by Steven McFadden – January 29, 2024

In a thought-provoking essay published in 1990, Wendell Berry asked, “What are people for?” Now more than three decades later, with the aggressive incursion of artificial intelligence (AI) into our lives, Berry’s rhetorical question takes on added magnitude.

What does it mean to be human in the Age of AI? Especially if the craft, trade, or profession you mastered is rendered irrelevant by “intelligent machines.”

In his essay Mr. Berry is challenging us to find our own answers. That’s our soul-searching assignment. But in an oblique response to his own question, he notes in his essay that there’s critical work to be done restoring and caring for our farms, waters, forests, and communities. That’s indeed work that must be done, and best done—he would likely say—with the high skill and honest pride of human cultivators, protectors, providers, and pathfinders. These are critical roles, highly purposeful.

In our moment of history, with the aid of AI, large industrial, chemical, GMO infused agri-corporations are continuing to subsume and to overshadow food systems, while colossal billion-buck investment firms continue to hoard farmland. This commercial juggernaut of consolidation and concentration for greater profit, in North America and globally, brings a second question into focus: What are farms for?

When Trauger Groh and I wrote Farms of Tomorrow (1990), and then Farms of Tomorrow Revisited (1998), we used a well-known epigram to express an obvious starting point:

“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” – Daniel Webster, NH Statesman (1782-1852)

We cannot work, play, watch TV, or survive if we are not eating, if we are without farms producing food. Farms are a foundation upon which everything depends. Not debatable. That farm and food systems are in a profound transition is likewise beyond debate.

A domineering set of responses to the “what are farms for” question is being blazed at warp speed by systems and forces that Oxfam designates as Inequality, Inc. They coined the term in their report on this year’s World Economic Forum (Davos).

The mammoth corporations Oxfam criticizes are reigning as ultra-processed, high-tech institutional patriarchs, presiding in many cases over global networks of exploitation to manufacture food products that often, over time, rankle our innards with digestive maladies ranging from GERD (reflux disease) to enraged bowel syndrome (IBD).

Oxfam’s representatives state the moral imperative plainly: “Human suffering should never be an ingredient in the food we eat.” Needless animal suffering, likewise, should never be an ingredient in the human diet. In the circle of life, all these elements inevitably become part of who we are, how we think and feel, the condition of our souls. All is related. The Sacred Hoop is a fact of life.

Industrial-scale agri-food systems based on chemicals, machines, and bottom-line economics are likely to continue advancing full throttle—from Big Seed, and Big Fertilizer, to Big Chem, Big GMO, Big Prisons, and Big Market. Earth’s 8.1 billion people need a lot of food. The big corporations can pump it out. Yet while industrial enterprises produce marketable crops that provide sustenance for many and monetary profits for the investors, in far too many cases they also lay waste to the life in the soil, foul our waters with chemicals, imprison millions of farmed animals in harsh, unnatural conditions, and engage human beings in low-wage and often unjust jobs.

Is this the future? Are farms to be massive, remotely owned, industrial scale, chemical, monoculture, crop-and-animal factories employing a minimum number of workers at menial tasks to help churn out masses of processed nutritional units? This is not a context in which most human beings are likely to find satisfactory answers to “what are people for?” That’s a barren vision and it just won’t do.

In a great many cases, agri-giant aims and practices must get woke (Earth Changes are real; willful, sleepy avoidance is a pathway of certain failure). They must find the will and the means to transform, to embrace, and to embody authentic, clean, just (not greenwashed) agroecological pathways for fulfilling their work in the world. That’s possible. That’s necessary. In light of extreme environmental, climate, and social realities, that’s urgent.

More relevant than walking on the Moon, such a foundational transformation of global food systems would represent “one giant leap for humankind.”

When researching and writing Deep Agroecology (2019), I had opportunities to consider the various roles of farms, and how those roles might evolve. In our times we are blessed to have a great many gifted thinkers and writers on matters related to our farms, food, and future. Many voices, many pathways exploring what farms are all about.

As I read, and visited, and listened, I absorbed the individual and collective voices of farmers, and also citizens and scholars with a passionate interest in bringing beauty and justice more fully into the world. Wondering. Had to wonder. Had to dream. Could farms be for serving life not solely as economic and food engines but rather, in this time of crisis, serve the essential healing and uplifting of our planet, the people of all the nations, and also the animals and plants in the Sacred Hoop—the Circle of Life—with whom we share existence and experience on Earth?

Could farms be for establishing a mature, far-flung network of agrarian oases, hallowed places radiating environmental, physical, and spiritual health through their landscapes and the clean food and fiber they produce? Innovative grass-roots community systems, nodes in an emerging web of relationships that is local and global at the same time.

