The Joy of Farm Work

by Michael Foley

Walk through a garden and you may observe all sorts of things – or not. It may just be a blur to you, a pleasant one perhaps and one where you might pick out this or that plant you know. But, well, just another scene. Or you may see the details – the lettuces or basil at the feet of tomato plants, weedy plants like Mullein or chicory allowed to grow up in otherwise tame rows, the trellises that don’t reach high enough to prevent cucumbers from drooping on the ground or tomato vines from bending over and creasing, grasses and bind week and ground cover overwhelming newly-planted broccoli, the droopy leaves of a dry patch or the soaked soil where a piece of irrigation tubing must be split. When I train a volunteer or intern or farm worker, it’s this kind of “seeing” that I’m looking for. I call it observation and it’s a rare trait. But it’s essential to farm work and to good gardening.

You could look on acquiring the power of observation as just another task, but if so you may never really acquire it. If you work to task, you will observe what you are told to and no more; but without a habit of observation, you may not even be able to keep simple instructions in mind in the buzz of garden work. Observation is one of those powers that must be enjoyed in order truly to have it, like the ability to make music. To my mind it is only acquired, and practiced, when you are able to set aside whatever goals you have – prepare a bed, set out transplants, harvest peppers – and just attend to what is around you. In that attention you can find joy in farm work.

There are all kinds of reasons to farm and all kinds of reasons to attend to things. You might be a food lover and want to grow the very best food. You might find your passion in building the local food movement, or you might imagine creating a successful farm business. You might want to restore your own relation to nature or participate in a larger movement to renew the earth.

Just as surely there are all sorts of reason to pay attention. You want to make sure your plants are getting enough water or the fertility is just right. You want to get optimum productivity out of them and harvest to the extent possible without waste. You want those tomato plants to stand up tall and keep producing, and you want to keep those cucumbers off the ground. You want to know what’s eating the chard so you can address the issue, and you want to spot stink bugs when they invade the summer squash and dispose of them as best you can.

Doing all these things – the big picture ones and the daily tasks – can give you satisfaction. I’m not sure it brings joy. And when the farm is faltering for whatever reason, or the daily tasks just get overwhelming, the solution to this or that problem just out of reach, the whole business can feel like drudgery.

All of these things, rewarding as they may sometimes be, pressing as they undoubtedly are, are head trips. They have to do with purposes you have conceived, means and ends you have weighed or want to weigh, results that you can measure, maybe even quantify if you’re inclined that way, laid out on a spreadsheet or run through an equation. They are your way of being “you” in the garden and making the garden you.

Joy comes with stepping out of “you”. It come with stepping away from your preoccupations and purposes, if just for a while, and simply being with the work. And doing so hones your attention in ways that little else does.

The ancient Stoics found our original sense of ourselves not in some “identity” (personal, ethnic or gender) but in the sheer enjoyment of our own bodies. They described the ease of use with which birds soar, predators spring on their prey, and prey evades capture in flight. And they found the same ease of use in each stage of human life, as infants delight in learning to use their hands, toddlers explore language, and skilled craftspersons shape their work. Or my youngest daughter, telling me to let go the bicycle as she discovered that, at last, she could balance on her own, then with a broad grin pedaling off into the intersection with her friends. There is joy is knowing our skill and using it, unselfconsciously.

That can come with as simple a task as weeding, and as you weed with concentration (because it takes concentration), you learn techniques for dealing with the peculiarities of each kind of plant, as you come to appreciate the plant. Pruning and trellising call for the same sort of attention and can produce the same satisfaction as you exercise your knowledge and learn more.

All of this takes a certain concentration, as I said. So it is less likely the more you distract yourself with chatter or your phone or podcasts. And the more you distract yourself, the less you grasp about the task at hand, the physical world in which you work, and your own abilities and potential. To have joy you have to give up mere pleasantries or entertainment and live your life engaged with your surroundings.

Do I romanticize farm work? No, any sort of physical or mental labor, provided it engages our full attention, can provide the same sort of joy. Hackers hack because the work itself engages them, and finding the solution, or an elegant solution, to a coding problem gives joy. Those of us who couldn’t stand to write code just haven’t gotten far enough to command a skill that could give joy. Mechanics may curse the tool or the rusted bolt, but the work can reward their patient impatience in ways that keep them at it, day after day. And if you watch musicians playing together, as I do obsessively, you often will see flashes of joy between them as they play off one another in new and surprising ways.

Yes, then, there is joy in farm work. And if you want to learn to do it well, and to get more than a bite to eat out of it, go for the joy.