essay on traditional farming

Advantages and Disadvantages of Traditional Farming

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We have collected some solid points that will help you understand the pros and cons of Traditional Farming in detail.

But first, let’s understand the topic:

What is Traditional Farming?

Traditional farming is the old way of growing food. Farmers use nature, like rain for water and animals for help, instead of machines or chemicals. They grow a mix of crops to keep the soil healthy and prevent pests.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Traditional Farming

The following are the advantages and disadvantages of Traditional Farming:

Advantages of Traditional Farming

• Preserves local biodiversity – Traditional farming helps in maintaining different types of plants and animals in the area, which is good for the environment.
• Low cost of operation – It is less expensive to run because it doesn’t rely on costly modern equipment or technologies.
• Enhances soil fertility – It improves the richness of the soil, making it healthier and better for growing crops.
• Minimizes chemical usage – It uses less harmful chemicals, which makes the food safer to eat and is better for the environment.
• Promotes sustainable practices – It encourages methods that are good for the earth and can be used for a long time without causing harm.

Disadvantages of Traditional Farming

• Uses lots of water – Traditional farming gulps down a lot of water, which can lead to water scarcity in some regions, especially during dry periods.
• Can harm the soil – It can also be harmful to the soil, as continuous farming without proper crop rotation can deplete the soil’s nutrients.
• Less efficient crop production – The method is less efficient in producing crops, as it does not utilize modern technologies that can improve yield.
• Can harm local wildlife – It may negatively affect local wildlife. When land is cleared for farming, habitats can be destroyed, disrupting ecosystems.
• Requires more manual labor – This type of farming relies heavily on manual labor, which can be physically demanding and time-consuming compared to modern, mechanized methods.
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Traditional Farming Practices and Its Consequences

Citation Count

Considering Ecosystem Services in Food System Resilience

Agrobiodiversity and agroecological practices in ‘jhumscape’ of the eastern himalayas: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, machine learning and deep learning in crop management—a review, population development and landscape preference of reintroduced wild ungulates: successful rewilding in southern italy, computational intelligent systems for crop and soil monitoring through digital imaging, using winter cover crops to improve soil and water quality, carbon sequestration in tropical agroforestry systems, climate change: linking adaptation and mitigation through agroforestry, history of india, composting technology in waste stabilization: on the methods, challenges and future prospects., related papers (5), integrated farming methods and their impact on biodiversity of the landscape, alternative farming techniques for sustainable food production, traditional agricultural practices in india: an approach for environmental sustainability and food security, alternative land management strategies and their impact on soil conservation, challenges of smallholder farming in ethiopia and opportunities by adopting climate-smart agriculture, trending questions (3).

Traditional farming methods offer benefits like improved soil fertility, biodiversity maintenance, carbon sequestration, sustainability, and environmental protection, making them crucial for sustainable food production amidst environmental challenges.

Traditional farming practices like agroforestry, crop rotation, and organic composting have influenced modern farming by promoting sustainability, soil fertility, biodiversity, and environmental protection in agricultural systems.

Not addressed in the paper.

Traditional Farming : Ancient Techniques for Modern Agriculture

• August 1, 2023

Traditional farming practices have been honed over centuries by our ancestors, offering valuable insights into sustainable and efficient agricultural methods. In today’s fast-paced world, where modern agriculture often relies on high-input technologies, revisiting these ancient techniques can offer innovative solutions to current farming challenges. This article explores various traditional farming techniques and how they can be adapted to enhance modern agriculture.

1. Traditional Farming Methods and Their Relevance

In this section, we will examine the importance of traditional farming methods and their continued relevance in the context of sustainable agriculture. We will discuss how these practices promote ecological balance, preserve biodiversity , and contribute to soil fertility, all of which align with the principles of modern sustainable agriculture.

2. Crop Rotation: An Ancient Technique for Soil Health

Crop rotation, a practice dating back to ancient civilizations, involves planting different crops in succession on the same piece of land. By rotating crops, farmers can prevent soil depletion, reduce pest and disease pressure, and improve overall soil health. We will explore the benefits of crop rotation and its potential to address modern challenges such as soil degradation and pest resistance.

3.Terracing: Innovative Solutions for Sloped Lands

Terracing, developed by ancient civilizations like the Incas and the Chinese, is a technique that involves creating level steps on hilly or sloped terrain to prevent soil erosion and optimize water usage. In this section, we will discuss how modern farmers can apply terracing methods to effectively manage water runoff, conserve soil, and maximize agricultural productivity on challenging landscapes.

4. Agroforestry: Blending Trees and Crops for Resilience

Agroforestry, an age-old practice, involves integrating trees with crops to create a diverse and resilient agricultural system. We will explore the benefits of agroforestry, such as enhanced biodiversity, improved soil quality, and increased climate resilience, and discuss how this traditional technique aligns with modern agroecological principles.

5. Seed Saving: Preserving Biodiversity and Adaptability

Seed saving is a vital practice where farmers collect and preserve seeds from their crops for future planting. By doing so, they safeguard genetic diversity, adaptability, and resilience in the face of changing environmental conditions. We will delve into the importance of seed saving in preserving heirloom varieties and supporting food security in the modern world.

6. Natural Pest Control: Nurturing Beneficial Insects

Ancient farmers employed various natural pest control techniques, such as introducing beneficial insects and companion planting, to minimize the use of harmful pesticides. In this section, we will explore how these traditional methods can be integrated into modern agriculture as part of an effective and sustainable approach to pest management.

we can conclude this, By tapping into the knowledge of our ancestors and reviving traditional farming techniques, modern agriculture can find innovative solutions to current challenges. Incorporating these ancient practices into contemporary farming methods can promote sustainability, preserve biodiversity, and pave the way for a more resilient and secure agricultural future. Embracing the wisdom of the past is not merely an exercise in nostalgia; it is a pathway to a more sustainable and prosperous future for agriculture.

1.What is traditional farming, and why is it relevant for modern agriculture?

Traditional farming refers to age-old agricultural practices that have been passed down through generations. These techniques hold significant value for modern agriculture as they promote sustainability, preserve biodiversity, and contribute to soil health. By adopting traditional methods, farmers can enhance their resilience to environmental challenges and reduce their dependence on high-input technologies.

2.How does crop rotation benefit modern farming practices?

Crop rotation involves planting different crops in sequence on the same land to improve soil health and reduce pest and disease pressures. This ancient technique helps combat soil degradation, increase nutrient availability, and promote more efficient water usage. By implementing crop rotation, farmers can enhance productivity while reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

3.What is agroforestry, and how can it contribute to sustainable agriculture?

Agroforestry is the practice of integrating trees with crops, creating a diverse and resilient agricultural system. This approach fosters biodiversity, enhances soil quality, and provides climate resilience. Agroforestry aligns with modern agroecological principles and offers numerous benefits, including improved ecosystem services and increased food security.

4.How can traditional farming techniques help preserve biodiversity?

Traditional farming practices, such as seed saving and natural pest control, play a crucial role in preserving biodiversity. Seed saving allows farmers to conserve heirloom varieties and maintain genetic diversity, ensuring that crops can adapt to changing environmental conditions. Additionally, natural pest control methods, such as nurturing beneficial insects, reduce the reliance on harmful pesticides and protect the diverse ecosystem of the farm.

5.Are ancient farming techniques practical for modern farmers?

Yes, ancient farming techniques are practical for modern farmers. Many traditional methods can be adapted and integrated into contemporary farming practices to promote sustainability and productivity. Techniques like terracing, agroforestry, and crop rotation have been successfully employed by forward-thinking farmers worldwide, demonstrating their feasibility and efficacy in modern agricultural contexts.

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From the Good Earth: A Photo Essay of Traditional Agriculture Around the World

Bioneers | Published: March 2, 2022 Food and Farming Article

In the 1980s, on a quest to understand the regionally-adapted ways in which traditional agriculture is able to feed people while tending the health of the land, Michael Ableman set out, along with legendary environmentalist on a journey to photograph agrarian cultures around the world to learn the “ valuable information [they had] for modern destructive society.” Legendary environmentalist David Brower was a key supporter of the project and traveled with Michael to the Russian Far East and Mongolia. A master photographer and author of four books on the relationships between food, land, people and culture, Michael is, most of all, a great farmer who considers himself, even after 44 years of farming, “a beginner.” In this photo essay, Michael reflects back on that journey and some of the photographs that appeared in his first book  From The Good Earth, A  Celebration of Growing Food Around the World.

Michael Ableman currently operates  Sole Food Street Farm  as well as the large, highly-diverse, rural  Foxglove Farm  in British Columbia. 

All photos are copyrighted and cannot be distributed, reproduced, or reused in any way without the explicit permission of the photographer (Michael Ableman).

Photos are from these books authored by Michael Ableman: Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It, From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World, and Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier.

