The Good Earth

Agriculture, I think, will always be war. At the conflict’s most dramatic, during an unseasonable storm or foreclosure warning, the agrarian fight becomes real bloodletting, a brutal, horrific, yet sometimes heroic experience. But most conflict and disaster on the farm is not so dramatic. Too often it is a struggle of a different kind--Hesiod’s less romantic, more mundane sort that kills more slowly: family squabbles, poor prices, bad decisions, missed sprays, wrong fertilizers, the rural counterpart to suburban desolation. I confess farming is mostly a prosaic, dirty and petty backwater skirmish against a nature that would insidiously deny the farmer his power to raise up food from the ground. Often the hydra’s heads are not even grotesque.

But because farming involves nature and so remains always conflict, both epic and guerrilla, there are clear enemies of agriculture, sensational and ordinary alike. From their destructions accrues a larger, precious knowledge for the rest of us about whom to fear. This wisdom is not to be found elsewhere. It is in no great book that I have read, on the lips of no professor, prophet, or French postmodern savant. It is not to be found with them and their work, because unlike most other occupations in the history of civilization, in farming both man and nature conspire hourly to thwart the agrarian. The farmer’s plight is a physical contest where he can see, smell, hear, and thus be one with his tormentors any hour he pleases. To the Greeks--who believed in the acquisition of knowledge through pain--Aeschylus’ pathei mathos--farming accordingly became in Xenophon’s words the “best tester of good and bad men,” the clearest mechanism known to teach the man of the polis the properly tragic view of the universe.

When your raisins are ruined in an hour, your pears rotted by codling moths, you indeed understand that we do fail. There are no second chances, the race does not always go to the swift. So Virgil glumly wrote of the farmer’s travail that “It is a law of nature that makes all things go to the bad, to lose ground, and to fall away.” That agrarian view of this universe Americans would now call “sour,” “pessimistic,” “bleak” or “bitter”--as if the farmer who learned such wisdom enjoyed it, as if he would not prefer to forget it and simply say, “I feel good that I tried,” “Everything will work out in the end,” or “Tomorrow is another day.”