Flee to the Fields, Part 6: We are men, not minders of machines

 This is the sixth in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

(Part 1: Why farming is not a business; Part 2: The case for subsistence farming; Part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else); Part 4: It takes a farm to raise a village; Part 5: The small economy as protector of human dignity; Part 5.2: Additional thoughts on the small economy)

"Man is an organic whole, soul and body, a unity of the rational and animal, and all his actions must conform to this unity. There must be correspondence between what happens on the one plane to what happens on the other. As with the individual so with Society. The nature of man, his function, the reason for his existence, was to love and worship God. Insofar as he confirms to his nature so he will be happy. The means whereby he conforms to his nature is his work. ~ George Maxwell

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As a culture, we have an odd relationship with manual labor. On the one hand, many people will look reverently at an old man's calloused hands, recognizing in them dedication and hard work. Older folks will talk about how things were "back in the old days." Maybe it's because my own generation is aging that some of my friends on social media share memes that picture grizzled old farmers by their tractors and Depression-era grandmothers posing by their winter supply of canned goods.

There is a clearly a nostalgia for "old ways." We instinctively feel that things were different when people actually sweated and developed callouses when they worked. Tough conditions lead to strong work ethic and better character formation. Instinctively we yearn for this in our own children and lament its lack in other people's children. Many of us develop hobbies seem to be an attempt to fill the gap in our own formation. We do a little canning when it'd be easier to buy canned goods from the store, we build a garden shed with our own hands when it'd be easier to purchase it pre-fabricated from the local Lowes.

And yet, we can't imagine actually doing manual labor for a living, at least not if we could be doing something else. As a hobby it's fine, but as a means of earning one's daily bread... that's another matter entirely. Manuel labor is a drudgery, the same repetitive motion over and over. It is physically demanding, wearing dangerously on the body and the joints. It is associated with an hourly wage, with borderline poverty, and with migrant workers who don't have any better options.

Ironically, many of the older folks who talk about how much better people's characters were "back in the day" are the same folks who, through the hard work of their own hands, put their children through college so that they could avoid this kind of menial drudgery. In an earlier post I already wrote about how they enabled the flight to the cities and the construction of the supposed urban utopia where today many people are experiencing feelings of ennui, broken family life, and the very economic instability that the college degree was supposed to be insurance against.

George Maxwell would have it that the problem isn't manual labor itself, but an economic system that transforms hand labor into drudgery. He argues that mechanization robs manual labor of "intellectual satisfaction." Factory work, he writes, is "mainly mechanical and exercises physical dexterity only. Although in many cases an extraordinary quickness of hands is seen, little or no intelligence is called for, and it may be said that they are helpless except at their own job. Work is regarded as an unmixed evil, even a degradation, to be avoided if possible.

Rosemary teases me because sometimes on these long winter evenings I'll watch farming clips on YouTube. But I was really taken the other night by some clips of vegetable harvesting and sorting on a European mega-farm. There were workers whose sole task was to stand at a station for hours and grade the produce. With a dexterous flick of the hand the worker would cast the lower quality product off of the belt, which moved at a steady, inexorable clip.

Since Europe seems to be ahead of the United States with respect to worker rights, it wouldn't surprise me if these assembly line laborers make the equivalent of far more than $15/hour and are able to support their families. They probably can use the bathroom regularly, and they almost certainly get scheduled fifteen-minute breaks every few hours and a half an hour for lunch. These are all small victories of a sort for the modern labor movement. Yet I argue that in the end they are but Pyrrhic victories. In Maxwell's words about factory work, "It is natural that a worker should seek an increase of wages and shorter hours. The character of their labor being such as can give no satisfaction in itself, every effort is made to reduce the amount of it."

In other words, the focus of the modern labor movement -- labor unions, laws to improve working conditions, even the recent push to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour -- all fail to address the real problem of our modern modus vivendi: the very nature of industrial, mechanized labor. To be clear, I'm not talking just about assembly lines in factories and migrant workers bent over rows of crops and harvesting in the same position for hours on end. I'm making the argument that many white collar office jobs are just as demeaning, just as undignified: making the same sales pitch with the same fakey smile and same lilt of the voice hour after hour, entering data into the same formulaic boxes in form after form. It's all repetition and drudgery; it all exercises one small set of muscles, whether they be mental muscles or bodily ones. If anything, in fact, the white collar work is far worse because it fully occupies the mind with drudgery while trapping the body in idleness.

Maxwell's essay in Flee to the Fields actually concerns not so much farming as the restoration of the crafts. He argues that while vastly more quantity of product -- furniture, clothing, etc. -- can be churned more efficiently and more cheaply in a factory setting, the practice is robbing us of our humanity. Is it worth it? he asks. Labor is the way that we give glory to God. When labor does not employ the whole man -- body and soul -- man is robbed of his means to live as man. So he copes by doing the bare minimum of the soul-less work that he needs to in order to eat and keep himself clothed. But he dissipates the rest of his virility in distractions.

In this context, supposed work-life balance is born. We keep our grasp on sanity -- barely -- by being able to turn off the work phone and concentrating on what "really matters." In the best of situations this is family life, volunteer work, and a healthy set of hobbies that allow a man some fulcrum in which to exercise his true creative energies. In the worst instances it's man-caves, sports obsessions, and Netflix binges. While we may think that work-life balance is normal, I'd argue that it's more like living off of an oxygen tank in a roomful of noxious air when one could instead open the door and step outside to breathe fully and deeply.