 This article is a transcribed, edited excerpt of a conversation with Michael Ableman

MICHAEL ABLEMAN: By the early 1980s, I had already been farming for a while, and I was interested in understanding more about this 7,000-year tradition I’d stepped into, considering myself, as I still do today after 44 years, a beginner. I was interested in what the lineage is and whose shoulders I’m standing on. At the same time, I was fascinated with the idea of hiking in the Himalayas, the highest mountain range in the world.

On the way there, I stopped to see a friend who was living and working in China and ended up in the city of Xindu. In those days, there weren’t a lot of foreign visitors in China and visiting rural areas was not something that was encouraged, but I was curious, so I walked for hours on the outskirts of the city on a path that led up a hill, and what I saw was remarkable. There was a vast network of fields being farmed by multigenerational families—kids with their parents and grandparents and, in some cases, even their great grandparents. Those fields had been farmed the same way, over and over, for thousands of years, and yet still appeared fertile and productive without the use of industrial methods. The thought struck me: “How is it possible? There were places near where I was farming in California where the land had been made useless after just a single decade.” I thought it was incredible, and I began photographing feverishly.

This image exemplifies the ability the Chinese had, at that time (1983), to feed a billion people on only 11% of their land base using the techniques that had been passed down since the Han dynasty. It is a highly intensive system. When I returned home from that journey, I was on fire with curiosity. I was young and fearless at that point of my life (neither of which I am now). I was intensely curious, and I was completely amazed and fascinated at the possibility that the profession I had chosen had a deep-rooted, vast, indigenous knowledge and history. I wanted to learn from it, and I wanted to understand how the work I was doing related to these other cultures that had been doing it for thousands of years.

But it wasn’t some sort of romantic quest for a mythic golden age; I wasn’t that stupid. I knew that the places, people and situations that I was looking at were also fraught with challenges and problems. It was more of an intense desire to learn and to record what I was seeing. I spent another winter in China because it was the oldest traditional agriculture in the world. I thought there was no better place to start exploring.

This two-acre onion field was being watered by hand. It was fascinating–like watching a well-choreographed dance. The equipment, which seems so rudimentary, is really well made, and the process is extremely balanced. The man was using both containers at the same time. I watched the entire thing and what was really profound is that two men using watering buckets could irrigate a two-acre field in about two hours without a word spoken. They both were in their 70s and had enormous physical strength, but what I saw was less about physical exertion and more about careful planning and balance. There was a great calm about the whole experience. It was a beautiful, silent dance.

I spent the entire next winter in the Andes in terraced fields built by the Incas that were so steep that farmers were known to fall out of them.

Capturing this image was a three-day process in order to get the lighting right. It gave me a lot of respect for Ansel Adams who would sit and wait for days just to make one frame.

I also traveled to East and Central Africa to try to catch a glimpse of the remnants of the few traditionally agrarian tribes that were still there. Pastoralists were dominant in those regions, but there were some really interesting examples of agrarian people making their own tools and doing some pretty cool stuff.

This photo was taken in the mountains of Burundi at the market in a little town called Ijenda where I lived for a while. The sorghum that the women are working with is made into a slightly fermented drink that’s sipped communally out of a common gourd with straws cut from a local tree. At the time, it was a very popular drink, but you would never see somebody sitting at home alone drinking it. It was a communal and social experience.

There’s an energy to this image of the women, a kind of excitement and enthusiasm around what’s happening. It’s a swirl of color and energy.

There was, at times, a tendency for me to romanticize the experiences I was having with the people I was visiting and sometimes to project my own ideas onto what I was seeing, feeling and experiencing as I was photographing them, but I had to keep all that in check.

People are basically just trying to survive, but the simplicity of some of those farming systems and the long history of those people on the land hold valuable information for modern destructive society.

The Moroccan markets are just incredible. I love the visual perspective of the passing of feet, the colorful clothing, the robes that people were wearing, and the vendor on the ground selling citrus and other items.

After Africa, I went to Southern Europe to Sicily and other places where I could photograph remnants of the traditional agriculture of that region.

In this image of an Italian olive merchant, you can see the diversity of olive varieties. There is also a diversity in the ways that olives were prepared, which is an almost lost art, but one that is coming back.

Traveling in Italy, I saw olive and carob trees that were four to five thousand years old growing wrapped around each other. The planting together was intentional because the carob is a legume that fixes nitrogen and feeds the olive tree.

Those ancient, long-term perennial systems are some of the most interesting to me because I’ve always believed that the fundamental structure of a farm has to be the perennial. The perennials have to be the anchor on the farm on many different levels—holding soil, creating habitat, reducing the churning of the ground, providing shade, etc. The folks in Italy know so much about all of that, as well as the importance of having a lot of diversity in their cultivars.

This image is from the Russian far east near Ulan-Ude in East Siberia. It’s so emblematic of the time: the style of dress, the soldiers and the seriousness with which people reflect on their cabbages.

David Brower had invited me to go to the Russian far east to Baikal the year I turned 40 (27 years ago). He had just turned 80. David had a longtime interest in Lake Baikal in Siberia because it is the oldest, deepest and largest body of freshwater on the planet with species that don’t exist anywhere else. David felt that it was one of the planet’s critical ecological cornerstones that needed to be preserved.

It was an extremely hard trip—long flights followed by long train trips. Transportation was not terribly functional. Food was not good; in fact, it was awful. When we eventually got to Ulan-Ude on Lake Baikal, David said to me, “Michael, I want to go to the Mongolian side of Baikal.”

So, we went down to the Mongolian consulate in Ulan-Ude and they said, “You’ve got to be kidding. You should have started six months ago to get that visa; there’s no possibility.” David had written two autobiographies, and he had one of them with him; I asked him to give it to me. There’s a page in that book with him and the Dalai Lama arm-in-arm with big smiles, so I opened it up to that page and I slid it on the table over to the consular agent. Then things happened fast. We got the visas right away. The agent even phoned and got us a ride in an ambulance. It was a hellish trip, super hard but super interesting.

The ambulance could only take us so far, so we took a train to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. As we were standing on the train platform, a drunk guy came right up to my face and out of the blue for no reason punched me as hard as he could in the stomach and put me out onto the ground.

After that, I decided to take a taxi to the marketplace, which is miles up above the city. I began photographing what was quite an incredible scene, but I didn’t realize that I shouldn’t have been there. A gang of young people chased me and pelted me with rocks; I barely got the hell out of there.

I began to realize that photographing those different cultures could be interpreted as appropriation of ideas, information and images that I could never really understand because I wasn’t from those places, and that would be a reasonable criticism. I questioned myself. I heard about people in various parts of the world who thought that taking their photographs was akin to stealing their spirits.  Some Western people would laugh at that idea, but I began to believe that there may be some truth to it. Was I stealing the spirits of the people that I was photographing?

But I felt what I was doing was fundamentally different. I was not a journalist or photojournalist. I didn’t step out of my office at The New York Times and fly off to some remote place. My daily work for most of the year was using my hands to grow food for my own community. Everywhere I went, I carried in my back pocket a little booklet of photographs of my farm and of me out in my fields. I thought that was critical because I shared a connection to the land and a shared interest in farming with the people I was taking photos of. Mind you, some people were farming from pure personal survival perspectives, some were farming to feed more than themselves. I was farming for both reasons, to feed my family and as a livelihood.

But the common thread was farming; that was a bridge. I’m sure I made mistakes, but I feel like that gave me a valid reason to be doing what I was doing. Often, when people see the portraits I made of other farmers, they comment that in many of the photos the farmers are looking into the camera, and you can see that there was a relationship there. Those images could not have been made without some connection. When I say relationship, I don’t mean that I was living with them or that I spent weeks there, but there was some sort of commonality established before the camera got pulled out. 

I never made a photograph of anyone without first developing even just the briefest of relationships. David Brower, who was involved in this project from its inception, said at a public event, “Notice how people in Michael’s photographs are connecting to the person behind the camera.”

There’s a sister image to this, which is of our friend Caroline, a Hopi elder, whom we spent a lot of years with at Hotevilla-Bacavi on Third Mesa in Arizona. Why would I be mentioning her in the context of this Karen tribesman? At the entrance of Hotevilla, there were hand-painted signs saying “no photographing, no drawing, no recording, no filming.” I was always very respectful of that, but in time Caroline gave me the permission to take some photographs of her, also winnowing beans. She had an amazing collection of bean seeds. When the time came for the book to be published, I knew there was no way I could use an image of her without her explicit permission.

So, I showed her a series of different images, and she said, you can use one of them if it’s next to the one of the Karen people winnowing beans. She understood acutely that there was a relationship that existed between Indigenous people all over the world, and she wanted to be thought of in relationship to that.

I took this photo in Todos Santos in the mountains of Guatemala, a little village where we spent a month living with a local family. This is a man on his way to the market outside an old church to sell his wares. The entire village, at that time, was made up of widowed mothers, children and old people. Inside the church where the market was held, the walls were riddled with bullet holes because all of the young men of that village were herded into the church during the civil war and murdered there.

