Back to the Land
In the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, Polyface Farm is a beacon. Joel Salatin, the proprietor, has created a farm so vital, the land itself seems to breathe. Unlike much modern agriculture, which relies heavily on capital, electricity, and infrastructure, Polyface Farm relies primarily on people.
Polyface Farm has beckoned me since 2006, when Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, and I, like so many others, fell in awe with Joel Salatin and his farm.
I was a professor at one of the country’s most liberal colleges then, and when I assigned Pollan’s book to my students, they too fell for the promises therein: that we can and we must remember what we have been, what the Earth is, what we are all capable of, and grow our food and communities with attention to ancient and actually sustainable ways.
Back then, Salatin reports, about 80% of the visitors to Polyface Farm were on the left, politically—tree huggers and granola-eating hippies, back to the land types who, if push came to shove, were hoping that the government would solve their problems. These were people who reviled corporations, but trusted the government.
Now, the ratio has flipped: about 80% of the visitors to Polyface Farm are on the right—homesteaders and homeschoolers and hunters, back to the land types who are more likely to push the government away than invite its help.
In fact, there is much in common between the two groups: a hunger to return to the land, our roots, our home. A desire to connect with self, community, and all of humanity. The differences emerge when we start talking about who, ultimately, should be in charge of our fate. Am I responsible for my choices, and must I deal with the consequences, no matter what? Or ought there be a safety net, protecting me from some consequences—and if so, how many?
When does a safety net become a security blanket, infantilizing in its comfort, preventing adulthood and self-worth from ever blooming?
My father grew up on a family farm in northeastern Iowa, back when family farms were still common there. He was born in 1938, the third of four children. They had pigs, which he admired, and chickens, which he did not. They grew corn. They had a kitchen garden and a nice barn and a gleaming silo and even, after a while, indoor plumbing. Running to the outhouse in the middle of an Iowa winter night was not one of my father’s favorite memories, but it was something he remembered.
Farming is tough, we have all been told, the margins so thin, the vagaries of weather and plagues and crop failures so difficult to predict that nobody with potential should consider doing it. This was what my father’s father told him, and indeed told all of the siblings: get off the farm. Find work that is more stable, more expansive, more modern. Make your way in the world, not on the farm.
And so he did.
By the time I was born the farm had been sold and my father had long since moved away, having become a computer engineer before most people had heard of such a thing. I grew up in LA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, about as far from life on a farm as it seems one could get.
And yet there were lessons that my father had learned on the farm that he kept throughout his life, and one of them was that when there is work to be done, we do it. We do not try to avoid the work, or spend our efforts calculating how to outsource it. First, we attempt it ourselves.
It was a vaguely perfect Saturday in west Los Angeles1 and, at 11 years old, I was inside with my nose in a book. The decrepit fence between our tiny eighth of an acre and that of our neighbors to the north had taken a tilt for the worse, and my father decided that it was time for a new one.
I enjoyed learning sports and math from my father, but I also liked reading and making art, inspired by my mother. I had no particular interest in building a fence. My brother, four years my junior, was game for the task, and it didn’t occur to me that my presence was called for. I continued to read.
“Come on, Heather,” my father said. “Time to get to work.”
“I’m reading, Daddy. Let little Doug help.” His anger came fast.
“I will not raise a helpless daughter,” he yelled at me. “Today, you are learning how to build a fence.”
This is one of very few times I can remember angering my father.
The message was abundantly clear, sufficiently so that I remember it more than forty years later: We do not avoid work.
We also do not make or do unnecessary work.
There is work to be done. It is good and honorable to do it. And so we do it, and we do it well.
On that day, we built a fence.
The Brownstone Institute held a conference last week at Polyface Farm, and I was lucky to be part of the event. Much could be said about it, but for now, for here, I will restrict my comments to just one thing Joel Salatin said during his keynote address. He asked:
How do we generate self-worth?
His answer:
Successfully accomplish meaningful tasks.
My sons are now young adults, hovering either side of 20 years old, and they are studying engineering and science, among other things. This last Summer they worked long hours on several farms most days of the week, sometimes leaving home at 5 am and not returning until after 10 pm2. The work ranged from tedious to inspiring, and required patience, pattern recognition, and problem solving. There are no bullshit jobs on farms, no make-work.
A well-meaning relative scolded them lightly, told them that next Summer they should be doing internships, by which he meant official internships in science or engineering, indoor work where they could keep their collars clean and white. They have their futures to think about, after all, and careers to build. Farm work is retro. Farm work is primitive.
Except that it is not.
