Finding Happiness on a Small Organic Vegetable Farm

Farming includes a good measure of capriciousness. The farmer walks into the fields to bring to the land a human purpose: growing food for human consumption. Organic farming includes the work of disciplining this human purpose within the ecological character of the land. The capriciousness lies in the way this ecological character includes great variations in weather and flora and fauna: can the organic farmer adapt and prosper as must all other members of the land community? Insects, weeds, and weather all conspire to dash the best of winter plans. The problem is not simply economic. The willing of the farmer to confront the varying forces of weather, weed, and insect create spiritual as well as economic challenges.

So how does a farmer stay happy, or, remain energetic and filled with a sense of meaning and purpose? I appreciate the opportunity to say, without argument, that we humans do not create our own meaning or happiness. I disagree with Jean-Paul Sartre. To enjoy meaning and happiness, all of us need to experience something which provisions it. We choose what we take from the environment, but meaning and happiness are found in the environment, not made by individuals. Sometimes, however, the environment seems discouraging.

But not fundamentally so, I think, not even for farmers.. A great contribution of the Christian religion remains its attention to the psychology of happiness, and for me, its most significant insight is found in Matthew 7: 19-22

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where month and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also

I admit that I don't believe in the Christian heaven, but the statement stands as a reminder to think carefully about what in your environment makes you happy, farmer or not. Alas the good farmer who found meaning and happiness in the abundance of sweet strawberries, the gentle perfume of ripe melons, the swirled red and orange of heirloom tomatoes! The point of meaning and happiness is that it should abide amid the world's change; the attraction of the happy person is the way they stay happy. Here is the existential challenge, then, for the farmer; what within the farm landscape remains solid and sturdy and good? What remains solid and sturdy and good in the surroundings of any of us?

One thing we've learned to do on our farm is to try and remember to work for the sake of the present and for the future, rather than work to repair the past. The past can’t change, of course, but how it affects our lives completely depends upon what we do at every moment. On the farm, this means that the past, with its memories of snow in April and cold afterwards, needs a certain amount of ignoring: not forgetting, just ignoring. So we are building field hoophouses, for example. The farmer still pays attention to the environment, of course, but pays less attention to what is settled and finished – this year, poor onion germination - and more attention to the possibilities ahead. I still have watermelons to plant. I suppose we all find ourselves in similar situations.

I think of Plato's line in the Timaeus

Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity…

What abides in the farmer's experience is this future with its possibility of "movement," or growth, perhaps. I can still build a hoophouse in field number one, and so make the farm better.

Also, the farmer must bring to conscious awareness the mysterious presence which seems to brood within the beautiful rural landscape: the rumbling storms, reddening tomato fruits, the play of light and shadow on green fields. It is the vague yet massive presence of something full of feeling; this presence haunts the poetry of Wordsworth and also Thoreau’s writings. There seems to me among the blue broccoli, colored peppers (when we have any!), and scattered winter squashes some distracting sense of an eternal working of all things. All I can say as a farmer is that, for me, to hold this workings-of-all-things in experience is to escape all fear of a poor summer.