Carefully Examined Ends

In the previous essay, I was trying to find an honest perspective on how a farm like Lapa’au—small, regenerative, local—fits or doesn’t fit into the economy of industrial agriculture. It is impossible to not be shaped by industrialization’s logic, but it is vital to not succumb to its power, its temptation, its false promises of security and ease. Lapa’au, like all farms and all businesses, was not created ex nihilo; we build atop the foundations of what has come before, with an imagination shaped at least in part by the traditions we have inherited. It is our work to take that which we’ve been given and do the hard, necessary, creative labor of forming and reforming it; to hear the call of what good farming is and could be in this particular place, and then to respond with our hearts and hands. Each day this is our vocation. It is nobody else’s responsibility but our own.

I came to Lapa’au desiring this responsibility but having approximately zero farming experience. Fortunately for me, the farm was still young enough that Michael and Lauren were willing to accept volunteer labor; when you’re bootstrapping it I guess you take pretty much any warm, breathing body that foolishly stumbles onto your path. I didn’t screw anything up badly enough to warrant getting kicked off the property, and after a while they agreed to bring me on as an actual hired hand (miracles do exist!). And here we are today.

My great hope when joining up with the good people of Lapa’au was pretty simple and unoriginal - that clichéd desire to ‘get back to the basics.’ I could feel the chapter closing on a period of my life where I had gained juuust enough wisdom to realize, “Oh man, I know nothing.” I was beginning to see with at least some clarity that our world is such a complicated, complex, infinitely-faceted place, and that the future is incalculable and tomorrow impossible to take for granted. I felt myself inside a current taking me …somewhere new. I knew not where: simply elsewhere. Pretty much the only thing that resonated with any sincerity was a need to strip back all the accumulated layers of sediment deposited on my soul. If I knew nothing, then I would start back at the beginning. And this beginning needed to be: embodied because society was becoming ever more disembodied; effortful because voices I distrust were promising that machine capability would abolish our need to labor; quiet and small while the culture was loud and metastasizing; outward-oriented as self-care curdled back into self-obsession; and—most importantly for me—meaningful in the midst of our collective hurtling through nihilism.

Farming was the only thing that made sense. In particular, the kind done on the couple acres being worked under the name Lapa’au. It was a new beginning for me, a fresh start, a second chance.

These few years here have given me an opportunity to take my existential neuroses—meaning, purpose, our numbered days—and incorporate them like compost and fertilizer into the soil of my work. I know myself; my brain can go round and round endless cul-de-sacs, and this is why a career in academia was so tempting (and still is, sometimes). It’s so exciting, the life of the mind! But I think it might have driven me mad. It’s too intangible; too easy to remain isolated inside your own mind, conjuring cosmos of ideas that don’t necessarily have to confront the material world. Here on the farm, though, the demand to incarnate your ideas is nonnegotiable. You cannot stop up your ears against it unless you want to not have a farm anymore. Crops have to grow, harvests must happen, deliveries must be made.

You must rise to the challenge of the real.

This is not a challenge merely of soil, sunshine, pests, precipitation. It is also a challenge of the market. How do your values—your vision—resonate or clash with the dictates of the economy? The great danger, especially in agriculture, is subordinating your values to what passes for values in the wider economy. It is a danger because we live inside “a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends” (Robert K. Merton, in the translator’s introduction to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, originally published in French in 1954).

Continually improved means to carelessly examined ends - it’s difficult to find a more perfect description of industrialized farming. The results of what Wendell Berry has called ‘maximum production at minimal expense’ look good on an agribusiness spreadsheet but sooner or later (likely sooner) bring ruin upon the actual farm, and therefore upon the actual farmers. That is a carelessly examined end. The antidote, then, is to carefully examine our ends: What are our goals? Why do we do what we do? I do not think it wise to disregard out of hand the ingenuity and inventiveness of what we broadly call industrialization. I don’t think “continually improved means” is the issue, really; we at Lapa’au are striving each day to get better, to be a bit more efficient and effective, to, I suppose, continually improve. But if that work is done without a coherent vision—or if the vision is coherent but corrupted—damage follows; the same old story of greedy short-sightedness plays out.

So, what is our goal? The formulation I’ve settled on for myself is this: growing good food for people. It’s a simple, comprehensible statement. I appreciate how basically boring and nonrevolutionary it is. But, at least in my own mind, it’s packed with meaning—not unlike Michael Pollan’s equally concise but much more famous aphorism, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Alright, let’s examine it (carefully).

