Post-industrial Ag
One of the things I have come to deeply appreciate about farmwork is how thought-provoking it is: how generative it can be, not only in the actual growing of crops but also in the growth of my intellect and curiosity. Farming is a creative act, one of humanity’s oldest and probably our most truly collaborative. To spend time in the fields at Lapa’au is to be immersed in a place that—if we allow it, if we have the ears to hear it—speaks truths and asks difficult questions. Questions about the relationship between your farm and the economy; questions about your place in the long arc of agriculture; questions, at the heart of it all, about your values and thus the vision that guides the farm. Which sacrifices are worth it, which are not? Who is buying, preparing, eating your harvests (and where are they)? What mechanical and technical means are you employing—and why?
These are the kinds of questions where no answer is its own kind of answer. To farm today is to ignore questions like these at our own peril; to avoid thinking about them is a dereliction of duty. Ignorance is not an excuse, it’s self-sabotage.
Perhaps the primary thing we must honestly face is the recent history of agriculture, in particular that epoch-defining word industrial. There is no getting around it, no pretending we are not irrevocably shaped by it - even (or especially) small-acreage regenerative farms like ours.
Let’s start here: agriculture’s industrial revolution has happened and enough time has passed for us to see clearly what has transpired. We threw pretty much the full weight of modern man’s resources and ingenuity at the application of mechanical and technical methods to agriculture. We synthesized fertilizers and pesticides for crops, developed vitamin supplements and antibiotics for livestock, improved transportation and storage methods, and manufactured tractors and other petroleum-powered implements for farmwork. (We also revolutionized the financial picture, with farmers being able to rely heavily upon credit for all these newfangled purchases.) These changes happened as the second world war was drawing to a close, and they happened fast. As usual, Wendell Berry captures this well in his newest novel, Marce Catlett, with a clarity bordering on brutality:
The machines and chemicals, required in prodigal quantities as weapons of war, could as well be fitted to the requirements, “scientifically” oversimplified, of agriculture. And so began the all-out industrialization of rural America. The new ways of farming were in fact new kinds of mining: maximum production at minimal expense, extraction without maintenance or any return of care. It was a foreign invasion, the homecoming of war, except that the invaders were the industrial corporations of urban America, employing rural labor as cheaply as possible to establish what has remained a domestic colonialism.
Berry is writing from Kentucky but the same logic applies here on Maui. The old cane fields—and their abandonment when greater profits were found elsewhere—stand as testament. To be clear, there is no point in pretending that prior to its industrialization farming was an Edenic pursuit. What era of innocence could we turn to? No, farming has always been hard, be it in similar or dissimilar ways. And abuse and injustice, whether of land or livestock or fellow human, have always had a foothold because these are apparently innate human qualities from which we’ve yet to find salvation. But the point I am reaching for here is simple: the advent of mass industrialization changed farming more quickly and more radically than any other turn in the history of agriculture. There is a thoroughness to industrialization’s victory which is nearly incomprehensible: how and when and which food is grown, who consumes it and where, who holds the economic reins, and so on.
From our vantage point in the mid 2020s, we are staring down eight decades of this agricultural evolution. There is no going back, obviously. Industrial ag’s folly has revealed itself but time as ever keeps moving forward, and societies naturally build upon what has come before.
And here, on a sub-three acre plot of land on the slopes of Haleakala, we’re farming. We live our lives and farm our farm day by day. We’re committed to doing things right—the expenditures, maintenance, and care that keep our land healthy—because it is compellingly self-evident that farmers must do right by their farms; integrity and respect and attentiveness are the guiding stars. I can’t imagine any of my coworkers would want to own or be employed by a massive conventional farm operation; I certainly don’t. But do not be deceived, friendly reader: We are not dogmatic. We are not ideologues. We are not operating a premodern farm and we don’t stand wholly outside of the global economic systems. (And seeing as we live on the most isolated archipelago on the planet, anything that gets shipped to us from somewhere beyond, say, O’ahu inevitably incurs an atmospheric and oceanic debt of carbon emissions we cannot truly hope to pay back.)
I think it’s important to understand with some amount of clarity what, for us here anyway, post-industrial farming looks like. By ‘post-industrial’ I don’t mean that we have fully moved beyond industry’s reach - that is more or less impossible (unless you save all your own seed instead of purchasing, use only tools you’ve made yourself, abstain from petroleum and plastic and electricity and the internet, etc). Rather, I use ‘post-industrial’ in the sense that this revolution has happened and we are left to make sense of its wake, its fallout. That is to say: we’re not an industrial farm, but we do live in the world that industrialization has made. We gain these insights not necessarily to point to this or that and deem it Good or Bad—I trust those judgments will be made manifest in time—but instead to invest the accumulating wisdom back into our work.
So. A somewhat thorough but certainly not exhaustive list of the ties that bind us to industrial agriculture:
Though we are a local farm (in that the vast majority of our produce stays on Maui with the tiny leftover percentage going only to neighbor islands), all our seeds come from the mainland, predominantly from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, headquartered in Maine. The sawdust spawn for our oyster mushrooms comes to us from Field & Forest Products, out of Wisconsin. Michael orders online and they promptly ship out.
We have a few petroleum-powered machines that get regular use: a delivery van, a small tractor (a Kubota LA854, if you want the specs), a BCS walk-behind tractor, a riding law mower, a weed whacker, a power washer, and an old golf cart we’ve refashioned into an all-purpose farm vehicle. (We also have an electric golf cart for the same uses.) Plus, a gas-powered generator for when the electricity cuts out.
We have two small refrigerated walk-ins, each cooled by an A/C unit.
