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Agrarian Life Vs. Industrial Life

November 8th, 2005 Leave a comment Go to comments

Jeff Culbreath finds an outline of the differences between the two at The House of Degenhart (highlighting is mine):

By farming, we can:

Produce healthy food to feed our family
Get exercise which helps keep our bodies fit
Work beside our children and our parents
Teach our children practical skills and give them an opportunity to use them

A popular alternative to farming is to learn a highly specialised skill and become an employee. This is that alternative that I chose to pursue. By doing this, we can:

Sit in a chair all day, away from our family, and get a money-like electronic commodity in exchange for our time.
We then leave the home to buy food to feed our family, most of which will eventually cause cancer and a host of other diseases.
We then leave the home to purchase a membership at a health club to get the exercise our body needs to stay fit.
We try to spend quality time with our family in the evenings to learn what they’ve been doing all day, and get to know them. (This comes in handy on Sundays, when we teach a class on the biblical view of the family. )
We then leave the home to visit our parents who live many hours away. We mostly talk about our job and what activities the children are doing (We pass along the information about the children that we’ve learned by spending evenings and weekends with them).
Our children learn to be consumers, but not producers, so when they are of age, we send them away from home and purchase training which will enable them to become a wage-slave like ourselves.

As a young man, I never thought through all the implications of my career path. Now that I am beginning to do that, I have a growing desire to move to a more agrarian way of life, and also help provide others with some of the facts required to make an informed choice.

And has his own thoughts on the dilemma:

There is really no way around the extreme difficulty of going from industrial life to agrarian life in one generation. (The reverse transition is much easier.) The best writers on the subject all say that, for the most part, it can’t be done and should not be expected. With respect to cheap land, it can be had – but the price is almost always separation from family, friends, and the Christian community we so desperately need.

This is why (as Wendell Berry repeatedly warns) that we need to preserve, not just farmland, but farmers. Because what can be lost easily and completely in one generation will take generations of concentrated struggle to regain.

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