A Farm or a Garden?

Sharon Astyk runs a small CSA farm in the Northeast. She writes thoughtfully, fluently and often with great humor about issues of food security, with a passion that I share.

Here at the farm we have often had the discussion about what makes gardening different from farming? Is it the use of hand tools rather than tractors? Is it a matter of scale or of what kinds of plants one grows?

Ms. Astyk contends that it furthers our cause in pursuit of economic localization to expand our definition of what makes one a farmer. I enjoy this blog for her breadth of knowledge and vision, as well as for practical information.

Sharon Astyk

"Now I know this talk is supposed to be about “large scale gardening” but I keep speaking of farming. That’s because there’s an untenanted space between the word “gardener” and the word “farmer” that needs to be addressed. A gardener is usually someone who grows things for their pleasure, from the sheer joy of it. When we talk about farmers, we usually mean someone with a profession is growing food on a large scale. But somewhere in between them is the idea we need to grasp with language - that there could be someone who grows a lot of food to eat, but still takes pleasure in the act, who may sell food, but whose work cannot be traded on the commodities market.

Or perhaps we don’t need a new word, because we have one. In nearly every nation in the world small scale or subsistence agricultural producers are called “farmers“. In English, the word derives from the word for “earth,” as in “firmament” or “terra firma,” but it also shares its origin with the word “form” to mean “to shapes or creators.” . It occurs to me that right now, we need to become a nation of people who see themselves as creators rather than conquerors or consumers, people who see our central work as the maintenance and sustenance of the earth and human cultures. So I’d like to propose to you that for the purposes of this talk, we think of all our exercises in food production as a kind of farming. In fact, I’d be thrilled if you’d go on thinking of yourself as a farmer after we’re done here, because I think that habit of thought could be a powerful one for most of us.

Because it isn’t such an outrageous leap to imagine yourself as a farmer. It turns out that only in our highly commodified culture, which values only large scale agriculture at all, and even that not much, is a farmer defined as a big man with a big tractor who grows a thousand acres of corn and votes republican. In fact, he’s not a he at all - the average farmer, worldwide is a woman, and not a white woman at that. Even in the US, the only really fast growing segment of agriculture is that of independent women farmers. The average farmer in the world is a woman, farming 4 ½ acres, growing 15 different crops on them. They own no tractor and do most of their labor by hand, and their household has at least one outside source of income (that last part is the only thing that is true of most professional farmers as well - 70% of them must either hold a second job or have a spouse work outside the home to support themselves). And the average farmer world wide doesn’t look all that different from what American farmers used to look like. Because the average first settlers in the US farmed only 7 acres, and by the time that Thomas Jefferson was rhapsodizing about the democratic possibilities of a nation of farmers, the average farmer only had 10 acres.

What we are talking about, then, is a return to human norms, in which many people are involved in a subsistence economy, producing most of what they need, with enough to create a small outside income for the things they cannot grow or barter for. We have been conditioned by growth capitalism to see such work as endless drudgery, grinding poverty and misery. But in fact, as Veronika Bennholt-Thomsen and Marie Mies describe in their book _The Subsistence Perspective_ (a book I highly recommend, btw), most small polyculture producers value what they have, their independence and their strong cultural ties. We should think carefully before we assume that a subsistence lifestyle is a step down - because for many independent small farmers in the world, our dependence on the money economy, military and economic expansionism and outside things like fossil fuels look like a kind of vulnerability and dependence that would be intolerable."