This picture was taken looking south. Directly to my back, to the north, would have been Trump’s steel wall. We guard the borders and build fences and walls to keep out the very people whose hands are doing all the work to grow our food. We’re talking about people who risk their lives to make that journey. The craziest damn stories: being put in a refrigerated truck for hours and hours, stuffed into trunks of cars, all kinds of crazy shit to do the work in service industries, restaurants, factories and farms, that most Americans will no longer do. It’s an absurd situation, and it’s heartbreaking to see what people have to go through to survive.

Hilario slipped over the border in his late teens as an “illegal” farm worker and eventually became a farm owner employing 100 people with a very successful farming operation. It’s one of those rare but important stories to tell because, historically, people like Hilario are not celebrated for their contributions. He’s an exceptional farmer.

I wrote the book The Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World based on these journeys, but when I completed those incredible international visits recording those traditional cultures, I realized that, in a sense, I had been looking at the remnants of where agriculture has come from. I felt that I should also look at what’s happening now and what we are moving towards in the future, so, I delved into the hardest images that I made, the ones of industrial agriculture in California’s Central Valley, the largest feedlot in the world. I went up in helicopters that spray pesticides and did all sorts of crazy shit just to get striking visual examples of industrial agriculture for people who were unaware of the scale of its impact and devastation. I thought if they could see it, maybe they’d want to do something about it.

This very emblematic image taken after the harvest in a California Central Valley cotton field has been used repeatedly by Patagonia and others to illustrate how incredibly destructive we have been in a very short amount of time to the land which we are inextricably tied to and dependent on. The contrast is stark between this field likely totally depleted in less than a decade and some of the fields I saw in China and Peru that were being farmed continuously for thousands of years and were still fertile and productive.

This is a celery field in the Oxnard Plain in Ventura County being fumigated. You can see the sprayer in the background. I didn’t sneak this photograph. The man is posing. He’s looking at me. I think his stance, his willingness to pose, demonstrates a certain pride. This is not a critique of this person. That’s an important point. He was part of a system. The system and the thinking behind the system are all wrong. And yet, I think there was a certain pride in the power of chemistry, the power of the industrial mindset, the power of the ability to control and manipulate the natural world.

This is the same celery field in Oxnard. That chemical being sprayed directly onto the crop’s leaves and stems enters the plant’s cells and then subsequently enters into our cells when we eat it. I believe that in those days they sprayed every 10 days, so you’ve got to understand that the chemical became fully embedded in the crop.

This farmer is pouring fertilizer into a furrow irrigation ditch. It’s crazy, it’s one of the hottest places in California, and they’re furrow irrigating (flooding the rows between crops). This is not precision farming. The day I was there, it was probably 110 degrees, and probably 80% of that overhead irrigation that you see in the background was evaporating into the atmosphere. So, the whole process makes no sense.

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3 Farming, the Virtues, and Agrarian Philosophy

Paul B. Thompson holds the W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, where he serves on the faculty in the departments of Philosophy, Community Sustainability and Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics

• Published: 11 January 2018
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Food production can be viewed as one among many activities that produce goods in modern industrial societies, with ethical issues analogous to those of other sectors of the economy. Contrarily, agriculture and farming have historically been thought to have unique influence on the nature of social institutions, the reinforcement of moral virtues, and the reproduction of cultural forms. Mainstream approaches in consequentialist and deontological ethics implicitly adopt the first perspective: the industrial philosophy of agriculture. The chapter summarizes alternative agrarian viewpoints, emphasizing the role of the household farm in the thought of Aristotle and Xenophon, as well as the special role accorded to agriculture in early modern debates on property and political economy. It concludes with the emergence of contemporary agrarian philosophies that see farming and food systems as uniquely significant for environmental ethics and sustainability.

Common wisdom holds that food comes from farms, and some version of a family farm is often presumed to be the way that agriculture is or should be organized. This essay queries that presumption; or, to be more precise, it examines two philosophical approaches that might be pursued in the attempt to query it. I propose that we think of the issues in terms of two competing philosophies of agriculture. The view that I have (somewhat mischievously) called the industrial philosophy of agriculture presumes that food and fiber production should be approached just like any other sector of an industrial economy when evaluated from the perspective of ethics. This implies that we should evaluate food production in much the same terms that we use to evaluate the automobile industry or the steel industry. We can ask whether workers are being treated fairly, and we can ask whether production methods cause pollution or consume too many resources. People with different philosophical orientations will have different answers for these questions, of course. Those who advocate for greater social equality may be more disturbed by the low wages and poor working conditions of field hands, for example, while others of a more libertarian bent may think this outcome to be the morally neutral workings of the labor market. Feminists may criticize the gender stereotyping of “farmers” as male and can go further in their critique when property laws and government farm policies aligned with this stereotype create hardship, exclusion, and barriers for women (as they do in many parts of the world). There is a lot to say about the ethics of food production given the assumption that agriculture is just one of several key sectors in the industrial economy ( Thompson 2010 ). In labeling this approach as an industrial philosophy, I do not mean to imply that it necessarily recommends industrial agriculture.

The alternative to this approach takes up a long history of social, political, and ecological writers who see farms and farming as having some form of special significance that makes agriculture different from other sectors of the economy, and especially from manufacturing. Although there is significant diversity in the ways in which agriculture might be thought to have special significance, I lump these approaches together as agrarian philosophies of agriculture. In considering this history, I hope to show that someone who takes contemporary ethical theories as the starting point for evaluating the organization of agriculture is, for all intents and purposes, adopting the presumptive orientation of the industrial philosophy of agriculture. Readers might fairly accuse me of a doubly mischievous intent, for not only am I duplicitous in my usage of the word “industrial,” my inquiry into the philosophy of agriculture is also meant to place some limitations in contemporary food ethics on display. Nevertheless, I will not argue directly for these broader implications, and I do not say that that ethical theory and applied ethics are entirely without resources for accommodating and adapting the insights I will exhibit by taking a more historical approach.

In fact, I do not contend that agrarian philosophies are inherently superior. The contrast between the industrial philosophy of agriculture and agrarian alternatives takes on importance for food ethics in three ways. First, it is a heuristic device for gaining an initial purchase on the diversity of ways that various methods or social institutions for food production might be evaluated from an ethical perspective. Both philosophies I will outline are quite general and require more specification before they yield ethical evaluations that could be subjected to classical tests for logical or normative adequacy. Second (and here is where the mischievousness comes in), many current critiques of industrial agriculture derive from the assumption that it can be analyzed and ethically evaluated using the same concepts and norms that would be used to critique any other sector of the economy. The moral ontology that is implicit in this form of critique is itself a cultural product of the Industrial Revolution. The thought process of many contemporary food activists aligned against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), genetically engineered crops, and the large corporations that are said to be in control of the food system comes straight out of this philosophy as it gets applied to agriculture. If critics are aware of the way in which agrarian approaches suggest an alternative way to think about food systems, the nature of their critiques does not suggest it. So third, gaining some grasp of agrarian philosophies should be a goal for anyone who hopes to develop a comprehensive and philosophically rich understanding of food ethics. It is especially crucial for understanding why preserving “the family farm” might be an ethical issue.

In short, this chapter is offered as an introduction to the philosophy of agriculture geared to these three ways in which having a philosophically articulate view on the social goals of agriculture and farming is relevant for food ethics. Given that the critiques derived from an industrial philosophy of agriculture are well represented elsewhere in this volume, the main focus of the chapter is to outline some issues in food ethics that are especially sensitive to agrarian values. The chapter works through several ways of configuring and articulating an agrarian philosophy, ending with the views of influential contemporary agrarians such as Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry. But, first, it is important to situate this discussion of agrarian philosophy by emphasizing the importance of claims and critiques that are mounted from an industrial perspective.

Why the Industrial Philosophy of Agriculture Is Important

A family of somewhat generic approaches to questions in social ethics began to emerge in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Drawing upon sources as diverse as the natural law tradition instituted by Hugo Grotius (1583−1645) and the mathematics of the Bernoulli family (Jacob [1654−1705], Johann [1667−1748], and Daniel [1700−1782] among others), the closing decades of the 1700s witnessed a powerful formulation of consequentialist ethical theory in the writings of Jeremy Bentham (1748−1832) and the masterful deontological ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724−1804). Figures in the Scottish Enlightenment helped give shape to these approaches to ethics by describing a sequence of developmental stages. For the Scots, moral sentiments emerge largely as tribal sympathies. These sentiments become institutionalized as a system of interpersonal relationship norms in settled agricultural societies. As more complex civil societies emerge, moral codes are needed to specify norms for conducting one-off transactions with strangers. In trading societies, there is a further evolution toward more abstract moral codes reflecting the judgment of an impartial spectator ( Smith 1759 ). Bentham’s utilitarianism and Kant’s categorical imperative can be understood as ways of conceptualizing the criteria that such a spectator might apply.