“For people”: Our customers are our neighbors, or they are guests visiting our island home. That is, these are real people, not mere quantifiable data in digital accounts. They have real wants and needs. They care about flavor and freshness and quality, just like us. Lapa’au does not operate within the purity of a totalized economy where everything and everyone is reducible to a dollar amount. We operate within a local economy where so much is based upon relationships, and relationships are irreducible. They form the community web of which we are a small part, and we care for—and are cared for by—our community. Every now and then a small percentage of our produce will make it over to our neighbor islands, but outside of those few boxes every root, fruit, leaf and mushroom stays here on Maui. What comes from Lapa’au is intended to be directly consumed by the folks within a few mile radius of the farm itself. It is not feed for livestock, or building blocks for ethanol fuel; it is for people.

“Good food”: As it says on the homepage of the website (and the backs of our shirts, if you’ve seen us around island), Lapa’au is focused on ‘nutrient rich foods.’ We are mindful to build up and maintain the health and liveliness of our soil so that the crops in our care may themselves take up that same health and liveliness as they mature. Once we harvest, wash, pack, and deliver them, those qualities are passed along to you. As they say, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (geometry and nutritional advice coming together!). If the nutrients coming to us from the earth are first run through an industrial factory and supplemented or fortified or held together with many non-food ingredients, then probably we should minimize our consumption of them—the human body is indeed resilient, but let’s not push it. In today’s world, notes the aforementioned Michael Pollan, “We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that … in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” This is the opposite of straightforward, and it serves not human health but distant and disinterested economic bottom lines. If, however, we can mostly stick to eating simply—eating the fundamentals of the human diet—we will be much better served. And I gotta tell you, eating a celery stalk that I have just pulled off the plant, or a broccolini stem I just cut: it’s hard to get more flavorful. Don’t even get me started on our heirloom tomatoes.

“Growing”: I admit it’s a funny word to use because we farmers are not doing any of the actual growing. The crops do it. All we’re doing is just trying to set them up for success. I can’t say it any better than Ben Hartman in this sentence from The Lean Farm, one which I’ve quoted before and will probably quote again: “Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant’s or an animal’s innate ability to do its own growing.” A farmer’s work is simply to encourage the plants to live their best lives. We say: Grow to maturity with strength and vigor, moving towards or into your reproductive capacities. (We neglect to tell them: And then we’ll kill you and/or eat your babies.) This word ‘growing’ also directs us to a traditional, ancestral sense of farming, much different than the realm of industrial farming. While large-scale, highly-mechanized, monocrop operations are still growing food I guess, what it really seems like to me is that they’re building. These industrial farms are, after all, modeled on the factory, the assembly line, the brutal and narrowly-defined efficiency of a machine. Farms like ours are rather different: fundamentally reliant upon living soil, a diversity of crops, human hands and the judgment of the human mind and heart. We are flexible rather than rigid—there are very few straight lines and right angles here. We grow, we don’t build.

Thus, Lapa’au is in the business of growing good food for people.

I find this to be a supremely worthy goal. I believe it both inspires and is inspired by timeless values that function as guardrails or constraints on humanity’s equally-timeless vices. So much of farming today has been swallowed by forces which at bottom pursue only money—forces which worship only the techniques that accelerate the acquisition of wealth. That is the modern, industrial mindset. It is “the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends,” and it has no room in its imagination for small, decent, local farms like ours. I hold a deep suspicion of that mindset, and the people I most trust—the ones that have gained much wisdom through their sacrifices and trials and convictions—are deeply suspicious of it as well. They see the emptiness, and the carelessness, and the shameful results of such a trajectory. They see also the goodness, or at least the possibility of goodness, that arises from its inverse. As Wendell Berry writes, “If we know carefully enough who, what, and where we are, and if we keep the scale of our work small enough, we can think responsibly.”

If we are determined to steward our farmland in such a way that it continually produces nutrient rich food, and if we are determined to get that food into kitchens and bellies in its freshest state, and if we are determined to keep strengthening our community bonds, I’m hopeful Lapa’au can stay on the straight and narrow. We all know we could make more money doing a different kind of farming, or by leaving the field altogether (and indeed, I supplement my farm income by serving at a restaurant that buys produce from us). But this place is precious, and the time we spend here is precious. In these days where everything is becoming commodified—where everything has a price—participating in the life of the farm is priceless.

I am beyond grateful that the (agri)cultural life here at Lapa’au has indeed offered the fresh start I was hoping for. It has continued to be embodied, effortful, quiet & small, outward-oriented, and meaningful. If there is any grace in this world, it will remain that way. For each one of us that works at Lapa’au, it was no small amount of good fortune that opened a place for us here; now, it is our responsibility to keep it.