Not everybody is called to be a small-time farmer. But I am truly grateful for this way of life that frees me to love and worship God through the work of my hands. The drudgeries of hoeing, weeding, and harvesting are normal human drudgeries, and to avoid them is to fail to discipline and subdue the body. These drudgeries are repetitive, but the changes in weather and the cycling of the seasons are gifts from God that keep the drudgery in check. I may work hard to hoe a field of squash for a few days straight. But then it rains and becomes too wet, and I'm free to change things up by choosing another task. I may work an eighteen hour day cleaning produce after receiving a purchase order during harvest season. But then the frosts of fall put an end to produce, and I can concentrate on putting away wood to keep us warn through the winter.

Now, here in the winter months I am freer to reflect on what worked last season and what didn't, and I spend time resolving to tweak things and try different methods. I'm always reading and learning something new, and I'm free to experiment and implement because I'm working my own land under my own rules and at my own pace. My only time clock is provided by God in the hours of sunlight for work and the hours of darkness that he grants for rest. My only pressing obligation is the responsibility that I've freely taken on to provide for a wife and to work collaboratively with her to nurture, raise, and educate our children.

Within this context, working with our hands is good for us. Our instinctive respect for the callouses on an old man's hands is evidence enough that this is true. Yet our revulsion at manual labor is also an understandable reaction within the context of our industrialized modern society, because such labor fails to employ the whole man. Instead it becomes a robber of man's dignity, for we are men, not minders of machines. 

Additional thoughts on the small economy

 I had a very good friend reply to yesterday's post. He happens to be a professional economist, and he took umbrage at my statement that the dollar is a poor way to value things. He didn't exactly say it wasn't a poor way to value things. But he did say that he couldn't imagine what the alternative would be. I can hardly begin to imagine how amateurish my musings must sound to somebody who is immersed in the intricacies of the economy nine-to-five every single weekday. But since basic human thriving (which is my basic area of concern in these posts) and economic theory have intersected, I've decided that it would behoove me -- at possible loss to my credibility -- to creep a little further out on the limb of economic theory.

To be clear, I didn't say that money was an inherently poor way to value things. I noted that money has no value in itself. Whether it's tied to a standard of gold or silver, or whether it's plain old fiat currency, the dollar cannot be eaten or worn. Money is merely a facilitator of our exchange of labor for things that really do have value because we need them. I'm a big fan of bartering for things. But I've fully aware of how inconvenient it'd be to barter for all of our necessities. If we move beyond the barter economy, we need to associate value with the dollar. I grant that.

My argument was not against the dollar itself, but instead that a global economy serves to distort the value of the dollar by putting it at a vast distance from the things that have value. My example yesterday was the Brussel Sprouts that I sold last fall, earning myself an income of about $1 per pound. The Brussels were part of what turned out to be a living wage for me. All told, I produced enough food beyond my own needs that I was able to support myself and my family and put away a little in savings. The value of a man's labor should be associated with it takes to support himself and his family. In my mind the value of a dollar is a handful of Brussels, or a decently sized spaghetti squash. 

The squash and Brussels are things that you and I can eat; they are necessary things. Therefore, they have real value, and that value is pegged at about one dollar. Their value is pegged at a dollar because, if I were paid any less for them, I wouldn't be able to feed my family by growing them, and I'd close up shop and try something else, and there wouldn't be squash or Brussels to be had. If they're worth having, people will pay a living wage for them. If you like food, you pay the one who grows your food a living wage.

At least, that's the way it'd work in the small economy for which I advocated last time. Yet in the big-city store, those very same Brussels were selling for $6 per pound. To be sure, there are truckers earning a living wage after their fuel and insurance costs to deliver them to the city and grocery store folks earning their own living wage and paying their store's rent, electric bills, etc. Those increases in cost are to be expected; people living in the big city can expect to pay more because of the extra costs brought on by living in such a place. I also critiqued the whole idea of the city last time, calling it an artificial construct brought about by the globalized economy. But let's leave off on that part of the argument for today.

The point is, the price of Brussels in the city isn't intimately related to any of these living wages, or even to their sum total. Let me illustrate: on my end last season, I actually received $21 per ten pound box on a good week, but as little as $17 on a bad week. In the end I had a hundred pounds of Brussels that my wholesaler couldn't even take off my hands at any price because apparently a whole glut of Brussels had suddenly arrived from south of the border. Who would have known that farmers grow Brussels Sprouts in Mexico, or that the USDA would trust that Mexican Brussels were grown in a manner equivalent to their own stringent organic standards? 

Our globalized economy doesn't care that I got left with a hundred pounds of Brussels and had my living wage endangered. Ultimately I sold the extra hundred pounds locally for far more than the wholesale price, but the point remains that the global market is cold and calculating. If a farmer in the Midwest folds because he can't make a living wage growing Brussels, it isn't because people aren't willing to pay him a living wage for them, but because there was cheaper product to be had elsewhere. Oh, they'll come back to the Midwestern farmer next season for more if the cheaper product doesn't present itself. But there is no human connection at all, just market forces and greed-driven speculation.

I didn't write yesterday's post just to complain, however. My goal was to present the beginnings of a solution in a return to a smaller, more localized economy. The whole edifice of middlemen and speculators comes crashing down when the distance between an object of value and the person spending dollars on it is eliminated.

While I've written about Brussels, how about ending with an example of lumber? Anybody who's been to Home Depot recently, as I was to buy some 2x4s for our bedroom renovation last month (home renovation is what a produce farmer does in the winter!), knows that lumber has increased in price by something like 50% since this time last year. The Internet tells me that it's partly due to due to COVID-related work stoppages, and partly due to speculation in the lumber market.

So who exactly is making the extra 50% that I paid for my 2x4s? Are the hardworking folks in the lumber industry retained by their industry at their former living wages, even as they are produce less lumber? Is that the reason that I'm paying more for each board? While I wish that were the case, I'd be willing to bet that it's not. Those folks more likely weathered the work stoppages by drawing on unemployment benefits funded by the Federal government.