For present purposes, it is important to stress how applicability across a broad spectrum of transactional relationships came to be one desideratum for social ethics throughout this period in philosophy. Norms for agrarian societies could be place-specific because farming was of necessity practiced at a particular place. As roads and transport networks improved, it became possible to move farm commodities from village to village, leading to a period of social upheaval as more generic legal codes for specifying the rights and responsibilities for trade began to evolve ( Thompson 1971 ). Norms that initially evolved for trade of harvested commodities could be equally well applied to manufactured goods, giving rise to a conception of an economy with a highly specialized division of labor that is nonetheless overseen by a generalized conception of social ethics applicable to all the various trades and sectors emergent during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The summary just given indicates that there are diverse and competing philosophical strategies for resolving the problem of developing a generic approach. Hence, we have the plethora of consequentialist, deontological, and contractualist or communitarian approaches to ethical theory that is familiar today. When I speak of an industrial philosophy of agriculture, I mean only to say that agricultural production can be seen as falling under the same general set of norms and concepts that might be used to evaluate and critique production practices in manufacturing, transportation, energy, or other commercial sectors of the economy. Rights theorists and utilitarians might disagree in how they would analyze a problem in food ethics, but they tend to agree that whatever approach wins out philosophically will be as applicable in agriculture and food as it is in health care, industrial labor relations, or energy ethics.

For example, agricultural laborers have been among the least well compensated among all forms of wage or piece labor in the industrial economy throughout the twentieth century. Workplace reforms that began to be enacted in the 1930s called for a cluster of legal entitlements intended to equalize power relations between employer and employee, and to institute key protections for all workers in an industrial economy. These include basic amenities and opportunities for personal necessities, workplace safety provisions, child labor laws, limitations on the length of shifts, minimum wages, and other more complex rules for insuring fair employment practices. Not the least of these was a hard-won right to organize. For various reasons, farms, ranches, and other firms employing agricultural workers were generally exempt from these laws. The outcry against the horrible working conditions of migratory fieldworkers began to be sounded in the 1930s with Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Fields (1939) . It continued with Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast Harvest of Shame over Thanksgiving weekend of 1959 and with Caesar Chavez’s attempts to organize California farmworkers in the 1960s ( Thompson 2015 ). These issues are very much with us today. The categories of mainstream consequentialist and deontological ethics are well equipped for articulating and debating the ethical issues associated with agricultural labor and the inequalities and abuses that are associated with race and gender among farmworkers. If workers in manufacturing or retail are entitled to protections or procedural rights on the basis of consequentialist or deontological considerations, there is no reason why similar questions should not be raised about workers in agriculture.

Environmental impacts from agriculture provide another and perhaps even more obvious and striking example of issues where a generic set of philosophical concepts can be applied usefully. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring documented the impact of insecticide use on songbirds and aquatic species, animals that were not the intended target of farmers who were using these chemicals to protect their crops from agricultural pests. In the intervening years, we have come to a fuller appreciation of the toll that agricultural chemical use can have for human health and for all “non-target” species. More generally, agriculture itself is the willful removal of natural ecosystems and their summary replacement by human-managed cropping and livestock production systems that generally disrupt the habitat for whatever species may have occupied the niches destroyed by agricultural conversion. Nutrients from CAFOs and from synthetic fertilizers can pollute water supplies and cause dramatic changes in downstream ecosystems. The list of potential environmental impacts from agriculture is long, and it is arguable that some of the most effective ethical concepts for describing and critiquing the environmental damage caused by agriculture are derived from norms and patterns of analysis that were originally applied to industrial pollution from manufacturing or mining. There is, again, a rich sense in which the social ethics developed for a generic evaluation of various sectors in the industrial economy is quite well adapted to the environmental impact of agriculture ( Thompson 2017 ).

There is, in short, no sense in which this chapter should be read as dismissing the importance and general applicability of ethical critiques that draw upon what I have called “the industrial philosophy of agriculture.” The industrial philosophy of agriculture just is the application of consequentialist and deontological frameworks that arose during the early years of the Industrial Revolution to problems that arise within or that are caused by existing methods of agricultural production. These are absolutely crucial topics, and they make up the largest part of what is now being called “food ethics.” But the theorists who developed these approaches to moral theory during the early years of industrialization also insisted upon their universality. Ever since Kant and Bentham, advocates of consequentialist and deontological theories have presumed—nay, demanded—that they articulate the basis for everything that is normatively significant about transactions and relationships throughout industrial societies. Contrary to this claim, I do offer agrarian philosophies both as a historical and cultural explanation of why agriculture might have been exempted from ethical scrutiny in the past, and as amendments to the kind of considerations that should be included in the food ethics discussions of the present.

Agrarian Philosophy: The Household Farm

Mainstream ethics provides a number of reasons to support small, household farmers whenever their interests clash with those of large landowners or multinational corporations. One might do so on grounds of economic equality, or one might take a more generally suspicious view of economically powerful actors or the concentration of wealth or capital. History supplies other arguments. Agriculture can be organized in a number of different ways, and the Greco-Roman world was distinctive in comparison to other civilizations in the Fertile Crescent for the dominance of household farms. Greek and Roman writers were aware of this difference and a certain strand of agrarian argument is written into the subtext of many doctrines that philosophers still take to be emblematic of their discipline.

Succinctly, agricultural systems of the Ancient world could be classified into three types. Early empires (notably Egypt) had been built on a highly productive system that deployed slave labor to tend extensive fields that were owned by the sovereign and centrally managed. In the case of Egypt, this unfree workforce was also deployed to build and manage an extended infrastructure for containing the annual flood of the Nile River. In contrast, the agriculture of the Peloponnesian Peninsula relied upon relatively small production units controlled and managed by the head of the household. Although both systems relied upon the labor of slaves, the nature of work differed significantly. The Greek (and later Roman) farm was a mix of crops—grains, trees, and vines punctuated by livestock—that took full advantage of the topography and climate, while demanding mastery of dissimilar skills suited to distinct crops and seasons of the year. In the Egyptian system, practical knowledge was limited to members of the priesthood and a few overseers. The third type of system was true subsistence farming found on the margins of the ancient world. In general, it was not productive enough to sustain the division of labor needed to support the military and economic institutions of civilization ( Mazoyer and Roudart 2006 ).

The Greek householders (the hoi mesoi ) were the citizens of the city-states. Their common interest in defense of their lands and in maintaining the craft industries (wheelwrights, blacksmiths, etc.) that were needed to support their farms was the basis of a polis, understood here as the shared values that form the foundation for political life. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson argues that articulation and defense of this agrarian-based polis is the back story for significant components of Hellenistic philosophy ( Hanson 1995 ). Indeed, one can see the argument being made in relatively explicit fashion in Aristotle’s Politics , where the household is described as the model for the state, and the hoi mesoi are identified as the most valuable citizens. A society built on this model is superior because the interests and daily practice of the hoi mesoi are naturally consonant with that of polis, the basis of community life. Because their farms are inherently tied to a particular geographic location, they develop a loyalty to the polis as a place. Because their investment in tree and vine crops requires multigenerational stability, they exhibit both a loyalty and a proficiency in the arts of defense and citizenship that mercenaries and those whose professions can be relocated will never have. Hanson argues that of all the city-states, Athens’ development of sea power created a class of traders whose economic interests were not so closely tied to the land, leading to the political upheaval that we associate with the time of Socrates and the eventual clash with the more firmly agrarian Sparta ( Hanson 1995 ).

Aristotle also clearly thought that the hoi mesoi were superior to true subsistence farmers. While very small farmers might have interests quite consonant with forming polis, their sheer poverty and their bondage to the hard, repetitious physical labor of farming meant that they seldom had time to attain the literacy and acumen associated with a Greek ideal of citizenship. Hence, when Greek philosophers praise farming (most evident in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus ), they are not necessarily recommending that one should get one’s hands in the dirt. Aristotle’s claim that virtue requires a certain level of wealth reflects a version of agrarian values that stresses the importance of leisure time that can be devoted to philosophy. It is thus important to see that household agrarianism is not simply a blanket praise of farmer’s virtue, but is more properly understood as a philosophy that takes agriculture to be especially significant for larger questions in social ethics. And it is only certain kinds of agricultural systems that are going to suffice.

Agrarian Political Economy

Greek farms were relatively small, relying on a slave labor force that rarely exceeded single digits. Roman farms were often much larger, and the heads of household were correspondingly much wealthier. European history continued this trend, as a manorial system of peasants farming lands held by titled aristocrats became commonplace. Under this system, the idea that landownership would bind the nobility’s personal and security interests to that of the larger polity continued. Ownership of land became a requirement for citizenship and participation in governance. At the same time, systems of land tenure were diverse, and some extended rights of occupancy, use, and limited abilities to transfer said rights through inheritance and exchange to commoners. English politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were especially influenced by debates over land tenure, and the evolution of “possessive individualism”—the philosophy that C. B. Macpherson (1962) saw as the precursor to capitalism and the form of ethics we associate with Bentham and Kant—was strongly shaped by agrarian ideals.

