How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, selected, translated, and introduced by M. D. Usher
This magazine focuses primarily on practical agronomy — techniques and practices for modern regenerative growers — but one of the goals of a regenerative growing methods is healthy, thriving rural and agrarian communities.
How to Be a Farmer is a delightful collection of some of the best ancient Greek and Roman writings on agricultural life. It doesn’t include the technical details, which are abundant in the literature and are important for historical reasons — how the ancients tilled and grew wheat, for example — choosing instead to focus on Greek and Roman attitudes toward the agrarian way of life and, more generally, how to lead a good life. It highlights “Greek and Roman attitudes, dispositions, and reflections on what it means to live, work, and think in a landscape.”
Agrarianism is the idea that the good life is the life that is connected to the land. At its best, it does not assert that technology is evil, but that it needs to be carefully and skeptically evaluated before adoption — that anything that divorces ourselves from nature and from where our food comes from should only be accepted with caution and adequate safeguards.
M. D. Usher’s introduction to How to Be a Farmer begins with a discussion of how there have a been a variety of “back-to-the-land” movements since the 19th century. The desire to somehow exchange the new ways of thinking, living and working with the old are powerful and
Usher includes a mixture of different types of writings, from local color to historical perspective to philosophical musings and even humor and poetry.
One excerpt, from the poet Horace, reminds us how in spite of life’s seeming unfairness
Usher succeeds in giving readers a glimpse of how “the ancient Greeks and Romans still inform the pursuit of sustainable, ecologically meaningful lifestyles today.”
But it’s good to remember, at the end of the day, that not all things connected to nature are roses. Vergil says in his “Praise for the Countryside,” “Ah, farmers!” How lucky they are — too lucky! If only they knew how good they have it: Far from the cacophony of swords, the most righteous Earth, of her own accord, produces a ready source of life from the ground.” There are times when all farmers curse their lack of luck, and it’s not as if food springs forth from the land without toil.
An even more ancient source than the Greeks and Romans reminds us that in our postlapsarian world, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:17b-19a).
Our hope of the good life can only truly be realized in a new earth.