No, the lumber cost more because the "market could bear it." Lumber was scarce, building projects had to continue, and some few folks became a whole lot wealthier through speculative greed and other folks folded the increased cost of their new houses into their home loans. They'll be paying for this speculative profit over the whole life of their 30-year mortgages.

At the same time, small Amish-run lumber mills in my neck of the woods have kept churning out a steady supply of rough-cut boards at a fairly steady price. There are still plenty of trees in the woods, and the saws are running fine. Perhaps there may be a work stoppage at one small mill. But the local supply doesn't become paralyzed, because there are five or six other small mills still running in the local vicinity during the one mill's stoppage. And the one mill doesn't suddenly raise its prices speculatively because the neighboring mills may not follow suite. That one mill would lose out on customers in the short term, and it'd earn a bad name for itself in the long term as an opportunist and a cheater of its neighbors.

The small economy is an interwoven set of relationships between actual persons who know each other and depend on each other. The small economy is not cold and heartless, drawing its supply from distant places and from people who may as well not even have names and whose demise would make no difference to us. My argument isn't against the dollar. It's against the globalized economy.

I have a feeling that the response to my admittedly crude caricature is that I have no idea the comforts and benefits that we'd be abandoning if the whole globalized edifice came crashing down. I'd miss the MacBook Air on which I'm typing this post and the diesel fuel that makes my tractor run. But thinking again of my Amish neighbors, who live very happily without many of the things that we take as sine qua non for human thriving, I'm haunted by another few sentences from Reginald Jebb's essay. They give me pause and make me wonder if most of our modern lifestyle and all the gains especially of the last century are but a game of smoke-and-mirrors that has left us worse off than we'd otherwise be. In that vein, I'll give Jebb the last word:

"One might perhaps compare the outlook of the average man under decaying capitalistic conditions, to a drug addict. He is not willing to give up his drug -- indeed, the idea appalls him -- though he can point to no natural or real advantages that it brings him. The notion of supporting life on food, drink, work, rest, and amusement -- the natural, indeed, the necessary, concomitants of life -- fills him with ennui, if not disgust. He craves for his drug because he has grown used to it, and he cannot picture existence without its stimulant. And though he knows that it is slowly killing him; he prefers such degeneration and death to a life of reality and vigor. For he has forgotten the taste of these things."

Flee to the Fields, part 5: The small economy as protector of human dignity

 This is the fifth in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

(Part 1: Why farming is not a business; Part 2: The case for subsistence farming; Part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else); Part 4: It takes a farm to raise a village)

"The real fact is that most wage earners have become so divorced from the responsibilities and the processes of thought inherent in free owners, that the wage they receive bears no relation in their minds to things produced for value given. They do not look beyond it, but only press for it to be made adequate to their needs. What it represents, where it comes from, how it is produced, what rights they have to it or to a larger one, they do not enquire. They start from the cash paid as from an incontestable metaphysical truth, and base all their personal economic assumptions upon that. It is true they realize that they cannot devour a pound note, or make it into a suit of clothes; but it is equally true that most of them cannot conceive of food or clothing except as the result of a money transaction. Thus the idea of a community largely self-subsistent appears to their minds as something unpractical -- almost unnatural." ~ Reginald Jebb

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I got into a debate with somebody the other day about the prospect of the federal minimum wage being raised to $15/hour across the board. While I acknowledged that there are mega corporations making a killing off of underpaid workers, I stated my firm conviction that simply raising the hourly wage will create more problems than it will solve. I hold that the problem is not with how much money a person makes, but with a system where the worth of an hour of labor is measured in dollars, which in themselves have no inherent value.

After all, what is $15 worth? Nothing, really. As Jebb points out, dollars -- pounds, for Brits like Jebb -- cannot be eaten and cannot be worn. Their worth is only found as a medium of exchange for something that actually has value because it's necessary for human thriving: basic necessities like food, clothing, or shelter, or things that that hold a culture together like learning and the arts. 

Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour may give workers more dollars to exchange for the things that they really need... At least it would, except that then the amount of money required to make the exchange goes up. Raising workers' wages simply means that now it costs more to produce the same goods as before. The fat cats certainly aren't going to reduce their share simply because workers are paid more. So workers spend their increased salaries on goods that have increased in cost because they were produced at an increased cost, and workers are left as poor as they ever were. Inflation is a fast track to nowhere.

A worker's living wage according to the Church's perennial social teaching in Rerum Novarum has nothing to do with a particular dollar figure. Leo XIII teaches that a living wage "ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage earner." He ought to be able "comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children"; and if he is "sensible" and practices "thrift," he ought to be able "to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income."

Truly ensuring a living wage for workers has very little to do with money. It has to do with creating the societal conditions under which people are able to meet their basic needs through the work of their hands. 

Jebb's essay is an argument for the small, local economy as the place where the value of a worker's labor is less strictly tied to the capriciousness of the capitalist system. To be clear, Jebb's is not an argument for a simple barter economy. He is arguing that small communities naturally link up laborers, farmers, and craftsmen who provide for each others' basic needs. The middlemen involved in transportation, marketing, and speculation are all eliminated. The actual value of a man's work is more readily apparent, and the relationships of actual human community living are free to flourish.

The middlemen of the global economy serve to distort the real value of things. To illustrate this point, I am thinking of my experience of growing Brussels Sprouts this past fall. The going rate for a ten-pound box of certified organic Brussels ended up hovering around $20. Once I got a system going, I found that I could clean and pack about a box and a half per hour. That's a wage of $30/hour. Which sounds nice until you deduct the hours spent planting, hoeing, spraying, and harvesting the Brussels, all prior to cleaning and packing them. It also doesn't take into consideration the mortgage payment on the land or the cost of the organic and food safety certifications.

