I spent the last six months apprenticing at 5th Crow Farm, a small organic farm near Pescadero. I am very grateful to the folks there for taking me on for a season of learning and hard work. During these last few days on the farm I have felt pangs of genuine pride. Farming is a tough, grueling, yet beautiful and rewarding vocation that one can full-on be proud to do! I can’t say I have ever felt that about my work before.
I have learned, of course, a lot. My body and “spirit” have been conditioned. I ate well, my cooking skills improved, I got up way earlier on a consistent basis than I ever would have done voluntarily and saw more sunrises and sunsets than I ever have before.
A few notes on the relationship between farming and social systems:
- One of the first things I noticed is that a lot of work is put into prepping produce for market — making it look nice, and throwing out the food that is unsellable. Labor goes into this, and food is recycled (I don’t want to say “wasted”) back into the soil without being consumed by people. I thought, if we just concentrated on getting healthy nutrition and calories to people, without the mediation of markets, we would certainly have more nutrition for less work. However, in the end, as long as the people eating the food are a distance away from where it is grown, even a short distance, there is going to be some prep work that needs to be done.
- I met a local Pescadero conventional farmer who left his peas in the field, unharvested, because the market price was too low to justify the labor of harvest at that particular moment. So, although conventional agriculture claims to “feed the world,” people go hungry while food is left in the fields, if the price isn’t right. Great job once again, capitalism!
- Farming is hard work! That is a truism, right?
It definitely is hard work. And has been since the beginning of civilization. An aspiring farmer such as myself has to squarely face this reality — and I have definitely come to terms with hard work over the last six months, and often came to enjoy it (hey, I saved on gym fees!)
There’s nothing “natural” about this, however. Just as humans could be as good to the planet as we are currently bad, growing food could be as easy and enjoyable as it is currently hard and undervalued.
As a societel consensus, since the beginning of civilization, we have decided farming should be hard. But the “low labor per unit yield” of swidden systems and the possibilities of collective play in having many hands and bodies involved in farm work belie the mirror-opposite which could be.