A succinct summary of the role that agrarian ideas played in the evolution of European political theory would stress three themes. First, as European societies become more diverse, political economists began to recognize the production of food as an activity having special significance. Second, the physiocrat tradition viewed agriculture as having a unique tie to the creation of wealth. Finally, as already suggested, the Greco-Roman emphasis on the farm household and its place-based loyalty was transformed into a criterion for citizenship and the distribution of political power. In contrast to many contemporary economic analyses that see no problem with a global trade in food commodities, early political economists argued that a nation’s farming population was a primary guarantor of sovereignty and a source of resistance to foreign powers. English political economist James Harrington (1611−1677) valued farmers not for their civic virtue but for their obvious role in securing the nation’s food supply. Harrington was especially solicitous of the need for secure lines of supply to a nation’s military forces, recognizing that for the peasant farmer and the landed lord alike, sheer proximity to the site of production would be adequate to assure access to food. As the division of labor was increased, meeting a nation’s food needs through trade came to be seen as more acceptable, and arguments for and against reform of the English Corn Laws became a topic for the generation that included David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill ( Montmarquet 1989 ).

The French physiocrat school of political economy is remembered for its advocacy of laissez-faire, but it also advocated the doctrine that only agriculture could actually produce wealth. Manufacturing was seen as simply rearranging materials, while farming could seemingly bring forth new goods from the very bowels of the earth. Although this latter doctrine holds little allure for present-day economics, the physiocrats were influential in their day for advocating national policies to promote the development of agriculture and to give priority to farming over every other form of economic activity. As such, physiocrats endorsed political institutions and policies that favored farm interests over industrialists and the proletariat that supplied a workforce for their factories. The importance of protecting private property from all forms of interference (including by the state) had its origins in the curious idea that only farms and farming could produce genuine wealth for national accounts ( Vardi 2012 ).

In a vague and generalized way, these doctrines from political economy merged with older political ideas handed down from the Greeks and derived from figures such as Machiavelli and Montesquieu who had written on the Roman Republic. In this latter tradition, the decline of the Roman Empire was sometimes traced to a series of ill-considered changes that separated the power to make policy from the source of tax revenue, which was, of course, the latifundia (e.g., farms) controlled by the Roman aristocracy. The income from these lands financed the complex patronage system that in turn provided the basis for Roman political life. Political reforms created new urban-based power blocks in Roman society that did not contribute to the fiscal underpinnings of the city (neither did they feed people). The upshot was that agrarian ideas stressing the importance of private property, the need for power to reside with an educated and moderate propertied class, and the view that agriculture was more conducive to virtue than manufacturing or trade provided a rationale for resisting democracy or anything that would empower the working class. The argument becomes a key basis for the view that landed aristocrats are the most reliable source of political stability. Many contemporary readers are still impressed by the seemingly inherent conservatism of agrarian reasoning (see Carlson 2000 ; Murphy 2001 ).

Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism turned much of this reasoning on its head. Jeffersonian agrarianism accepted many of the agrarian premises (though there is little evidence that he was strongly influenced by the physiocrats’ view that land is the sole source of wealth). Yet Jefferson argued that in the Americas, where ownership and control of land was broadly distributed, these very ideas could be martialed in support of democracy. Jeffersonian agrarianism is too often seen as a romantic attachment to a bucolic past, but in the context of the American Revolution, where manufacturers and traders were much more likely to abandon the revolutionary cause than farmers, the idea that farmers’ interests align more tightly with those of the polity was very clear. Jefferson advocated an agrarian democracy because he felt that farmers were “the best” citizens, and, as he wrote, “ mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body” (Jefferson 1783).

American agrarianism took a further turn during the administration of Abraham Lincoln. On the one hand, abolitionists were appealing to moral arguments derived directly from Bentham and Kant, while defenders of slavery tended to recite agrarian arguments in its defense. Slavery was thought essential for the characteristically southern form of agriculture, which was in turn defended as a bulwark of political stability and the font of culture (see Smith 2003 ). There is thus an important sense in which the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1864) represent the emergence of an industrial philosophy of agriculture in the United States. No longer would the preeminence and political necessities associated with farming be permitted to override the patent suffering and abrogation of human dignity inherent in race slavery. On the other hand, in 1862 Lincoln signed both the Morrill Act creating the public university system dedicated in significant measure to the promotion of agricultural science and the Homestead Act making Federal lands available for agricultural settlement. In the same year, he created the Department of Agriculture, also dedicated to furthering the interests of farmers. Lincoln articulated the rationale for these actions in starkly agrarian terms, equating farming interests with those of “the people” and reinforcing the Jeffersonian vision of an America founded upon the natural marriage between the interests created by land-based economic activity and a broadly distributed pattern of ownership ( Lincoln 1859 ).

To summarize, the Greek polis and the corresponding notion of citizenship rests on the agrarian foundation of the hoi mesoi . Imperial agricultures (Egypt and China) produce only subjects, not citizens. Other forms of agrarianism emphasize the tight link between feeding the populace and military stability (Harrington), the tight link between farming and the material production of wealth (the physiocrats) and the tight link between those whose wealth comes from the land and political stability (mainstream political economy prior to the Industrial Revolution). To these three kinds of agrarianism, Jefferson and Lincoln added the view that when control of the land is broadly distributed, agrarian thinking supports democracy. The new political economy launched by the Scottish Enlightenment was, in an important sense, still grounded in these ideas, but Hume and Smith believed that the Industrial Revolution was creating opportunities that could not be fully exploited by a moral and legal system in which legal rights and moral sentiments were so permanently tied to a particular plot of land. Thus, the idea of property and the right to property had to be freed from its agrarian moorings in order to facilitate the growth of manufacturing and gains from trade. This in turn required a new conceptualization of labor as an alienable good, also subject to the terms of barter, rather than as a set of duties fixed by demands of a particular soil and climate (in bondage to a particular lord whose interests were defined by that soil and climate). The actual political changes that were needed to bring about this “great transformation” away from agrarian ideals took more than a century ( Polanyi 1944 ).

Contemporary Agrarianism

I see three reasons why scholars of food ethics should be attentive to agrarian views. The first may be a personal prejudice: my training emphasized the history of philosophy, and I cannot bring myself to imagine true philosophical thought in the absence of coming to terms with the texts of Aristotle, Locke, and others. The history of philosophy cannot, in my opinion, be read accurately without an understanding of the role played by agrarian values. If food ethics has something to contribute more broadly to the discipline of philosophy as I understand it, it must surely begin by noting that contemporary scholars’ lack of familiarity with the tradition of agrarian argument contributes to a limited understanding of the discipline itself. However, I realize that this is a minority view, and it is in respect to two other themes that food ethics, understood as an inquiry into the full consequences of eating one way rather than another, takes on its fuller significance.

The second reason is that echoes of agrarian argument forms continue to be heard in contemporary food ethics. Michael Pollan has promoted Wendell Berry’s aphorism, “Eating is an agricultural act,” but what did Berry mean by that? Kimberley Smith’s Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace provides an overview of agrarian themes in American political thought including both Jeffersonian democracy and the less attractive aristocratic defense of slavery on agrarian grounds that was mounted by Jefferson’s contemporary (and political ally) John Taylor of Caroline. Smith argues that Berry’s significant engagement with debates over race and slavery (not fully appreciated by many readers) serves to significantly constrain some of the politically conservative elements of the agrarian tradition. Furthermore, Smith argues that Berry is the first agrarian to bring ecological themes explicitly into the agrarian lexicon. For Berry, agrarianism is an ecological worldview that emphasizes connectedness in every dimension. Not only are traditional farmers socially connected in a manner consistent with the way that Aristotle might have suggested for the hoi mesoi , they are attentive to the seasons, to the soil, and to the full sense in which they are both dependent on their encompassing world and at the same time responsible to it. Berry’s 1977 book The Unsettling of America was one of the first critiques to discuss the disconnectedness of modern “scientific” agriculture and to see the tight marriage between industrial farming and commodity markets as an ecological and political disaster ( Smith 2003 ).

Berry’s environmentalist agrarianism has been taken up by advocates of reform in agricultural practice. Wes Jackson interprets an ecologically sensitive approach to farming as the route to pursuing Thoreau’s goal of “becoming native to our place.” It is through farmers’ attentiveness to the structure and vulnerabilities of the specific, place-bound ecosystem in which they farm that human practice can resolve into cultures that respect and even amplify the potential inherent within the natural world. It is through work, rather than leisure, that moral character is formed, hence it is the person who works within and with nature that satisfies the demands of environmental virtue ( Jackson 1994 ). Agrarian arguments were also rehearsed in another volume with a title echoing Thoreau, Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984) , co-edited by Jackson, Berry, and Bruce Coleman. Here, essays advocating a more ecological approach to farming as well as attention to the impact of agricultural chemicals on farmworkers were advanced through ethical arguments that appealed to a declining (if not lost) virtue of agricultural stewardship, rather than drawing upon uncompensated harms or violations of human (or nonhuman) rights ( Jackson, Berry, and Coleman 1984 ). Similarly explicit appeals to agrarianism can be found in Eric Freyfogle’s The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture and Community (2001) and Norman Wirzba’s The Essential Agrarian Reader (2003).

