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.