is every hope and every reason to believe that those movements could be brought together to transform our culture, assuming we can find a mutual respect and understanding of one another. That alliance has the possibility to reach many people with a single message – that small scale farming is the most urgent work we can do, and also the most pleasurable.

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As production drops steadily on salinated and stripped fields in California and Iowa, and almost 50% of the world’s arable land is now classed as seriously degraded, we may yet compensate for some of that by wisely but intensively growing our food on suburban lots, replacing lawns with gardens and decorative trees with fruit trees.

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This is an awful lot of change, and for many of us, the next question must be “how do we do it when the current administration is so hell-bent on leading us to destruction?” It is essential to recognize that change does not have to come from the top down. In the end, there are damned few leaders in history who have led people anywhere. Mostly, people have to point in the right direction and our so-called-leaders get out of breath trying to keep up.

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In essence, everything that is good and valuable in the last 300 years of our human history has been a repeating narrative in which people who were powerless, enslaved, colonized, impoverished and desperate stood up and said, no more, and overthrew the people who colonized and enslaved them. Every one of those movements started out with a small number of angry and frightened people who saw the need for transformation and risked, as someone once said, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Folks, this is just growing food! Every one of us is more privileged, better educated, more powerful and in every way better prepared to change the world than thousands of people who already did it. How can we possibly do less than they, when the stakes are so high? So please go home and plant your gardens.

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