Lousy Farmer

I would have made a lousy farmer. Thank goodness my ancestors gave up potato farming in the cold rocky soil of Quebec. That’s not a life for me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad there are farmers. I’m doubly glad I’m not one of them. For me running a farm is a type of slavery, or at the very least serfdom. Serfs were bound to the land. Farmers are too. Don’t think so? A farmer that spends too much time away from his farm soon goes out of business. Lord help him if he’s raising animals as they require constant care.

I believe it was Henry David Thoreau who said something about how much of a misfortune it is to inherit a fully functioning farm. Then again, I guess we can call Thoreau’s cabin experiment at Walden Pond the great grandfather of the simplicity movement. He pared down life to the basics and seemed to truly enjoy himself.

Thoreau, while not a farmer, was a gardener. There’s a huge difference between the two, and not just of scale. A farmer grows food with the intent of surplus. That surplus allows him to participate in the money economy. A gardener grows just enough for his own needs. That allows him to have freedom from the money economy.

Farmers deal with the greater economy of banks, markets, suppliers, dealers, regulators -a whole host of masters. A gardener avoids all that. They can even afford to participate less in the money economy because part of their needs are being satisfied without it. No need to earn taxable money to buy the food that you can grow.

As you can imagine, governments love farmers and hate gardeners. The first farmers provided the surplus that supported bureaucracy, priesthoods and armies. Sure, we got civilization out of the process, but at a high cost to personal freedom, liberty and health.

-Sixbears