There are other authors who appeal to agrarian themes without also evoking the term “agrarianism.” The role of the farmer is stressed by Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Heldke in their book Philosophers at Table. Consistent with the discussion, Boisvert and Heldke argue that late modern figures such as Bentham, Kant, and Hegel adopted a “spectator” standpoint toward the evaluative process. Boisvert and Heldke are as keen to stress aesthetics as ethics. The aesthetic practices of high culture—a visit to the museum or a concert—are modeled on leisure activities. The value theory of late eighteenth and early twentieth century came to stress a disinterested judgmental practice as a way to control the sway of passion. Boisvert and Heldke see the specter of Cartesian dualism in these theories, where disembodied minds attempt to curb the potential for animal spirits. They recommend the farmer over the spectator as the model for aesthetic and moral judgment. It is the farmer’s active engagement with material practice that gives this archetype its generative force for value theory ( Boisvert and Heldke 2016 ). Boisvert and Heldke’s use of virtue talk differs from that of contemporary theorists who emphasize dispositional attitudes. In appealing to the farmer as a cultural archetype, they suggest that our moral and aesthetic imaginations can be piqued by our implicit understanding of the way that an archetypical figure would respond (hence be response-able) in specific situations. The mere spectator has been stripped of the embedded understandings that reside at the root of responsibility in this situated sense. In contrast, known individuals (an admired mentor or family member), famous personages (Jesus, George Washington), and even fictional characters (Harry Potter or Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett) can inspire a moral and aesthetic response from us when we ask, “What would X do?” It is doubtful that Boisvert and Heldke would view their approach as a form of agrarianism, yet their use of “the farmer” as a generative archetype for eliciting a normative standpoint indicates how agrarian ideals might challenge mainstream forms of consequential or deontological moral theory.

Finally, I see agrarianism as a way to link systems and sustainability. Drawing upon the ideas of Berry and Jackson, I have interpreted the way that Jefferson or Aristotle link the virtue of citizenship to agrarian ideas as a way to emphasize both the difficulty and also the importance of taking a systems perspective. The threats to Athens or Rome that were associated with the rise of a trading mentality or military imperialism arose because the people advocating these thrusts could not grasp the sense in which their own interests depended on a prior commitment to polis, to protecting the land and soil-based interests that were the source of these cities’ initial wealth and sense of common purpose. The hoi mesoi represent a crucial political form because the management of their farms lends itself to a systems mentality. The complementarity between olive trees and grapevines, on the one hand, and the grains growing in the lower valleys becomes expressed as a palpable household rhythm. It defines what must be done when and where, and orders their lives through seasonal cycles at the same time that the scale of the household farm allows these tasks to be performed by a relatively small and autochthonous family group. Except that their autochthony is visibly constrained by their dependence on craftsmen and by their need for a common defense against invaders. The household farmer represented by Xenophon’s Ischomachus can see how the systemic integrity of his household is integrated within the larger system of the polis.

In our present era, it is crucial to add dependence upon the integrity of broader ecosystem processes, as well. My own work has stressed the tension between conceptualizations of sustainability that draw upon the idea of sustainable development and those that emphasize the resilience or adaptiveness of systems (be they biological, social, or some combination of the two). I have argued that attention to agrarian philosophies can alert us to the way that systems thinking has been given political salience in the past, and I note a series of figures (including Liberty Hyde Bailey and Aldo Leopold) who emphasized the foundational importance of agricultural practice during more recent times ( Thompson 2010 ). The chief contemporary spokespersons for the system perspective have been ecologists. It may thus be significant that recent work in conservation biology has begun to emphasize the agrarian values of indigenous communities and has argued that these farming peoples possess an understanding of the systems perspective that has been extremely difficult to cultivate among more highly educated Westerners ( Rozzi 2015 ).

When Berry says that eating is an agricultural act, he is in fact opening the door to a number of diverse ways in which farms and farming might stimulate a deep and highly situated form of moral reflection. This is not to say that those who see the enactment of food ethics primarily through consumption practices that resist the industrial have it altogether wrong. Cage-free eggs and free-trade coffee have their place. Yet Berry is also calling us to appreciate how agrarian values can enrich our moral ontology and push us toward a more integrated systems perspective. At a minimum, it is to say that food ethics is much more than hoping to save the world with better shopping. In the end, the best reasons to promote consciousness-raising food practices, from vegetarianism and locavorism to community-supported agriculture and fair trade may have little to do with the causal connection between our food purchases and the larger supply chain. They may be better justified as first steps toward broadening our ethical horizons in a manner that is not only more sensitive to the philosophies of the past but more generative of response for the challenges of the future.

In concluding, I note again that the industrial philosophy of agriculture, the ethical approach that sees agriculture as just another sector in complex industrial societies, brings absolutely crucial resources to the table. There is very little in the classical agrarian mindset that would advocate for a minimum wage for farm laborers or fast-food workers. Indeed, there is little basis on which one might advocate for a right to food. As noted, agrarian arguments were advanced in defense of race slavery, arguably the least defensible institution ever countenanced by human civilization. At the same time, however, I have tried to indicate briefly how contemporary authors are trying to save what was wise about agrarian values, while also adding ecological themes that were never explicitly argued by classical advocates of agrarian philosophy. The unifying theme is that there is something special, something unique, and something normatively generative about agriculture and farming. It is precisely this element that is lost when ethical theories that depend upon an ideal spectator are applied in the typical manner.

This is not to say that the themes I have associated with the agrarian worldview cannot be incorporated into consequentialist or deontological perspectives. In a similar vein, contemporary movements such as particularism, virtue ethics, and even feminist theory clearly do pick up themes that would have once been associated with an agrarian perspective, while shedding any sense that agriculture and farming as such have much to contribute. Perhaps the one thing that does distinguish farming from these perspectives is that for the time being, at least, this is how we get our food. And food is manifestly different from other goods produced by other sectors in the industrial economy. Yet there are thrusts on the horizon that would end this linkage, while the arguments for synthetic meat and climate-controlled agriculture are being advanced on moral grounds ( Welin, Gold, and Berlin 2012 ; Dey and Pinel 2015 ). If there truly is anything special about farming, the time to consider that question is now.

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Traditional Farming Definition

This sample essay on Traditional Farming Definition provides important aspects of the issue and arguments for and against as well as the needed facts. Read on this essay’s introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Biological factors include pests, diseases, and natural conditions (weather) which reflect the fact that crops are living things unlike machines which are not susceptible to weather changes, disease or pests. The spatial factor that influences resource allocation refers to the limited amount of land that a traditional farmer by definition has, therefore traditional farmers must allocate resources to maximize use of the limited land that they have.

Seasonal factors refer to the highs and lows that occur In the use of labor because labor Is used Intensively during harvest times and significantly less at other times. In response, farmers develop a farming system which allocates resources in such a way as to make use of labor most intensively all year round. The kinds of farming systems that traditional farmers have developed address the constraints or characteristics of agriculture in order to make best use of land and labor and increase overall average production.

Therefore, the farmer must evaluate any new innovation taking into account how It will affect the whole farming system and therefore overall production. While adopting a new Innovation or farming practice may seem more profitable or more productive at first glance, It might increase production of one crop but come at the expense of increased risk, or a decrease in the ability to use land and labor as efficiently as they had been used before.

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Factors That Could Influence The Optimal Mix Of Resources

When viewing the farm system as a complex system that the farmer has developed to minimize risk, and maximize the use of land and labor given the characteristics of agriculture that he faces, the farmer’s failure to dado a new Innovation/farming practice can be seen as rational because he Is looking out for the overall productivity of his farm which may be negatively Impacted by adoption of the particular innovation. The biological nature of agriculture reflects the susceptibility of agriculture to pests, diseases, and natural conditions.

Since these factors negatively affect levels of output and since traditional farmers usually depend (at least in part) on their output for food, they are naturally very risk averse. Some of the risks that farmers face Include risks from natural disasters, weather related uncertainly, agricultural diseases and pests, and price and market related risks. To reduce risk, farmers use crop varieties and breeds of livestock that have proven dependable under poor conditions like low fertility or rough terrain.

They also plant root crops which can be pulled at different times of the year in order to make up for an unexpected bad year for other crops. Two commonly used techniques for reducing risk used by traditional Tatters are meal cropping Ana meal Tarring. Meal cropping Is a rills spreading mechanism which reduces reliance on the success of a single crop. With many crops, farmers will not be devastated if one crop does not do well. Mixed farming means that farmers plant multiple crops on a single plot of land at the same time. Mixed cropping has many advantages.

Not only does it reduce reliance on the success of en crop, it also creates the opportunity for one crop to provide shade for the other. Mixed cropping also provides protection from natural disasters since pests or diseases may affect one crop but not another, and some crops have higher tolerance in drought or excessive rainfall than other crops do. This technique also provides protection from fluctuating prices for a particular crop. Since crops are harvested and brought to market at the same time by all farmers, competition is often the cause of large price drops.