As best that I can figure it, I made about one dollar of income per pound of Brussels. Yet I'm told that my certified organic Brussels Sprouts bring closer to $6 per pound at the big-city Whole Foods. So is a small bag of my Brussels worth a dollar, or is it worth half a dozen dollars? I argue that the question is non-sensical. Dollars are a poor measure of value -- not only of products, but especially of the work of the men who produce them. 

What I do know, however, is that a pound of well prepared Brussels has the value of being the delicious vegetable component of a dinnertime meal, and that we regularly need vegetables with our meals, just as we need shoes on our feet, clothes on our backs, and roofs over our heads. The farmer, the teacher, the builder, and the craftsmen all deserve a wage that covers necessities like these. The irony is, I could not have afforded my own Brussels. Only my subsistence farming protects me from the capriciousness of the food market. More on that in a moment...

The point is, the monetary value of my brussels had very little to do with their actual value. Our global economy twists and distorts the actual value of things until it's hardly recognizable. Don't get me wrong, I'm not presenting a sob story. A dollar per pound on Brussels did constitute a living wage for our family last growing season, at least when factored in with other crops that paid a little better. I'll grow even a low profit crop like Brussels because a diversity of crops is insurance against total failure. One year the flea beetles will decimate the brassicas. Another year excess rains will cause the squash to rot. 

But a dollar per pound didn't constitute a living wage because it was a dollar. It was a living wage because, as Rerum Novarum would have it, I was able to support myself and my family comfortably and put away a little savings. It wasn't an easy sort of comfortable. But there is food stocked away, and the mortgage has been paid. I'm not complaining.

Yet I will point out the irony -- and this is where I dovetail with Jebb's point -- that I managed to do this even with fat cats living off of the $5/pound that my Brussels lost in monetary value as they wended their way to the big-city Whole Foods. I agree with Jebb that I was able to earn my living wage in large part because land-holding insulates me from what he calls "world-wide gambling and the greed of a few monopolists." True, I do have monetary obligations -- things that I cannot grow -- and therefore I am not wholly protected. But my subsistence farming offers me a degree of protection that the hourly worker who buys everything at the grocery store at its prevailing price does not have. 

My friend in that $15/hour wage discussion noted that although I was critical of the idea that raising the minimum wage would solve our societal ills, I had not put forward anything constructive of my own. I think that the start to my constructive alternative is found in Jebbs' argument is that what is true for me as the farmer can be true for an entire village of small landholders and craftsmen who are willing to work together. Just as I subsist mainly from my land and sell from my surplus, so too can the local community mainly subsist through, in Jebbs' words, "the local consumption of primary commodities." 

Why buy your groceries at Walmart when you can buy them at the farmer's market? Well, because it's cheaper. Except that it isn't cheaper if your local farmer makes less because he has to sell to Walmart wholesale so that Walmart can turn around and sell it to you retail. It leaves the farmer with less money to spend on whatever it is that you are contributing to society through your own daily labor. Cut out the middlemen and fat cats. Buy from somebody that you know.

The glaring problem, of course, is that this only works where it works. I am fully aware, for example, that it's impracticable in the urban centers where so much of our nation's poverty is glaringly present. Yet that's why Jebb calls the cities artificial constructs that are "themselves powerless to supply their own needs," that are "the unwieldy factories of goods for which markets must be found by hook or by crook all the world over." It only works when the cities are dissolved by a fleeing to the fields, to the countryside and the small towns and villages that are more in keeping with human thriving.

Flee to the Fields, part 4: It takes a farm to raise a village

 This is the third in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

Part 2: The case for subsistence farming

Part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else)

"[I]n agriculture it is quite clear that we must immediately create a trend, not merely 'back to the land,' but 'back to the hand.' Where the balance will be found, even here, is not a matter of dogmatism. Obviously we shall stop far short of the primitive cave man, scratching the earth with a pointed stick. He could never support a real culture. Equally obviously we cannot make a great community permanently free and happy if it is dependent for its vital needs on half a dozen men who, because they control the half-dozen machines that tear up a whole depopulated countryside, can dictate its every activity by the threat of starvation. This is, however, the state of things towards which mechanization tends today. The men not necessarily being actual 'farmers,' but possibly 'capitalists' or a 'public body.'" ~ Herbert Shove

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Owners of quarter-million dollar, GPS-guided combines, I'm looking squarely at you. Your machines have killed the village. Did Herbert Shove understand how big the the machines would get, and how thoroughly the countryside would be depopulated? Regardless of whether he did, our current situation in rural America is precisely what he predicted. Rural America is dying, and in many places it is already dead. High schools have been consolidated due to lack of students, rural hospitals have been closed, and young people have left in droves for the bigger towns because "there's nothing for me here." 

Shove's argument is that mechanization in agriculture is "labor displacing." It's an argument based on his earlier premise, which I wrote about in part 1, that farming, with its static principal, yields simple interest. There is only so much tillable acreage, and there is only so much that that land can yield in a particular season. Even if a few farms can increase the size of their operations, there is only so much land surrounding a particular rural community. And so even if a particular farm's workers aren't displaced by mechanization, whole other farms are displaced instead by the mechanized farm's expansion. A machine that does the work of ten men introduced into a farming enterprise means that nine men have to seek work elsewhere. Or maybe it's only eight men if a man is needed to maintain the machine, in addition to the man needed to operate it. But the fact is, when machines come in, the number of laborers needed in the enterprise -- or writ larger, the rural community -- goes down.

With no means of absorbing the displaced labor, rural communities experience depopulation. Then high schools consolidate, the hospital closes, etc. Ironically, at least two generations have viewed rural flight positively. It meant that their children would have opportunities that they never had. They could go to college and work with their minds, not their hands. They would be doctors and lawyers, and they would raise their children in a sort of utopian suburbia. There would be a steady paycheck every two weeks, not the whims and vagaries of a land that yielded sometimes more, sometimes less.

