Farmers are People too

It’s a foregone conclusion amongst food and ag writers that there is something wrong with the way we grow food in America. Paging through the best-selling volumes by Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Dan Barber, and others will lead you to one conclusion; there’s a better way to farm out there, and they’ve found it. After you close the book/put down your NYTimes, you’re inevitably left to wonder, if these journalists and chefs found these solutions, farmers must be willfully ignoring them. Sure, these authors tell the farmers’ sad tale about the inheritance of industrial agriculture and the industries and policies that entrench it. But, we wonder, if farmers were smart enough, hard-working enough, and truly the environmentalists they claim to be, they should be putting away their John Deere tractors and their Monsanto seeds en masse to plant heirloom tomatoes alongside their grass-fed beef. Right? Reducing farmers and agribusiness to stooges and villains is a good way to sell books and documentaries, but it’s no part of a meaningful solution. If we want farmers to take our goals around ecology and sustainability seriously, we have to stop believing that they’re either holy or evil; they’re people, people who are more than their jobs.