By harvesting crops that few other local farmers produce, traditional farmers can overcome this treacherous loss of income. Mixed farming is the raising of livestock in addition to crops. Livestock can be consumed or sold during crop failures. In addition they provide sources of fertilizer, fuel, hides, and can be providers of power and transport. Thus mixed farming is another risk saving mechanism. The spatial nature of agriculture refers to the limited amount of land available to traditional farmers. By definition a traditional farmer owns less than 10 acres of land.

This fact makes allocation of land a very important issue to the farmer. To address this issue, farmers plant different crops on the same plot of land at the same time mixed cropping) in order to use every level of land since different crops take root at different levels in the soil. This technique maximizes the farmers use of land. The seasonal nature of agriculture reflects the fact that there are highs and lows in the use of labor because labor is used intensively at harvest times and significantly less at other times.

Thus farmers plant different crops together so that they have different harvest times and can use labor all year round. Similarly, farmers raise both livestock and crops so that when labor is not tending to crops, they can tend to livestock. In this way, farmers maximize their use of labor. Once it is understood that resource allocation makes up a complex farm system designed to address the biological, spatial, and seasonal constraints that farmers face, one can see that introducing some change into it can have many more consequences than one might initially expect.

Seen from a limited framework, a particular innovation or practice may increase the productivity of a particular crop and failure to use the innovation by the farmer may cause one to say he/she is irrational. However, when the innovation is evaluated in terms of how it affects the hole farm system and the ability to maximize the use of land and labor, one can see that the farmer is not being irrational at all.

While a particular innovation can increase the productivity of a single crop, it may be at the expense of increased risk, a decrease in the ability to mix crops, or a decrease in the ability to mix livestock and crops. So, when considering the issue of rationality versus irrationality, it makes sense to talk about evaluating any new innovation in terms of how it’s going to affect the overall system and if it will disrupt the system in some way that is unacceptable to the farmer.

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A Comprehensive Update on Traditional Agricultural Knowledge of Farmers in India

• First Online: 04 April 2023

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• Avinash Sharma 5 ,
• Chowlani Manpoong 5 ,
• Himanshu Pandey 6 ,
• Chandan Kumar Gupta 6 ,
• Yani Baja 7 ,
• Mayanglambam Sanjit Singh 5 &
• Chau Chiktiya Mounglang 5  

Part of the book series: Plant Life and Environment Dynamics ((PLED))

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Traditional agricultural knowledge is an important information created by the forefathers in past civilizations. The forefathers practised traditional agriculture during Harappa, Vedic and Iron Age civilizations. The present small and marginal farmers utilize traditional information in crop production and management, crop protection, farm machinery, tools, soil and water management, medicinal and aromatic plants for diseases diagnosis, animal husbandry, stored grain pest management, weed management and value-added value products. The traditional information in agriculture practices is collected from the different geographical states of India. The information from traditional practices used in specific activities by the farmers. The farmer utilizes compositions of natural resources in the geographical states for crop husbandry and farm-linked activities. The Southern and North-Eastern states of India have more traditional agricultural practices. The farmer applies specific information in crop production and management, crop protection, farm machinery and tools, soil and water management, medicinal and aromatic plants for disease diagnosis, animal husbandry, stored grain pest management, weed management, and value-added food products. The farmer preserves and transfers the information to the rural community. The farmer transmits information to the present generation to create mobilisation. Traditional agriculture information transforms agriculture resources, maintains biodiversity ethics and enlightens historical and practical approaches to the present generations. This chapter outlines and provides comprehensive information on the traditional agricultural knowledge of the farmers.

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Sharma, A. et al. (2023). A Comprehensive Update on Traditional Agricultural Knowledge of Farmers in India. In: Kumar, A., Singh, P., Singh, S., Singh, B. (eds) Wild Food Plants for Zero Hunger and Resilient Agriculture. Plant Life and Environment Dynamics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6502-9_14

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85 Farming Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best farming topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on farming, 💡 most interesting farming topics to write about.