We use plastic drip tape for our greenhouses and any beds that are not on overhead irrigation, and most irrigation runs through battery-powered timers. We get our irrigation from county water lines.
The washing/packing station, barn, mushroom house, and greenhouses have electricity for various purposes.
The human-powered tools so dear to me—the Jang direct seeder, the paperpotter, even rakes and shovels and hoes—are all factory made. As are of course the greens harvester and tilther, both of them being powered by a hand-drill.
And while Lapa’au is a family farm, it is not the archetypal family farm of yesteryear. Michael and Lauren have employees and pay us taxable hourly wages. It is a business, not subsistence.
If you were intent on writing a polemic, it would be pretty easy to find fault in every one of these bullet points. They each can trace their lineage to some aspect of the industrial economy that has ravaged and continues to ravage our communities and the natural world. What to do with this fact, this uneasy alliance we have made with the world-eater? What to do with the fact that without the items that make up my little list above, Lapa’au Farm would simply not exist? Because that is the plain truth, as merely one example will show: without the BCS, we could not prep our beds efficiently enough to maintain the planting schedule we need for Lapa’au to succeed. Simple as that.
This is the great paralyzing dilemma of any attempt to break out of the world industrial regime: you kill it, you kill yourself. These are the golden handcuffs of modernity.
There are the prophets out there, of course. They see more clearly than we regular folk do, and are burdened by their vision much more heavily than we are. They have renounced gasoline and wifi, turned their back on free shipping and exploitive economic games. And I am grateful to them, grateful for their lights burning off in the distance, inviting and insisting and grieving and trying as best they can to midwife our culture through the birth pangs of something new. We need them. But you know what? It’s hard to be friends with (or be married to) a prophet! They’re out there like John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, pulling antisocial stunts, getting hauled before The Authorities to answer for their recalcitrance. They’re often murdered.
I, for one, plan to keep my friends and my wife—and I’d prefer to keep my head attached to my body. Perhaps on the other side of death’s door I’ll have to answer for my lack of conviction, my willingness to play some of the games dictated by the modern industrial and technological economy. That is a possibility that will haunt me.
But farming is a long game. It will take a long time to right the wrongs done in the name of feeding people. I am hopeful—I am certain—that the next farms and farmers, the ones that come along in the next fifty years, will want to improve upon our work, just as we are attempting to improve upon what has come before. When I look upon my list of industrial items, I give us the benefit of the doubt. I look at the list (I look at our farm) with compassion, knowing full well that perfectability is illusory and ideologies are always incomplete. If the farm has taught me anything, it is that life will never be fully comprehensible; tomorrow is categorically unknown and untouchable, and that is what allows for hope. We figure it out day by day, daily bread by daily bread. And every now and then, grace intervenes. “Economy is inescapable, but it must be continually interrupted, its grip broken” - that’s John Caputo, my favorite theologian & philosopher. Our farm has its existence between, on the one hand, the seeds and spawn coming into us from the realm of the Economy, and on the other hand the harvest going back out into the Economy. Money in, money out: ‘inescapable.’ But in between—within the temporal and spatial bounds of the farm—oh my lord there is beauty, such beauty. That’s where the life is.
I may be harvesting a hundred and fifty pounds of carrots to fulfill the orders for our accounts (e.g. economy) but I am doing so in the world of dirt, wind, rain, photosynthesis (life) (…and death). That world—and I shall emphasize: the only world we know—breaks the grip of the economy. This interruption is vital and sustaining because it roots us, it deepens our oft-tenuous connection with the breathing earth. When we were harvesting carrots today, it was, shall we say, less-than-ideal conditions: the wind was whipping the rain sideways at us, gusting and cold and the ground so damn saturated your boots could disappear. And it was fun. I mean it was terrible and dumb, obviously, and we all wanted it to be over as soon as possible …but I enjoyed it. I felt enlivened, enriched, the feeling that only occurs in an active encounter with a force much larger than yourself. It’s a moment that, if we so wish, offers a choice—curse the economic webs in which your labor unspools, or bless the natural world for its richness and indeed exuberance.
Perhaps that’s a path forward as we lean further into the post- of post-industrial. Seek the moments and places where a blessing can be offered up for the gift of the world, of life, and resist the inclination in that same moment to curse your economic shackles (be they iron or gold). Make the choice to turn toward the world, the more than human earth. The fires of industry are tempting indeed, and often we are like moths to the flame. But to be turned toward, to be attentive to, to offer your full presence to the land you walk and work: it renews your ties to your place. That in itself is a very post-industrial posture. It allows us to use the tools of industry for the sake of our work rather than the other way around - it keeps the industrializing of the small farm economy in check.
I’m willing to trust farmers as well as the businesses which believe in good farming and keep it alive via seeds and implements and amendments. I trust that good farming—decent, dignified, curious, humble farming—is compelling and even irresistible, not merely to the prophets but to the rest of us folk. Consumers can choose to buy local produce from small, human-scaled farms that are loved deeply by their farmers. Chefs can do the same for the guests at their tables. Policy wonks can fight the good fight. Most importantly, more people can become farmers.
It will probably always be economically dicey, but that’s (dare I say it) the prophetic role we get to play. Choose the thing that doesn’t make sense to the world-eater. Good farming is a particular challenge—one we must keep answering each day, in the day-to-day. It is, as Caputo might say, a call that is always and already calling, persistent and insistent, inviting me to participate in a form of life that will remain, in a most fundamental way, alien to the industrial mode of being …even as we continue to use our machines and rely on electricity and the internet. That foreignness is the interruption, the breaking of the grip of economy, opening up the future to more good farmers and more flourishing farms. What could be better?
