If farming doesn’t make you humble, you’re not paying attention

Lessons from life and the land

A quick note before today’s post: Attentive readers may have noticed that I didn’t post anything last week, and that this week’s offering is late. This is because I recently started a full-time job at a farm. It’s a medicinal herb farm (no, not pot) located in Paonia, Colorado. The main field is pictured above. If you’re on the West Slope or find yourself there this season, look me up. Visitors are welcome (though if they stay long they’ll be put to work, lol). Anyway, this job is a lot of work and doesn’t leave much time for writing, so expect my postings to be a bit sporadic this summer. Thanks for your support!

Though I am a lifelong plant lover and gardener, I didn’t come to farming until my mid-30’s. As I told here, my inspiration to scale up my growing efforts was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I was living in Portland at the time and friends of mine from the herbalist and anarchist communities went to New Orleans to help with the mutual aid activities. They reported that big players like FEMA and the Red Cross were ineffective or even harmful, and that the most successful activities were grassroots and neighborhood-based. The lesson was clear to me: in an era of more frequent crises, it’s up to us to support each other, and to not count on being rescued.

So I took up farming because, well, food is so obviously essential to survival and I enjoy working with plants. I also went into it with the goal of learning more about life and myself, and so a part of me has always been standing aside, observing.

I mention all this because my motivation was not to make profit but to contribute to a greater cause: that of building people power by developing my own skills and knowledge, and also to cultivate awareness in myself. Financial concerns have been important of course, but there’s a difference between getting by and getting greedy. I am sad that our culture here in the US prioritizes the latter, though I’ve also known and been inspired by many people who buck that trend.

Building skills and knowledge requires self-appraisal about what you can’t do and don’t know, and then making choices about how to learn. Books and research, mentors and teachers, experience and experimentation, are all important. A farmer friend in Oregon once told me, “When you’re learning how to farm a piece of land, you’re learning how to farm that piece of land.” He was so right. Sure, some basic skills and knowledge will apply from place to place, but each location has its own history and unique attributes, some of which can only be discovered by working with the land. Yes, you can learn something from soil tests and other methods of surveying, but until you see sprouts poking up—or not—and then watch how they do, you’re just crossing your fingers that anything you want will happen at all.

I and my various farming partners over the years have had experiences where we did everything right to the best of our abilities and the crops under-performed or failed. Likewise, we had experiences where we messed things up, and the plants flourished anyway. One of my all time best carrot harvests was from a patch that I really neglected in terms of weeds and water. All summer long, I never quite got to it, but in the fall when I dug it up, the roots were fat, long and delicious. It would be wrong to conclude that “the way to grow carrots” is to ignore them like this, but in that particular instance, it was fine. What can we make of experiences like that?

We can admit that the part played by the farmer is, in the end, smaller than many farmers might like to admit.

The weather plays a big part, to be sure, and is impossible to control. Responding to it is limited not just by the resources of an individual farmer, but by the ability to respond at all. No farmer in the world can’t stop an extreme event like a wildly late or early frost, a catastrophic storm, a severe flood, etc., and even the richest one can’t mitigate for them.

Pests and diseases cannot always be stopped. The land’s history is also out of the farmer’s hands and may reveal itself in unexpected ways, both fruitful and not. Then, equipment breaks, workers get sick, and random shit just happens. And only a few factors affecting the field are held at bay by fences. The wider world is always pressing in.

Over time, “on that piece of land,” a farmer can figure a few things out—at least within the context of the conditions there over that period, which are not guaranteed to remain consistent—but the further the farmer gets from that piece, geographically or otherwise, the less their specific experience will apply.

Farming can involve science, but farming is not a science. Nor is it an art in the way that illustration, sculpting, and film, where the artist is mostly in control of the medium and the scope. The farmer is working with living creatures—plants—who have their own drives and destinies A farmer can try to coax or corral them, depending on their style, but in the end, the farmer is not truly in charge, even if they like to think they are. Living things and living systems are inherently independent and stochastic.

I personally go so far as to say that a farmer cannot truly take credit or blame for a crop’s performance. Certainly, over the course of the season, a farmer will make good choices and bad choices in this or that instance, but overall and ultimately, the farmer only plays a supporting role. They’re not the headliner. Again personally, I find it relieving to recognize that capital-L “Life” is the one actually bottom-lining everything, not me.

All of this is to say that the farmer who pays attention and is being honest with themself will inevitably be humbled. “Yep, I did my best, but in the end, I don’t know how much of a difference that made.” If you hear a farmer say something like that, you know you’re dealing with someone you can trust.

I’m sorry to report that there are many many farmers here in the US who don’t pay attention in this way and dodge that kind of honesty, seemingly a majority of them. Hubris is all too common. There’s lots of know-it-alls out there, and in virtually all cases there’s an inverse relationship between boastfulness and true ability. A lot of them are just jerks, tbh, like so many other business people. Which is par for the course in the prison that is our profoundly sick society. And being well adjusted to such a society is no measure of health, as a wise person once said.

My advice: whether you’re a farmer or not, try to keep it real. Remember that your role is small in whatever you do that involves others, human and more-than-human alike. We’re the stars of the show only in the stories we tell in our own heads, not on the solid green earth where life actually happens.