How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land, selected, translated and introduced
This magazine focuses primarily on practical agronomy — techniques and practices for modern regenerative growers. But one of the goals of regenerative growing methods is healthy, thriving rural and agrarian communities.
M. D. Usher’s 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 technical details, which are abundant in the literature and are important for historical reasons — how the ancients tilled and grew wheat, for example, or how they fattened their livestock — choosing instead to focus on Greek and Roman attitudes toward the agrarian way of life and how, in general, 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 one that is connected to the land. While some would argue that urban life provides a subpar existence, agrarianism, at its best, does not assert that all popular culture or technology is evil — just that new ideas and machines need to be carefully and skeptically evaluated before adoption. Anything that to some degree separates us from nature, and from where our food comes from, should only be accepted with caution and adequate safeguards.
Modern U.S. rural life, while different from that in the cities and suburbs, doesn’t necessarily match up with this ideal of agrarianism. The politics of rural communities differ statistically from that of larger locales, but TV and now the internet and social media have been pretty successful in inculcating many non-agrarian ideas into the mindsets of country folk. Many are just as consumeristic and disconnected from the land as their urban counterparts.
Usher seeks to remedy this by recalling that this struggle is not new — even ancient Greeks and Romans had to remind themselves of the virtues of caring for the land and, as Wendell Berry puts it, carefully developing an “informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity.” Usher shows in his introduction how this has continued throughout history — in our country alone there have a been a variety of “back-to-the-land” movements since the 19th century, continuing with today’s agrarian renaissance. The desire to somehow exchange new ways of thinking, living and working for old is itself ancient.
Usher includes a mixture of different types of writings, from local color to historical perspective to philosophical musings, and even humor and poetry.
One of the most famous ancient writings on agriculture is Vergil’s Georgics, which others have entitled “Praise for the Countryside” or “In Praise of Farmers.” Vergil reminds farmers: “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.” Usher couples this with Horace’s original tale of the country mouse and the city mouse — although in his telling, it’s only the country mouse whose experience in the opposite locale teaches him to be content with his own way of life. The city mouse continues his harried existence, instead of the safety and comfort — albeit with hardships — of rural living.
In other excerpts, Pliny the Elder demonstrates the formative role of agriculture in all of Roman life and criticizes the growth of large-scale farms — several hundred acres in size, being worked by slaves, with absent landlords. “The fields were tilled in earlier times by the hands of generals themselves, and we are justified to think that the Earth rejoiced in a laurel-crowned plowshare and a plowman who had celebrated a triumph. Perhaps it was because these men treated the seed with the same care that they waged wars and laid out their fields with the same attention that they applied to setting up camps.”
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. 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. The grand agrarian vision is not one that people seem to adopt naturally; it must be inculcated — cultured — even among those who grow up in it.
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).
While an agrarian life does offer deep satisfaction, our hope of the good life will only truly be realized in a new earth.
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