The Farm is a Neighborhood

Notes from a conversation with James Rebanks, and more

Camille Pissarro, Gathering Potatoes (Recolte de pommes de terre), 1886

I first encountered James Rebanks’s work in a 2017 article for the Times. In it, he shared some thoughts on the state of rural America after a visit to rural Kentucky. His observations resonated deeply with my own. I had been reading and researching issues concerning rural America and the state of farming since 2013, and worked on a fellowship-sponsored study of farms from 2015–2016. (Eventually, that research would become a book.) I was frustrated with the pundits I read, at the time, who would suggest rural Americans must move away from the places they loved. According to their logic, things were bad, rural economies were broken, and rural culture and mores were one-sided and flawed at best, oppressive and exploitative at worst. Because of these things, rural America itself deserved abandonment.

Of course, people should always have the freedom to move—and are often right to do so. Not every critique of the pundits was wrong. Many of them were and are right about the problems we face in rural landscapes. But the language around leaving behind rural America often carried with it a note of disdain for those who believed their places were worth holding onto, or worth reforming and changing. I wondered: is the answer to rural America’s problems abandonment, blight, and further decay? Mightn’t it be fidelity and reform, instead? (Kansas author and journalist Sarah Smarsh dedicated a beautiful podcast series to those who, in this vein, choose to stay in or to return to their rural homes and to do important work there.)

Rebanks had noticed all this, too. In his Times article, he spoke to this tension between struggling places and the people who love those places:

Economists say that when the world changes people will adapt, move and change to fit the new world. But of course, real human beings often don’t do that. They cling to the places they love, and their identity remains tied to the outdated or inefficient things they used to do, like being steel workers or farmers.

Rebanks’s autobiographical book, The Shepherd’s Life, spoke to this tension between fidelity and the need for reform and growth in rural spaces. Real human beings often love their homes, as he writes above. And that is an admirable thing. But, of course, these places need to be livable and healthy. They need to be growing, not decaying. So how do people stay put while not falling into a dangerous nostalgia? How do we celebrate—and even bring back—historically healthy farming practices while embracing important reforms and innovations?

Thankfully, Rebanks wrote another book in September 2020, in which he further teases out and explores this tension through his own experiences. In 2017, he had written for the Times that his sheep farm was not profitable. He was struggling with the changes in agriculture that we’ve often discussed here at Granola: forms of industrialization, specialization, and monocropping that destroy the health of plant, animal, soil, and human life. He was trying to determine whether the ancient shepherding practices of the Lake District could survive in the 21st century.

By the time he wrote English Pastoral (Pastoral Song in the United States), Rebanks had turned things around on his farm in remarkable ways. In his book, he shares these stories of agricultural preservation and renewal. In some ways, he explains, he has chosen to farm as his grandfather did, resurrecting habits of care and attention that he observed when following his grandfather around and helping him out as a child. In other ways, he has embraced innovation and “the new”: particularly, the benefits of scientific study, testing, and reinvigoration available to us in the 21st century.

This mix of old and new agricultural habits, he explains, allows—and in fact, encourages—other forms of life to flourish on the farm. He has supported the growth of hedgerows and planted thousands of trees. These things, in turn, foster the wellbeing of birds, insects, and hedgehogs. And all these things, in their way, strengthen the farm. Topsoil is healthy and plentiful. Rivers and streams are flourishing, fighting soil erosion and flooding, and benefitting the farm’s crops and animals. Cattle and sheep are no longer reliant on antibiotics or hormones for health.

In all these instances, health has developed via a superabundance of life and diversity, and an interplay between past and present—not from further specialization or eradication. Every time a farm seeks to limit the life on its farm, via spraying or monocropping, Rebanks reminds readers, it will suffer. Health happens when the farm is hospitable: when it welcomes fungi, insects, birds, grasses, weeds, flowers, trees, and countless other members of its ecosystem.

I have read and loved Jane Jacobs’ work on cities for years. (I’ve written about her briefly in the past, here at Granola.) But I never saw the relationship between her work and that of agricultural renewal until I read English Pastoral.

In the mid-20th century, Jacobs worked as an activist to defend Greenwich Village and other U.S. cities’ working-class neighborhoods from efforts aimed at “renewal,” “revitalization,” or “slum clearance”—efforts that ignored their inherent dignity and worth. She was even arrested for her efforts in 1968. But Jacobs’ wisdom has lived on. She saw the healthy diversity and inherent prudence of neighborhoods that everyone else ignored. And she helped to explain how and why the wisdom of these neighborhoods mattered and needed to be preserved.