Oh, it is surely wonderful to be freed from worrying about life’s necessities—staying warm enough, and dry; having enough good food and clean water. Once those things are taken care of, it can be delightful to be freed from more—letting the machines wash our things, and cook our food, and keep the temperature just so. Then it can seem like such a convenience to have our food made uniform and safe, designed in labs and produced in factories, easy to heat and to eat on the go. Our thirst for convenience encourages us to outsource more—we’ve already outsourced the making of our clothes and our customer service to faceless people half a world away, why not ask machines to do our thinking for us. Then, having fallen out of the habit of reckoning with things, we can outsource our analysis to the experts, who arrive all shiny with their credentials and their certainty and assure us that they have it all figured out, if only we will follow and comply.
Where you decide to call it a slope, and how good your traction on that slope is, will vary.
Another way of framing being freed from having to think about the necessary things of life, is that you are utterly dependent on those who still know how to do things. Worse yet, once the technocrats wrest power from those who do things—which they have-- you are utterly dependent on them. You exist and thrive at their pleasure. You have forfeited agency and autonomy for convenience.
Anecdotally, I can say this: my older son already did a year-long, full-time engineering internship, right out of high school. For this opportunity he was and remains grateful, and he learned tremendously. But even then, while he was solving perplexing engineering problems many days a week, he came up to the islands on the weekends and worked one day many weeks on a farm. He wasn’t driven by the money. He liked the work. He liked being outside all day, even in the Winter, working with his hands, solving problems, and—again and still and always— successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.
It is not clever to reduce our workload to nothing, unless the work that we are minimizing was already meaningless.
Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, has a new book out. It is an inspiring little book, a quick read, and I recommend it. Spirits of America defines and celebrates what Tucker understands to be several fundamental American characteristics—frugality, independence, physicality, thankfulness, among many others. In the chapter on the spirit of work, he writes (p23):
Hard work is a virtue. There is no line between work and life; they are the same. We used to know that. That’s how this country was built: with blood, sweat, tears, and heavy tools and long hours. To be inert is to be miserable.
To be inert is to be miserable.
Yes. To what end do we want our labor to be “saved”? What are we saving it for?
Let us stop handing over our agency and worth to those who promise an easy life. Ease is not the goal.
Salatin’s words once again: we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks. On his farm, people are the lifeblood, rather than infrastructure, or electricity. Real farmers are doing real work.
I wonder why the people who are showing up at Polyface Farm are of a different political bent than they used to be.
Some people on the right, who never trusted the government but were a little too eager to believe in promises from the private sector, were once tech-optimists and anti-agrarians. In the chapter on agronomy in Spirits of America, Tucker writes that, for much of his adult life, he couldn’t understand why anyone regretted a move off the land. Before exposure to ample critique of industrial food and Big Agriculture, his thinking was (p58):
What’s wrong with corporate farming? It’s feeding the world and we would starve otherwise. We need big companies, huge machinery, oceans of pesticide and fertilizer, and consolidated supply chains. We simply cannot and should not go back.
So there’s that.
But I also wonder if those of us who showed up 10 and 20 years ago, and called ourselves liberals, aren’t many of the same people who show up now. We’re not democrats anymore though. We’re politically homeless, or maybe we call ourselves conservatives or libertarians now.
We haven’t changed, or not much. Just as many on the right have woken up to the problems of Big Ag and Big Food in light of what happened to us all during Covid, many who thought of ourselves as being on the left have woken up, too. We appreciate the 2nd Amendment more now, having seen some of what the government is capable of. And we are more wary of regulations, for the same reason. But we’re still fundamentally interested in conserving the Earth, and its inhabitants—people included. We prefer our food real, and the moneyed interests far away. Problem is, real food has become ever more difficult to source, and discerning who and where the moneyed interests are, has become a devilishly hard game.
Don’t we all, every last one of us, feel the tug to be more connected—to ourselves, to other people, and to the land itself? Work brings us together. Much has been said of the lack of work ethic among the young now, but I believe that this is always said of the young.
Perhaps more mothers and fathers need to be telling their sons and daughters that it’s time to build fences. Because again: we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks.
It has been proposed—plausibly in my estimation—that the lack of need to ever struggle against the weather is part of why Angelenos are often so soft. Tending towards the vapid, even. Fires—so much worse now than they were decades ago—may change this calculation.
While farm work is correctly understood to be challenging, those particularly grueling hours are due to a combination of farm work and living in an archipelago with unreliable ferries and working some days of the week on farms on an island other than their own.
Source: Natural Selections
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