I see that possibility. I’m happy to share in that dream, and to honor all those already working toward it along a diverse matrix of well-intended pathways. The seeds of such a possibility have been sown for several decades, in uneven parallel with the advance of the giant agri-food corporations. Honor and respect is due to the steadfast agroecological compatriots, the community patriots. All around the world are individuals and groups who have developed the local, real organic, real regenerative, and community-based farm and food initiatives that have set roots and that continue to mature.

We’ve so many promising seeds. In hundreds of thousands of places in North America and millions of places around the world, individuals, communities, and creative organizations are working dynamically to innovate, to establish, to restore, and to vitalize clean, healthy, local food systems, and to help stabilize our climate. These agrarian endeavors represent promising evolutions in the matrix of our farms and food. They are soul-centered and soul-fulfilling in a way that AI can only imitate.

This is what we need. This is what initiatives such as community farms (CSAs), farm-to-institution programs, co-ops, and hundreds of other agroecological initiatives are all about. Creating fertile spaces of relationships, wombs of association in which the nodes and hubs and webs are formed. No doubt the tool of AI and the other technological marvels can and will be employed in this evolving web, but guided by the human-honored wisdom of the Seventh Generation teaching, which arose through the native spirit of North America.

Last year (2023) was the hottest in recorded history, a year also marked by climate disruptions ravaging every corner of the globe. Facing those realities, it’s time to deploy our intelligence and resources wholesale toward restoring balance, whether working from the grass roots or in the corporate institutional domain. Farms and food are a key in this, our main chance, worthy of full attention.

With that understanding for context, here’s a sample of farm and food news items that have informed me recently, and that I regard as noteworthy:

• At the 8th International Conference of La Via Campesina in Bogotá around 50 allied organizations representing workers came together. The focus was on human aspirations for respect, dignity, health. The most oft-repeated phrase at the conference: “Alone we can go faster, but we won’t get far.” That phrase communicated their sense of solidarity, even in the context established by the multinational agricorps. “At a time when we are witnessing an attempt to dismantle the human rights framework, the criminalization of struggles and multiple attempts to blind us with false solutions, it is necessary to strengthen more and more both narratives and actions that reinforce the defense of territories and the agroecological route.”
• The COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai was huge. Some 85,000 participants. Ruth Mattock, attended and blogged about it on TABLE, a global platform for knowledge synthesis on the future of food. She wrote: “Working ‘in partnership’ with farmers: a number of events had titles like this, or on ‘farmer-driven’ agendas. In each case, actual involvement from farmers remained quite tokenistic.”
• COP28 did deliver a noteworthy public statement, The UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action. A total of 159 nations signed the pledge during the conference.
• The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) is a coalition of countries acknowledging he urgency of this moment in time, and determined to act together. Signatory nations commit to driving systemic change, taking a ‘whole of government’ approach to deliver better outcomes for our lives on earth.
• As reported by Food Tank, the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy in New York has established Food Forward NYC, representing a comprehensive 10-year food policy plan for a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy food system. With Food Forward the city has issued a healing challenge to America: “We are calling on mayors across the nation to protect our planet, starting with their city’s food consumption.”
• The C40 Good Food Cities Accelerator gives cities an opportunity to connect and to educate citizens about a Planetary Heath Diet. C40 is a knowledge hub, offering insights and practical resources from cities that are demonstrating leadership in response to climate change.
• Another noteworthy offering among many is the New England Food Hub Network’s webinar series, CommUNITY Powers the Food System. Worth checking out.

As world conditions intensify, positive farm and food actions become all the more important in opening up healthy pathways forward. Creating opportunities for direction and purpose. By restoring balance and making the land and waters vibrantly healthy, the Earth’s sacred dimension is more clearly revealed and strengthened in support of all life. With our diets free of disruptive substances and processes, we human beings can be healthier, clearer, and generally more sane. With these radiant foundations in farms and food we human beings can more readily fulfill what I appreciate as a worthy response to Wendell Berry’s question: a key direction for our lives in this era, something worth being for, is to evolve from homo sapiens to homo spiritus.

The term homo spiritus refers not to a form of religious binding, but rather to what many thinkers and writers have identified as our next possible and necessary evolutionary breath: women and men who have awakened and who respect in thought and practice the fundamental fact of our connection with each other, the Earth, and all the forms of life upon the Earth. This is not an abstract or unattainably lofty goal of perfection, but rather an essential aspiration.

As Dennis Klocek phrased it in one of his extraordinary books, “Sacred agriculture is not just the manipulation of resources, but rather a spiritual act. This is an imperative of evolution, as well as an imperative of survival.”

All of this is what farms can be for. Beyond food and fiber they are a foundation for our physical, moral, and spiritual survival and evolution. They represent our main chance.