Of course, we all know that that's not what happened. Medical school is too demanding intellectually for most students, and society now has a glut of lawyers. A college degree these days is mostly just a prerequisite for jobs that didn't used to require college. Instead of idyllic suburbia, people are swimming in lakes of credit card debt and drowning in mortgages that are underwater. Divorce rates are skyrocketing, and children are largely incognizant of their supposed "opportunities."

Shove's argument is that the restoration of rural communities necessitates eschewing the big machinery of big ag. We can't return to the land until the machines that displaced us make their exit. But how big is too big? How far does "back to the hand" need to go? Not to scratching at the earth with a stick, Shove says. But if you're not harvesting corn with quarter-million dollar combine, then is a a smaller combine all right? A pull-behind corn picker? Do we need to harvest and shuck the corn by hand?

As much as I began by pointing my finger at quarter-million dollar combines, I have a nagging feeling of guilt as to my own purchase of a second tractor with a loader last spring so that I wouldn't have to fling manure into the spreader by hand anymore. I'm even pausing to reconsider my planned purchase, this spring, of a three-point undercutter so that I won't have to harvest garlic bulbs one at a time, with a potato fork, as I've done for the last three Julys.

Am I as complicit in killing rural community as the combine operators?

I was thinking about this the other Saturday after hosting an enthusiastic group of young Catholics who wanted to experience life on the farm. It was a marvel how quickly they mucked out all the goat kidding pens. While it would have been a hard day's labor by myself, they were done in two hours, before we even stopped for lunch. Then we headed out again to clean up some trees that I had felled a few months ago in a pasture reclamation effort.

In short, an awesome Saturday filled with honest hand labor and camaraderie had me thinking of the way that big projects got done in years past. I'm thinking of old-fashioned cornfield hoe-downs, or Midwestern barn raisings, or Cajun backcountry boucheries. These occurred by necessity, simply because they were the only way to get such big projects done on small farms. But they were also evidence of -- and creators of -- community.

Ever since we started farming four years ago, I've wanted to share our farming venture. It certainly didn't begin this past Saturday. I've had former students of mine, and former colleagues together with their families, come and work in the fields for a day, or even for a few weeks. Rosemary has some childhood friends who've made it their tradition to visit from Iowa and help with garlic harvest. Every spring my mother has made the trip to help with direct-seeding the squash first thing in the spring. Every fall a few of my brothers have it on their calendar to come for a day and help with turkey processing.

I love how the work of the small farm helps to foster community. These are things that I could do more and more on my own with further mechanization. A few thousand dollars sunk into a turkey plucker would streamline processing. The undercutter that I'm guiltily considering for garlic harvest would reduce the labor involved by more than half. But each mechanical addition reduces my dependence on others. It isolates us as a farm, emancipating us from our need to generate a community simply to get done what needs to be done.

Of course, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. When my tractor broke down two summers back, and I couldn't make my first cutting of hay until well into July, there wasn't anybody near me that I felt comfortable asking for help. The farmers nearest to me farm too differently; organic certification alone precluded bringing their machinery, used for conventional harvest, into my fields. Likeminded farmers were too far away and struggling with their own narrow harvest window. Similarly, the enthusiasm of folks who helped with cleaning garlic our first few years has waned. It's an admittedly tedious job, a lot less exciting than a hoe-down followed by music and dancing.

Raising a village, in short, is hard, and I feel that we are in the awkward in-between here on our own farm. The like-minded and the enthusiastic -- the eager helping hands -- are available sometimes, and yet not other times. The temptation to the quarter-million dollar combine -- or, for me, at least the garlic undercutter and the second tractor with a loader -- is ever-present. But let me state for the record that what I really want is precisely what the Catholic Land Movement envisioned: the rural community that thrives in symbiotic relationship with its cluster of small landholdings. This, in turn, only works when people return to the land in large numbers. And to return, people need work.

So I concur with Shove: we need not only a return to the land, but a return to the hand as well. It's hard work, to be sure. But as I look out at clean kidding stalls and over a few cords of wood piled in the pasture, I'm left thinking that many hands make for light work.

Flee to the Fields, part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else)

 This is the third in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

Part 2: The case for subsistence farming

"Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance." ~ Harold Robbins

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Like this one is, my last post was also a reflection on the above quotation from Robbins' essay. But my focus last time was mainly on how our varied enterprises here on the farm (goat herd, hogs, turkeys, garlic, produce, etc.) all complement each other. The livestock provide the manure that enriches the fields, and the unsaleable produce and all of the other superabundance of the fields in turn feeds the stock. Ultimately we ourselves eat from the substance of our stock and whatever else our land yields, and we sell the surplus to meet the cash expenses of our family and our farm. We are, in short, subsistence farmers as Robbins describes the term.

This time I want to focus in greater depth on how growing the greatest practicable variety of crops as Robbins suggests is of benefit to the land and, therefore, to everything that depends on it (all the way up to the farmer, the land's caretaker, and even those who depend on the work of the farmer to eat). In other words, you.

You don't plant the same things in the same place year after year. This, really, is something that most all backyard gardeners know, and that, if they ignore, they eventually learn the hard way. I had somebody send me some pictures of their garlic awhile back. They were at a loss as to why most of their bulbs came out of the ground withered and rotted away to nothing. Were they planting it in too low spot in their garden? The answer was, no. They assured me that they always planted the garlic in that spot. And that was the problem in a nutshell: planting garlic in that spot year after year had led to a buildup of tiny eriophyid mites that fed on the the bulbs. Below the ground the mites leave the bulbs susceptible to rot. In storage, they cause the cloves desiccate, transforming them into wrappers-full of moldy dust. 