In English Pastoral, Rebanks relates Jacobs’s work on urban neighborhoods to lived realities on a farm. Jacobs addresses the perils of urban specialization and abandonment of the old in a way that applies directly to rural landscapes, he suggested:

“It has long been recognized, thanks to writers like Jane Jacobs, that cities and towns that are too specialized—too monocultural, too modern, or too fossil fuel-reliant—work less well in practice than diverse places with a mix of old and new. The new and the old cross-fertilize in all sorts of unforeseen ways. The same is true of agriculture. Rather than making the old farming, and crop species and farm animal varieties obsolete, the most intensive farming needs them for its very survival. The most intensive agriculture on earth relies heavily on the genetic diversity provided by the older farming systems, breeds and crops.

… And much of the diverse agriculture that remains is to be found at the margins—in the mountains, remote places, deserts, forests or jungles of the world; in places where isolation, poverty, lack of development, type of climate, altitude, latitude, soil type, disease risks or duration of the growing season mean that intensive agriculture doesn’t dominate and hasn’t swept away traditional farming practices. Such landscapes are full of special varieties of domesticated plants or heritage breeds of domestic animals. This is because for over 10,000 years human beings have had to try out different methods in all kinds of places through trial and error. In the global ‘library’ of farming there can be found a whole range of solutions to millions of different local challenges and problems.”

Rebanks here highlights the fact that each particular farm should vary, respecting local particularity and diverse global ecosystems, while at the same time embracing universal principles of plurality, resilience, care, and intensity. Jacobs saw all this in the city. Rebanks has observed it in the Lake District. All our places need to respect this tension.

Last Tuesday, I had the great privilege of talking to Rebanks about his books and work, as part of my interview series with the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. During our conversation, I asked him, “How is a farm like a neighborhood?”

In response, Rebanks argued that farms are a neighborhood. They are not just analogous; they are the same thing. Today’s farms, all over the world, will require the same principles of diversity, plurality, healthy investment, particularity, and care that our cities and towns need. They will require the same habits of attention, the same healthy respect for what exists, and the same dedication to reform and improvement. They often suffer due to the same combination of greed, disdain, and exploitation. The work is the same. It just happens on different scales and via different vocations.

Which brings me back to those first observations, regarding the difficulties facing rural America. The work that need to be done is rarely (if ever?) a work of destruction or abandonment. Places need love, care, and attention. There’s a reason human beings so often choose to stay in places that are hurting, rather than leaving them behind. It’s because we care. We want to be “good neighbors,” whether to the folks living down the street or to the birds nesting in the hedgerow. But real care is neither a faulty nostalgia nor a blind determination to tear everything down and start over. It’s something else: a difficult tension between reform and fidelity, change and preservation. It’s the work of Jane Jacobs, James Rebanks, Rachel Carson, and Wendell Berry.

I’m excited to explore some of these same ideas and concepts next Friday, in conversation with Dr. Norman Wirzba, as part of this Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation interview series. (I’m sorry I didn’t alert you all to the conversation with James Rebanks in advance! It came together rather last-minute. I will share the Zoom interview recording as soon as I can.) If you’d like to join Dr. Wirzba and me, you can signup for the event here.

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Further reading, if you’re interested:

The Shepherd’s Life, James Rebanks

Pastoral Song, James Rebanks

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

Agrarian Spirit, Norman Wirzba

The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry

The World-Ending Fire, Wendell Berry

… and of course, countless others. Add your own recommendations in the comments below!

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news + essays

• A lovely article on redwoods: “Life is folded in and among the redwoods, below and within and about them. The trees are integrators, bringing together many life forms. Some of these life forms rely on the tree; others on occupants in and around the tree.”

• Phil Christman (author of Midwest Futures) is doing a Substack series on Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, two authors we’ve read together in past years!

• Elizabeth Oldfield encourages a recovery of communal time in Comment Magazine: “With the loss of the clock of community we have lost the scaffolding for our relationships, the regular points of contact that didn’t require detailed scheduling and multiple cancellations to make happen. Loneliness is driven by many things, but a key one is surely that we all want sovereignty over our schedules and can’t make those highly individualized schedules sync up.”

• Peter Mommsen writes in praise of repair: “the disposability of things becomes… a kind of synecdoche, a symbol of the disposability of the natural world itself, ‘our common home,’ which our technological society is destroying in selfish pursuit of dominance.”

• Playgrounds as third spaces.

• Speaking of Jane Jacobs, this book review by Linda Poon considers the importance of our built environment in fighting loneliness: “The Surgeon General’s report on loneliness emphasized the strengthening of America’s ‘social infrastructure’ — which can include public resources like libraries and parks as well as commercial districts, sporting venues and public transportation networks — as well as expanding programs and policies that promote connections.” (h/t Jeffrey Bilbro)

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Charles-François Daubigny, The Farm, 1855

food + drink

• A delicious Thai green curry that we’ll be making again (and again).

• An easy chocolate chip cookie recipe that hits all the right notes (chewy, crunchy, chocolatey, etc.) without insanely long refrigeration times.

• Gorgeous + easy focaccia bread.

• recipes to try: winter salad pizza, cold-fighting chicken noodle soup, and 30-minute ginger sesame chicken meatballs.