Doing Anything Worth Doing for the Long Haul
I finished reading Michael Foley’s new book, Farming for the Long Haul today. Besides the delight and joy of putting my hands in the soil and serving up the fruit of this labour, I also take the Apostle Paul’s command to Timothy to heart: consider the hard-working farmer. In my own vocation attentiveness to the hard-working farmer has generated some wisdom. Hopefully its wisdom that will keep me in my vocation for the long haul too!
Michael currently farms in California at Green Uprising Farm with his wife and eldest daughter. Besides serving on several farming related boards, he is the cofounder of the School of Adaptive Agriculture and manages his local farmers market.
I offer this lengthy quote from Michael Foley in which wisdom for the long haul nurtures a kind of stewardship that resists the impulse to just move on or to just take what you can from a place:
Exodus resonates in our culture, even today, because much of the settlement of the United States was experienced as an exodus from tyranny, precarious living conditions, or overcrowding. Oscar Handlin’s classic study of European immigrants to the United States draws in broad strokes the situation of peasants in an overcrowded Europe; and the portrait applies to the circumstances of many immigrants. The impulse to simply move on in the face of limited opportunities at home fueled the westward migration of both these and earlier settlers and informed our own culture of mobility.
Exodus may be an alternative to captivity, but it is also an exile. And exiles settle uneasily on the land and often find their former experiences less than helpful with new soil, a new climate, new conditions of production, and new markets. They leave behind their long experience of stewardship, if they enjoyed it at all, and they are too apt to move on again rather than cultivate the soil and the society where they find themselves. They can lend diversity and richness to they places they come to, but it takes years, even generations, to grow the sorts of roots that are required to tend the land well.
As Wendell Berry says, genuine stewardship lies “in the possibility of settled families and local communities, in which the knowledge of proper means and methods, proper moderations and restraints, can be handed down, and so accumulate in place and stay alive; the experience of one generation is not adequate to inform and control its actions.” (“The Making of a Marginal Farm” reprinted in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, 2017. p. 45) Thanks to the relentless uprooting that a national economy and education system focused on upward mobility has thrust upon us, and to our own immigrant roots, most Americans are exiles, and those of us who choose to recover the sounder principles of caring for land and community are only slowly learning to be rooted. We should avoid exodus where we can. We will need a culture that rewards and encourages rootedness instead of mobility if we are to assume a role as proper stewards of the land and truly farm for the long haul. But that means that we will need also to cultivate voice as our first and most persistent response to the larger forces that attempt to shape our destiny.
Michael Foley. Farming for the Long Haul, Resilience and the Lost Art of Agricultural Inventiveness. 2019. p. 194-195.
Farming for the Long Haul from Amazon