Of course, these mites occur naturally, and there should be no illusions that they can be avoided altogether without intense chemical application. So the goal for the gardener who doesn't want to poison his ground -- and the food that he puts on his table -- should be to plant garlic in at least a three-year rotation with other crops so that the mites are never able to congregate in large numbers in a particular location.

What is true of plants in the allium genus is also true of brassicas, cucurbits, nightshades, legumes, and all of the other plant families. Each family attracts its own distinct pests, and each draws on the soil differently. Plant heavy-feeders like cabbage or brussels in the same spot year after year, and you'll deplete your soil of nitrogen. Plant beans, peas, or a clover cover crop after brassicas, and you'll rebuild the nitrogen of your soil. Again, every successful backyard gardener is at least vaguely aware of these indisputable truths.

And yet, I've had an older farmer point out a field and remark to me that it has been planted "corn on corn" for more than twenty years. While he acknowledged that it "not a great practice," he shrugged his shoulders. It's what everybody does these days, he said. So long as you apply the right chemicals and the right pesticides at the right times, you are more than likely to have a yield. In the event of a crop failure, no worries: government subsidies will carry you over financially till next year. In this older farmer's words, "Corn pays."

While corn may pay, nobody -- not even a farmer who has embraced monoculture farming practices -- argues that it's good for the soil. Constantly drawing the same set of nutrients from the soil requires an annual artificial "re-balancing." First these injected nutrients are never truly incorporated into the soil by its organic components because they're so quickly drawn up again. Then the bacteria and fungi in the organic component of the soil are starved and begin to die off, leading to the cascading effect of less and less nutrient and mineral absorption and more and more run-off in the form of macronutrients (think of well water polluted by high phosphorus levels), pesticides (consider the rising incidence of glyphosate-caused cancer), and even the soil itself (basic erosion and farmland loss since dead soil doesn't absorb and hold water as readily as living soil does).

The answer for large-scale, corn-centric farmers is to plant soybeans as a "nitrogen fixer." Which is certainly better than continuous corn-on-corn planting. The irony of soybeans, however, is the same irony that has dogged corn for years: we simply don't need it all. So for corn, we farmers lobby the government to subsidize ethanol to make it financially worthwhile to keep growing corn. We invent ways to put more of it into our foodstuff. While sugar from beets or cane is much easier for us to digest, we instead put corn through a chemical process to make high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener linked to inflammation and, potentially, cancer. We do this not because it's more economical considered in itself, but because it's more economical when government subsidies are factored in. Again, corn pays.

But corn only pays when soy is planted too. So we need to find ways to utilize the glut of soy as well. Seventy-percent of it is fed to animals despite the fact that it causes inflammation in the digestive tracts of pigs and, together with corn, is not a proper feed source at all for forage-loving ruminants like cows. Ever wonder why cows produce so much methane? They'd produce a whole lot less if they were fed a more easily digestible diet! And this doesn't even get into the way that soy has found its way into human consumption (I'm thinking soy milk, despite the fact that the regular consumption of soy is likely linked to hormonal issues for women).

The point is that monoculture "big ag" causes problems at each stage. The mania for corn-soy on a mega-scale leaves us with a glut of product that we don't need at huge expense both to the taxpayers' pocketbooks and health, and certainly to the land itself as well. 

I believe that the solution is the small landholder -- in other words, the subsistence farmer -- who produces what he and his stock need, and who sells from his surplus. As a small landholder, the subsistence farmer grows small amounts of the widest variety of crops in a true rotation. His rotation is not the corn-soybean nitrogen quick-fix and repeat, all the while applying a full range of ever stronger pesticides to keep the ever-present fungi, aphids, and borers at bay. The subsistence farmer can practice a true rotation because of the wide variety of things that he grows in small amounts.

In our own case, we've focused on the allium family (garlic), the cucurbits (zucchini, winter squash), and the brassicas (brussels, cabbage), mixed with a few cover crops (clover to recover nitrogen, mustard to prepare the soil for garlic). Since the brassicas take so much less space than the cucurbits, we're able to add to the mix a small field of wheat for our own use and another small field of corn to fatten our stock. We have a dozen acres in hay as well, and with that we meet all the dietary needs of our small ruminants. Admittedly, we're still a work in progress since we do have to purchase some additional grain for the hogs in the winter and for the turkeys that we raise in through the summer and fall. But we're working toward a rotation that will care of all of our needs -- both human and animal.

And we sell from our surplus, as Robbins says the subsistence farmer should. And my strongly held opinion is that the surplus that we sell from basically matches up, proportionally, to the sorts of things that the outside world needs. Whereas the big row-crop farmer give the world a glut of practically indigestible corn and soy, the subsistence farmer sells the wide array of vegetables, small grains, and pastured meats that the consumer really needs.

What else would we need that the subsistence farmer can't provide? Are we worried that without big-ag we wouldn't be able to feed the world? I have an argument from Flee to the Fields -- for another future post, for sure -- that if all the big farms were eliminated, and if they were replaced by a third of the acreage of small landholdings, we'd be living in a land flowing with milk, honey, and a whole lot of other things preferable to corn, soy, and their ilk. We'd be healthier for it too, as would our animals, and even the land itself.

Flee to the Fields, part 2: The case for subsistence farming

This is the second in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

"The Catholic Land Movement proposes Subsistence Farming as the first remedy. This does not mean, as its enemies assume, that the farmer lives on his farm as on a desert island, and sells nothing. Rates and Taxes alone would make this impracticable. Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance. For the farmer, on the whole, sells wholesale and buys retail. On the economic side alone, any practical diminution of this kind of traffic cannot fail to be a net gain to him." ~ HAROLD ROBBINS

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Reflection

I have a hard time explaining to people exactly what type of farmers we are. It is true that I work part-time from home. Even if farming brought in all of our income needs, I'd still be teaching.  I love teaching for Mother of Divine Grace, the online program directed at Catholic homeschoolers that my own boys are enrolled in. Yet we're hardly homesteaders or mere "hobby" farmers either, as more than half of our income last year derived from our working of the land. So we're not hobbyists, and despite the fact that we're Wisconsinites who milk goats twice a day, and despite the fact that the goats take up a lot of our daily attention here on the farm, I wouldn't dare say that we're dairy farmers either.

