When the field of modern psychology was still quite young, the findings, theories, and musings of its rock stars precipitated a revolution in commercialism by giving the advertising industry the keys to our desires. Now, a new revolution in human programming has led us to be emotionally charged experts in 57 facts an hour, spending nearly every vacant moment (and many of the moments we should be attending our responsibilities) with our faces glued to the tele-speak-a-phones that now fit very conveniently in our pockets.
As I scroll through my morning news feed, pelting my psyche with anxiety-inducing headlines, I’m frequently astonished (disgusted, actually) by the blatant similarity between respectable journalism providers and the sensational hooks of the internet’s chum factories. Most of the time, this is a simple matter of GIGO — garbage in, garbage out. Unfortunately, our brains do not know the difference between an impression made by a headline and one by true experience, so the impressions get logged in memory as if they were true and honest real things that happened to us. Cue the inter-anthropocene era of virtual anxiety.
But not all of it is inherently bad. For a good solid decade, I was seduced by the romanticism of agrarian life, convinced that if I left the big town and tucked into some good hard hay stacking, I’d get fit, find fulfillment, and play my part in saving civilization from itself by helping it to rediscover the joy of real food wrought from the land by the hands of someone the eater knows personally.
I’m still glad I did it, as some of the above has come true, and I have discovered much more of great worth that I hadn’t even anticipated. But I have to confess — I was duped. The concept of small, free-range, sustainable, agroecological farm to fork, spork, chopstick or whatever — that most of us have in our heads — is a myth.
Others have done a much better job of exposing this lie better than I ever could, so I’ll leave you with these links and encourage you very strongly to set aside some time to both read and contemplate these pieces:
What Nobody Told Me About Small Farming (Read this now!)
Small Family Farms Aren’t The Answer
The Birth Of A Myth
And now for the good news — we are not discouraged. These realizations are a gift, and the universe has planned our enlightenment with good timing. As we work our way through the lessons experience can teach better than any professor, YouTube video, or “Top Ten Reasons Why You Need A Continuum Transfunctioner” list ever can, we are also finding the right people at the right times in their lives to combine efforts with and reinvent ourselves and our approach to agriculture. In the 1970s, the USDA’s mantra was “Get big or get out!” Yeah. That was a mistake. My grandfather, who I’ve quoted here with these very words before, had a better mantra: without friends and family, you just can’t make it. In the near future you’ll likely find yourself grappling with the astronomical cost of your favorite foods. The discounts we enjoyed in the past are expiring. You might find yourself reminiscing about the smell of a real apple, or wondering how many years it’s been since you saw a banana. Broccoli very well may become a special treat reserved for children on their birthdays! Seriously, things could get weird, and grandpa was right — you will need friends and family as much, if not more, than ever. If you aren’t a farmer and you don’t know any, it would serve you well to make friends with one or two of them.
In the meantime, I will let you in on a little secret: there are some serious badasses with very big brains and even bigger hearts working hard to get your back. And they’re not falling for that “I did it all myself my way without any help in the snow up hill both ways” myth. They are collaborating. Collaboration among farmers is like compound interest — just as “a modest rate of return can accumulate a fortune over time”*, the power of community and collaboration in farming will bless us with a wealth to be envied by gold itself. Bon appetit!
*Naved Abdali - guy who says stuff.