We're losing our farmers, and much more with them

I read recently that farmers, who have made up the majority of the world population for millennia, have all but disappeared from Europe ‘in the blink of an eye’.

Up to the mid twentieth century almost half the working population was involved in food production in European countries – now it has fallen to single percentage figures. It has been replaced by large-scale agribusiness, with vast amounts of land farmed by a small number of landowners. It has resulted in much more food being produced, much more efficiently. It has also been ‘heavily subsidised, economically unjust, and ecologically disastrous, in a climate-threatened economy of shortages, destabilised supply chains, growing economic protectionism, and degradation of soils all over the world’. ^[1]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm has alerted Brits generally to the hardships that modern farmers face. It is desperately hard to make a living as a farmer; it’s unrelenting work, for widely unpredictable gains which at their best might be very little. Yet we all need food. In a rational economy, one would think that food production is something that could never lose money. But humans are anything but rational.

The Bible was written to an agricultural economy, and its metaphors, especially as used by Jesus, lean heavily on farming and land analogies. Adam’s work, the archetype of all work, was in the garden; the curse was directed towards his relationship with the land. Since the fall, farming the land has never been easy. Humanity’s connection with the land was broken, and although God continues His blessings of the routine patterns of the seasons, this fallen world has always been fraught with the threat of bad seasons and famine.

What we've lost

For that reason, most of humanity has always lived with uncertainty about the future, and so being taught to pray daily for daily bread would have had special weight. Farmers would have been forced to rely upon God, and to pray. Those closest to the land would always have been the most familiar with the threats of poverty, and powerlessness, and so being told that the blessed ones are the poor, the meek, and those who mourn would have been particularly striking. They would have understood the need for patience, and perseverance, and the way in which suffering produces character. They would have had a particular insight into the need for hope, and so rely upon especially upon the hope of the glory to come.

So humanity loses a lot when so much of its population loses a connection with the land and its rhythms. We have paid a huge price for modern prosperity. It is not just the price paid in terms of this world – the inequality, the unhealthiness of mass pesticide and other chemical use, the mass industrialisation of heavily processed food – but we have lost a lot in the potential for spiritual insight as well.

I have never been a farmer – I don’t know how I would cope with the harshness of such a year-round, exposed life. But I do know that my soul soars in the countryside in a way it just never does in the city. There is something about the closeness to nature that is healthy and healing and uplifting, despite the problems of cold or heat or other vagaries of weather. The research done on both the physical and psychological benefits of green spaces, proximity to water, and the aptly named green and blue exercise (exercises taken in the open air or open water) testify to how good it is for us to be closer to God’s natural world.

Cities are good, too; the new creation is actually described in terms of a city, not of wilderness (Revelation 21). Cities are in some ways God’s gift of protection to us against a cursed and chaotic nature, which we have failed to have the intended, blessed dominion over, which will fight us and be our enemy. Humans are social, and rural isolation is just as bad as any other kind. I also don’t want to romanticise some golden age of rural life. The threat of poverty is very hard to live with.

But the loss of rural community, of a large portion of humanity who farm the land and feed the rest of us, is definitely a loss of human and spiritual good. It is the triumph of the impulse of Babel, of accumulation and making a name for ourselves, over humble service of each other. It has taken the worst of human nature, selfishness, greed and accumulation of wealth, and left behind the idea of not maximising profits, of seeing land as a gracious gift of God (as the Old Testament law embodied).

I don’t have a solution to the wide scale changes in social economics that have happened over the last century. Surely it’s not impossible to have rural life that is not necessarily poor? I would need far more wisdom than I currently own to suggest how. But I do suggest we all consider how we might regain a bit of the humility that reliance on God teaches, as opposed to the illusion of security that technological life gives. We still all rely on Him for every breath. About time we paid attention to that.

^{[1] Gus Mitchell, ‘Past Peasant Future’, plough.com}