Perhaps the strongest case is that we are produce farmers. Last year we made nearly $14,000 off of garlic after expenses. We also grow enough winter squash, brussels, and cabbage to market these crops wholesale through a produce cooperative. But if we're produce farmers, we're awfully distracted produce farmers. We're distracted by the attention we pay to a growing herd of meat goats. We cut and baled nearly two thousand small squares of grassy-alfalfa hay last summer. We process and sell turkeys direct-to-consumer every Thanksgiving. We recently had a few sows farrow, and we have two steers that we're bottle feeding. 

I want to tell people that we're subsistence farmers because, really, that's the most accurate description. But I'm taken aback at how alien the concept is to many folks, even -- and perhaps especially -- the folks involved in agriculture. The concept of subsistence farming conjures up African farmers raising small plots of maize in desert conditions and living on the edge of starvation. Or it brings to mind people who enjoy living off of the land, but who earn the money to pay the bills by employment off of their homestead. Well, I can assure you that we're not starving. And as already noted, more than half of our income derives from our land.

When you talk to older folks, subsistence farming is only a generation or two back in time. The idea had been that you lived off of your land, and you sold things from the farm to pay for the items that you didn't produce for yourself -- new shoes, perhaps, or household luxuries, or the occasional new farm implement . This was the most common form of farming well into the 20th century. Then here in Wisconsin, dairying became a specialty. In other places, it became a cash crop like wheat, cotton, or corn. At some point it became easier simply to focus on the cash crop and to buy everything else ready-made.

And what is wrong with a total focus on a cash crop? Absolutely nothing in a good year, I suppose. But what happens in the year when your cash crop fails? If you are a subsistence farmer, then you don't buy household luxuries or new farm implements that year. You put away vegetables from the garden and butcher a hog. You stack wood in the shed, light a fire, and stay warm and well fed all winter as you plan and pray for a better year next year. If you're not a subsistence farmer, you'd better hope that the government intervenes with a highly subsidized crop insurance program. Seriously, American taxpayers, are you aware that you are paying farmers to focus on their cash crops? Why is that? Why are we paying farmers to produce so much corn that we are depleting our soil and inventing strange new uses for it? 

It's not subsistence farming that's strange, it's the other way around that is strange. Why in the world would a farmer concentrate on a single crop? If I were encouraged to do that, it'd be produce since produce is our major "cash" money maker here on the farm. The first few years I had to purchase fertilizer simply because there was no other option. Also the first year, I had the tough experience of learning that a great deal of produce is deemed unfit for the market due to the most annoying, tiniest of defects. In short, I had additional costs with respect to inputs, and I had product that was unsaleable. I was losing money on both ends of the equation. 

Add in livestock, however, as we gradually have, and loss becomes gain on both ends. After making up a $2,000 investment into an old manure spreader, our growing goat herd began to provide ample fertility for the produce acreage. Outside fertility runs about $700, and for that price you get pelletized chicken manure that can only be used for so many years before you risk the build-up of micronutrients like calcium. In three years we've already made up that investment, and the goats are still there producing more free fertility for the produce operation than ever. On dairies they call manure "liquid gold." For goats it's a little different-- a little dryer and easier to work with -- but just as valuable (and not as unbalanced by excessively high nitrogen).

Add some feeder pigs too, as we also have, and the loss of unsaleable produce becomes the gain on the other end. Last year we sold nearly a thousand pounds of zucchini to our wholesaler, for example. But for every saleable zucchini that is under seven and one half inches and perfectly cylindrical, there's another one that curves slightly or comes in too large or too fat. This past December we processed five feeder pigs that were fed on zucchini through June, July and August; that feasted on winter squash through September and October; and that were finished on brussels stems and leaves and fattening homegrown corn all the way through to their processing date.

It's so hard to account for all the benefits of subsistence farming on the balance sheet. For example, Rosemary objected the other day when I was grumbling about the cost of the goat herd. I pointed out that we'd be $5,000 richer if I sold the hay that the goats are burning through this winter rather than retaining it. I pointed out that we made only a few thousand dollars off of goat sales last spring, and that the herd only produced the equivalent of $700 worth of manure. But then Rosemary reminded me that we processed a number of cull goats and pressure canned their meat to keep our own hungry brood well fed. And depending on the time of year we get half a gallon to two gallons of milk per day. Consider the price of all the milk that the boys go through, and all the cheese that we've made and enjoyed, and Rosemary makes a convincing case that the goats actually turn a small profit. Add to this the fact that the size of the herd -- and therefore the real value of stock on the farm -- continues to increase without any cash inputs (apart from $350 spent on a buck with new bloodlines a year and a half ago).

The point is, subsistence farming doesn't necessarily look good on paper. But I can assure you, we're eating really well, and we stay warm through the winter. We have enough cash to pay the bills, even when things are a little tighter when one of our several cash crops fails, as our squash did the year before last. Which has me thinking that I should also write about Robbins' point in the quote above about growing the greatest practicable variety of crops. But maybe I'll save that for the next post!

Flee to the Fields, part 1: Why farming is not a business

 For years I've been vaguely aware of the Catholic Land Movement that was initiated in England in the interbellum period between the two great world wars. Its promotors included G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, writers whom I've admired for years. Their project, in short, was to foster a return to the land. They saw the rise of industrialism in England -- the self-styled "workshop of the world" -- as being inherently inimical to basic human thriving. Man has "an affinity for reality," one of Land Movement's promotors argued. "The elements of life -- the cleansing earth, the seasons, the contact with primary things -- are necessary to sanity."

