Neither a product of the world, nor a reaction to it

Although I can eat a lot of vegetables myself, it's only the smallest fraction of what I grow—so why bother doing all this work to grow so darn many? Clearly the farm plays a big part in your dinner plans, the vegetables being your main interface with what's going on here! But there are many reasons to have a farm, just as there are many reasons to join a CSA: there's the ecological principles, living in the natural world, or engaging with an enterprise that contributes to connection with sustainable agriculture and local food systems. These are all things that you might appreciate, and that I do appreciate. Another facet is to be a part of the local economy, and for you to support small businesses, ideas you're probably familiar with in general. It's a little harder, though, to get a feel for why exactly to do that, and what arises as a product of that small-scale, local economy. For me, one of the main things I appreciate about the farm in my own life is that it is a way to support my livelihood with an engaging, positive project while living as a part of the economic patchwork of the world around me.

The area I live in is based on farming, at least in a historical sense; there's still enough of that agricultural community left that I fit into it on that basis. But it also contains repair shops, parts stores, mechanics, truck drivers, and all the other support businesses and tradesmen required to keep an agricultural area going, all here in this same place. My farm is an operation that lives in that larger picture—my peer group is comprised of the people and businesses who are doing that same thing, living in that same world. These people are the vegetable farmers I learned from, selling at farmers markets to provide for their lives, and now, retirement. They’re the neighboring businesses we sold next to and thought well of for the fact that they could do the same. They're the farmers I pass on the road, people I don't even know, driving tractors to make hay before rain. It's the machinery repair shop, the traveling mechanics; it's Fred the plumber in his truck heading the other way down the road, and the propane delivery drivers delivering fuel for greenhouses and winter heating. In our own way we're all doing the same thing, a part of the same world.

This social fabric is the cultural history of the place where I live. Describing the society of immigrants who came to Pennsylvania, then spread down into the Shenandoah valley and across the Potomac here to Lovettsville in the 1730s, Warren Hofstra writes in A Separate Place that “No farm was entirely self-sufficient, and few farmers sought to live in isolation from their neighbors. Many...could not produce all they needed to feed, house, and clothe their families. They had to depend on local trade. ... The need for wagons called for wagonmakers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights to make them and teamsters to drive them. ... Thus the farm and the limited scale of commercial activity on the farm generated an intricate goods-and-services economy. ... This network was a community premised on a set of exchanges that were reciprocal and mutually supportive.”

Not all farms, though, are a part of that goods-and-services economy, today or in the past. I use the same equipment and production systems as farms many times my size, to produce vegetables of largely the same types—tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, squash. But the giant farms of agribusiness out in the Salinas Valley of California, they aren't owned by people—and a monocrop of thousands of acres of lettuce isn't really my speed. The tomato fields of southern Florida, the same: whichever businesses control that ground are designed to export the resources of the region to generate more and more money and power well beyond a human scale, rather than to live with their neighbors in small-scale commercial relationships.

On the other end of things, many small sustainable farmers have the opposite orientation to the business side—in fact a deep discomfort with the imperative to support one's livelihood with one's farming efforts. I didn't encounter this questioning in the world of farms I came up in; here it was laudable to support one's long-term life by selling vegetables. In my first job, the farm owners talked about money and shared their numbers; anybody paying attention knew how much money they made and how they saved for retirement.

Being neither a product of the world that seeks money and power, nor a reaction to it, is what in fact allows a farm to exist via human-scale commerce as a node in the local social fabric. And it's the economic interconnection of buying and selling, and relying on local repairmen and service providers, and employing people from the same networks, which allows the world I live in to flourish under more or less the same principles as it has for centuries. When people talk about local economies, small businesses, main street, etc., this is what I feel like they're getting at. There's no aspiration to endless growth as a metric of success, nor to make a farm bigger than what one person can run—never mind to build the sort of empire a true business entrepreneur might. I'm doing the upper level planning here for the farm, and also still picking the lettuce.

And my farm does this in conjunction with all the other small businesses in my world who share this orientation, in a network of mutual reliance comprised of people who despite being entirely different characters understand that holding a society together as neighbors does not require being friends. For all our apparent differences in farming methods, products, and professions (not to mention the variety of social, political, and religious backgrounds), yet we share a common orientation towards our own work and interface with others.

Describing the social organization resulting from William Penn's land policies, Hofstra writes that “Englishmen, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, and others...built Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Sectarians like Quakers, Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers founded their own towns. … But although religion and ethnicity provided a basis for community among small groups, neither could bring cohesion to the whole society. … Only the commercial life of Pennsylvania provided a basis for community beyond the neighborhood.” As these people moved through Maryland and into the mountains of Virginia, the contrast with the society of Virginian plantation owners to the south and east became clear—a world built on class difference, subjugation, and hierarchy, formed for the purpose of exporting profit to England.

But for those Pennsylvanians, and their economic descendants in my neighborhood today, commerce and trade bring positive results, the exchange of goods and services encouraging connection and social cohesion, not exploitation—a system of economic exchange where everyone is better off, no one person more powerful than another, no one business large enough or self-sufficient enough to take advantage of others less well off. There's a place in this fabric for everyone, from the scrap man collecting cast-offs useless to others, to the well-driller's assistant able to run the shovel and retrieve tools from the truck—not much, but enough.

In the 1790s Irishman Isaac Weld spent three years traveling through our new country and published a popular book of his accounts; I'll conclude with this passage about the area of the Shenandoah Valley due west of here around Winchester, where he describes the social organization and aspiration of the Pennsylvanians, of their communities in the Shenandoahs, and by extension, of those who came across the Potomac to Lovettsville. “There are no persons here, as on the other side of the mountains, possessing large farms; nor are there any eminently distinguished by their education or knowledge from the rest of their fellow citizens. Poverty is also as much unknown in this country as great wealth.”