The highly idealistic Land Movement sought to train Catholic men in the agricultural arts and settle them on small plots of land, both to farm and to raise their families in small, closely knit, faith-centered communities. Then World War II intervened: the world changed dramatically, many of the most prominent promotors died, and, sadly, the budding movement died out.

But the Land Movement's founding documents endure in a book entitled Flee to the Fields, which Rosemary purchased for me last month as a Christmas present. Having started reading the book just yesterday, I'm only two essays into the slim volume. But I'm so taken by the ideas expressed therein that I'm inspired to restart the old Garlic and Sapphires blog. My intention here is to write a series of posts on particularly pivotal insights that I've come across in my reading. In each entry I'll lay out in the insight in context, and then I'll reflect on it in light of my own farming experience. Perhaps I'll be enthusiastic enough to write daily; perhaps life will distract me, and I'll slow down. 

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The problem of simple versus compound interest

The first essay in Flee to the Fields was composed by Herbert Shove, who was a British naval commander in both world wars as well as a self-taught economic theorist. Among many other insights, Shove notes that modern capitalism thrives off of compound interest. The idea is that profit is calculated from ever-increasing principal balance. With burgeoning enterprises, this makes sense because such businesses have the potential to be ever larger; they are held in check only by the market forces of supply and demand. If there is a demand for flat-screen televisions, then a maker of flat-screen televisions can chart an upward trajectory in production, consistently showing a profit that compounds as the business grows in size. While one may certainly question whether such a trajectory can continue indefinitely, even in industry, that would be a matter for another essay.

What works (at least temporarily) in industry, Shove argues, does not work in agriculture. A farm may briefly take on the trappings of compounding profits by improving its efficiency to squeeze more out of a flock, a herd, or a parcel of land. But eventually the interest stops compounding because nothing more can be squeezed out of what is available without adulterating the quality of whatever is produced. The principal is what the principal is: so many cows produce so many hundredweight of milk per year; so many acres yield so many bushels of wheat per season. There are limits to what the land can produce or the size that an operation can be. Interest in farming is simple, Shrove writes, not compound, because the principal remains constant.

When agriculture is run like an industry and has industrial profits demanded of it, it's quickly run into the ground. Whereas industry turns a profit by "reducing the time cycle of manufacture," agriculture is bound by a "rigid seasonal time factor." Also, both industry and agriculture reduce their wage bill by turning to mechanization. But whereas industry pays for that mechanization by expansion and by diversification into an near endless array of manufactured goods, expansion in agriculture can only go so far because a nation only needs so much milk, so much wheat, and so much corn and soy. 

And thus capitalistic agriculture-as-industry rapidly becomes a dead-end. "The seasonal 'simple interest' return from land must, as the speeding-up process continues, lag ever further behind the cyclic 'compound interest' return from trade or manufacture."

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Reflection

Shove's argument spoke to me because I see the market pressure on farmers all around me here in Wisconsin, the home of a dying dairying culture. It seems that dairy-turned-industry is in the last throes of the dead-end that Shove predicted for industrial agriculture more generally. Farmers were encouraged for years to turn a profit by expansion; for years they looked very much like a burgeoning industry, and they expanded and mechanized accordingly. Now the market is glutted, the milk price has tanked, and farmers are saddled with the debt from facilities they can no longer afford and with more milk than they can sell, at least at a price that off-sets their debt. Ironically the only way out that many farmers are able to see is to produce even more milk. 

The expansion approach may work for a few mega-dairies in the short term. But how long will it be worth it as the profit margin narrows even more? What are independent mega-dairies to do now that Walmart and other major retailers operate their own milk facilities because their loss is less than the commission they'd have to pay to independently owned dairies? Expansion, it seems, is no answer at all in the long run: ultimately mega-dairy agriculture will be swallowed whole by the commerce industry. We know this because it's already happened with poultry farming, and this is exactly the pattern that retailers are following with dairy. Most all of poultry sold in the States is raised under exploitive, non-negotiable contracts with companies like Tyson delivering the birds and the feed and the farmer (contract employee, rather) taking on all of the risk. This is the bleak future for dairy too.

I don't pretend to know the path forward for my fellow farmers who are invested in dairy or poultry. In fact, I don't know what the path forward is for any farmers of any stripe, given that the general presumption is that farming is an industry and therefore must expand in size and scope in order to turn an ever increasing profit. I remember being asked about cashflow by the FSA farming representative last year while applying for a loan for our small, second tractor for our farm. Apparently it was a red flag that so little cash was "flowing" through our farming operation. It was explained to me that, ideally, I'd sign up to grow significantly more produce next year in order to raise the cash flow. It mattered not in the least that it would require me to hire an employee or to further mechanize, or possibly both. Apparently the important thing was that I become larger and therefore have more "profit potential."

The irony seemed lost on the FSA representative that our little farm had made more money for our family that year than many other, far larger farms that had much more "cash flow." We had no employees to pay and (until that second tractor loan came through) no debts to service. We made plenty of money. It's just that our static enterprise was producing simple interest; it was not compounding. 

My resolve then -- now confirmed and strengthened by my reading of Shove's essay -- is that I need to avoid the industrial treadmill in my farming enterprise. Farming for me, ideally, will bring in the "simple interest" of a living income. We do have some growing yet to do as we learn fully to utilize our beautiful plot of land. Indeed, the income will grow together with my growing gaggle of boys; then it'll slowly ebb as they age out and move on to whatever God has in store for them. I have no pretensions to "growing a business." I'll stick to growing squash, brussels, garlic, and cabbage for those few folks who appreciate good food enough to pay what it's worth.