• Farm-to-Table Supply Chains for Supermarkets A potential risk is that small farms may be unable to provide a steady supply of the necessary magnitude or adhere to the same standards of quality.
• The Farmers’ Market Analysis For the farmers the benefit lies in the cost saving of the production transportation and in the ability of the wholesale with the large grocery companies. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Natureview Farm’s Strategic Plans The chief executive officer of Natureview analyzed the market stance and tasked his team to develop strategic plan to ensure that the revenue growth increase by over 50% at the end of the year 2001.
• Natureview Farm: Problem Case It is in this regard that Wagner advised the management to increase the firm’s revenues from $13 million to $20 million before the end of 2001.
• Dairy Meal as an Important Concentrate in Dairy Cow Farming The number of times that the dairy meal is fed to cows depends on the management regime of the cow. The dairy meal is one of the feeds that guarantee better productivity to the farmer.
• Fish Farming Impacts on the Environment To begin with, according to Abel and Robert, fish farming has been generalized to have adverse effects on the environment, which ranges from the obliteration of the coastal habitats which are sensitive in the environment, […]
• Agriculture and Farming in Abu Dhabi Many researches have been done on soil taxonomy in the UAE, with the invention of a non-absorbent type of soil that was one of the breakthroughs that have greatly influenced agriculture in Abu Dhabi.
• The Process of Raising Factory Farm Chickens The lives of the chickens that are raised in the factory farm begin at the hatching machines. As such, the welfare of the chickens is secondary to profitability.
• The Entomo Farms Company’s Analysis Such an approach contributes to improved control over the company’s development and ensures that Entomo can incorporate customers’ feedback for enhancement.
• Rearing of Cattle: Deprecating the Beef Farming It is for this reason that the whole world has to pose as ask the question “What are the causes of global warming?” The answer is simple, climate change and resultant global warming has to […]
• Farmer Definition and Culture The era of information the has led, to the creation of the particular image of success, and mass media created an image of a successful and stylish businessman.
• Food and Farming: Urban Farming Benefits the Local Economy Urban farming and foraging play essential roles not only in the lives of communities but in the ecosystems as well. Such responsive attitudes allow people to protect the environment and create more opportunities for local […]
• Decline in the Honeybee Population and Farmers in the United States The analysis of farming in the country shows that the added revenue to crop production because of the pollinators’ activity is about $18 billion. Statistics evidence the topicality of the problem and the necessity to […]
• The Ethics of Farm Animal Biotechnology From an Anthropological Perspective Biotechnology is one of the most important branches of science, the results of which are used in many areas. The use of animals in the context of biotechnology is a daily routine for researchers.
• “The Biggest Little Farm” Movie Critique The film is a documentary and shows the real life and the desire of the husband and wife to create their wonderful farm where they can grow vegetables and fruits, as well as have different […]
• Prices at Farmers Markets vs. Grocery Stores When evaluating the items ordered at grocery retail locations to those acquired at local traders’ marketplaces, it is revealed that the commodities purchased at hypermarkets are more reliable and outstanding in form and structure.
• Smart Farms Hiring People with Disabilities Although Smart Farms is a non-profit organization and benefits from donations, the workers play their role in income generation by working on the farms and sales.
• Marketing of Indoor Farming in the UAE Adding to that, the delivery service, health benefits, and availability of Local Leaves products can be advertised on all social media platforms to help the company get the recognition it needs in a short period […]
• Demand for Indoor Farming Services in the UAE For any business, it is essential to be sure of the readiness of customers to buy the product. The likelihood of buying the service may be defined by the data, indicating the popularity of the […]
• Sunrise Farm’s Research of Its Customers Needs In this regard, the exploratory mixed methods approach was chosen to study the possibilities of diversifying the activities of Sunrise Farm. In particular, a semi-structured approach to the interviews was chosen that is suitable for […]
• Role of Technology in the Future of Farming The role technology has to play in farming in the future needs to be in great as it has been in the transportation sector in the past.
• Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) and Their Development The process involves the establishment of the limiting factors like site boundary, the maximum number of facilities to be installed, identification of dwellings that rotor blade shadows may affect, and a minimum spacing of the […]
• Cato’s “On Farming”, a Translated Part of Famous Treatise “De Agri Cultura” Review From this point of view, Cato’s recommendations are ideal: the location of the willow tree immediately after the vineyard and the garden is not accidental, since in this passage a scale of the main and […]
• Farm-to-Table Food: Dissemination Portfolio Modern American families try to adhere to the principles of Healthy People 2020 with its promotion of the so-called farm-to-table food and farm-to-school programs.
• Law: Legislation Regarding Marijuana Farming To evaluate the applicability of the proposed marijuana farming bill, the current marihuana production legislation needs to be reviewed, and the changes in social norms regarding criminal behavior are to be analyzed.
• Artificial Intelligence in Drone Technology for Farming Automated drones fitted with spraying features are used in the monitoring of agricultural processes and crops to schedule tasks and expeditiously address the observed issues throughout plant life.
• Problems Facing American Farmer Workers The owners of farms will continue to exploit these people since they are not afraid of any law that is in place and working as it should to protect this group of people.
• Food Processing and Farming Methods Afoakwa, Budu, and Merson note that nutrient loss in canned food depends on the amount of heat that is applied during the pre-treatment step, the type of tin, and the type of nutrients in the […]
• Face Recognition in Farming: The Multi-UAV Framework Indeed, the consumer wants a delicious and quality meat product, and it is known that the absence of stress in the life of an animal directly affects the structure of the meat.
• Using IoT Low-Cost Sensors for Smallholder Farms It is, therefore, essential for the users and IoT systems and devices developers to collectively ensure that the internet and the users of such components are not exposed.
• Fish Farming in the United States In the present day, the potential of the country’s fish farming is substantively limited by national, state, local, or tribal policies and opposition by national and local interest groups. Nevertheless, the supporters’ recent efforts and […]
• Artificial Intelligence in Smart Farming Owing to the development of the smart farming concept and precision agriculture, farmers all over the world gained a chance to implement digital tech to their daily operations and utilize AI to support some of […]
• Building a Sky Garden: Vertical Farming System Business Plan It helps farmers to appreciate the benefits of valuing more the depth of land fertility than the size of land holdings.
• United States History in 1864-1900 Years: Industrialization, Urbanization, and the Commercialization of Farming The Western frontier advanced in the years 1864 and 1900 by the establishment of democracy in America, industrialization, urbanization and the commercialization of farming.
• Competitive Market: Farm Income and Costs Connecting the farms in the US to the concept of the perfectly competitive market, the definition and the characteristics of such a market should be outlined.
• Agro-Food Geographies: Food, Nature, Farmers and Agency Therefore, the important thing in food and nature depends on the geographies of food and the beneficially is the subject, Currently, agro-food study is affected continuously by the current improvements in the agro-food geographies, especially […]
• Standards for Confining Farm Animals One major concern that has been brought to the attention of animal farmers, in general, is the issue of whether or not it is appropriate to confine all or certain farm animals.
• Linking Small-Scale Farmers to Input-Output Markets Output markets refer to the markets that are used by the farmers or businessmen to market their products while the input market is used by the same group to access products that are to be […]
• How to Reduce Carbon Footprint by Using Solar Farms In fact the living beings on the earth use solar energy in many ways already, but now scientists and technologists have started thinking about the ways and means which could help us in tapping the […]
• Organic Farming and Agriculture Those combinations that are selected will constitute the best part of the genetic make-up of subsequent generations, resulting in the development of ecotypes adapted to local ecological conditions. On the whole, yield performance of organic […]
• Farmers Exchange Bank’s Strategic Human Resources Every employee of the bank is bounded to maintain the secrecy of the customers. This principle of the bank has greatly contributed to the success of the firm and increased the profitability of the business.
• Why the Best Soil in the Province of BC Is Not Used for Farming The opportunity cost for farming is, therefore, lower than the opportunity cost for the warehouses/airports. So you have got no opportunity cost for this because this is the best option for your building and it […]
• Economics in the Hog Farming Industry China and the United States are the largest producers of pork products from the hog farming industry. This is due to the fact that the United States is a major exporter of pork products.
• Fish Friendly Farming Case FFF viewed farmers as people with a vast amount of knowledge about the land and agricultural practices and those who were interested in supporting their lands fertile and farming productively. The case of FFF and […]
• New Zealand Farming Industry. Organization Theory and Design One of the most critical issues that the Guy fielding farm is facing is the organizational structure of the company. The gathering of 2009 and Macdonald’s fear that he will be left out, heated the […]
• Farming and Regulations in California The American government made multiple attempts to control the flow of immigrants to the county and the degree of their involvement in work in the agricultural industry.
• Smart Farming and Sustainable Agriculture Smart farming allows for a wide range of options, from robotization and satellite imagery to the Internet of Things and the blockchain technology that increases the efficiency of crop cultivation by optimizing the use of […]
• 3rd World Farmer: Interactive Resources An educator’s main task is to explain the main causes of the appearance of these problems and the background that preconditions the formation of a particular environment.
• The Farm Labor Organizing Committee Movement Chapter 3 of the book by Barger, Reza, and Velasquez is dedicated to the history of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the movement associated with this labor union and the promotion of immigrant farmworkers’ […]
• Sprouts Farmers Market Company’s Entry to Canada The proportion of older people in Canada is also increasing thanks to improved living standards and access to affordable health care.
• Farmers and Their Role in the American Agriculture The recent changes in the world’s largest countries’ economies can be a good illustration of the exclusive role of agriculture which can enable a state to play an important role in the world.
• Farmer’s Market as a Food Event: Fresh and Straight From the Farm If I were to describe the entire scene an apt description would be to call it a scene of ordered chaos in that despite the sheer amount of people crisscrossing in front of me there […]
• Moral Status of Animals at Factory Farming Stewart is concerned about the extent to which human beings are willing to mechanize animal farming to meet their needs. As human beings, we are faced with moral dilemmas of whether to compromise an animal’s […]
• Kimango Farms Environmental Factors In 2015, the government established the Tanzania Agriculture Development Bank which is focused on assisting in developing the agricultural sector and assisting in the implementation of policies.
• Kimango Farm Enterprises: Business Plan Cultural values in a country guides business operations as well as it is important to be sensitive and understanding of these norms and attitudes.
• Farmers Views: Should Organic Food Be Promoted From? Organic food is grown and produced using natural methods, and it is believed that such products are safer and more nutritious than conventionally processed ones due to the rejection of the use of any artificial […]
• Kimango Farm Enterprises: Business Analysis of Tanzania The primary motivation and purpose of the company is to grow healthy and organic foods through sustainable farming techniques and to offer the world a piece of Tanzania.
• Impact of Antibiotics on Farm Animals One of the primary reasons for this condition in people is the use of antibiotics in farming. However, the use of antibiotics is associated with the occurrence of antibiotic resistance in people.
• Pre-Industrial Societies and Farming Patricia Crone has created a work where she discusses the trends and elements of pre-industrial societies in the world, particularly those that existed in the West. Farming was a key element in the pre-industrial era […]
• Susan Ferriss: United Farm Workers in “The Fight in the Fields” The focus of the reading is on the identity of Chavez and the evolution of the United Farm Workers, which is also the major event in the book.
• The Impact of Factory Farming The fish population is also subject to this problem, as the long-term overcrowding may lead to the higher competition for food and result in stress and decline of the immune defense, which can cause the […]
• Bernard Matthews’ Farm Marketing Issues Valuable prizes and practical involvement should elicit in the customers the necessity to purchase Bernard Matthews’ products and actively participate in the life of the brand. Nonetheless, the key changes should be performed in the […]
• Farm, Companion, Laboratory Animals in Canada This paper will give facts on four categories of animals kept in Canada; the farm animals, animals used in experiments, animals used as companions to people and those used in entertainment. The category of wild […]
• Native Americans’ History, Farming, Agriculture Nowadays, the task of primary importance is to educate the society and convey the idea that the rich past of the American Indians should be remembered.
• Farm Security Administration and New York Photo League The disagreement regarding the focus of the Film and Photo league served as the basis for the emergence of The Photo League in 1936.
• Tasty Farms’ Changes and Communication Networks Following all the steps of effective change management models is crucial in ensuring that available resources are properly aligned to meet the objectives of change. Due to the resistance from the employees, the process of […]
• Laying Hens Farm: Peach Farm and Olive Farm In the Peach Farm, the chain feeders are placed at a lower position than the average height of the hens. Therefore, if the perch space is sufficient, as in the Olive Farm, the hens are […]
• Managing Farm Dams to Support Waterbird Breeding The frequent fires and forest clearance in these areas have led to extensive migration of different species of birds. For example, they should take some of the endangered birds and breed them separately in a […]
• Agriculture Improvement: The US Farm Bill Nadine Lehrer, who has been studying the bill, asserts, “The bill was developed in the wake of 1930’s farm crisis to bring farm incomes up to the par with the required minimum incomes”.
• The US Farm Bills and Policy Reforms This law is very good in that it considers the health of the nation, the bill will a continuation of the 2002 Farm Bill.
• What Kind of Energy Can Be Produced from Corn in Farms Over the years, corn has been used to produce alcohol in the form of ethanol, a major raw material for the production of energy.
• Organic Farming for Sustainable Food Production The article is titled “Will Organic Agriculture Feed the World,” and it provides its readers with an overview of the statistics that apply to the sustainability of organic farming.
• Farming and Ranch Management Considering the varied nature of the job of a Farm or Ranch Manager, the college offers “the Farm and Ranch Management Degree and the Agriculture Management Certificate”.
• Farming Effects on Golden Sun Moth Agriculture has led to the destruction of the natural habitat of the moth. Farming practices have led to the dramatic reduction of the grass needed for the survival of this moth.
• Genetically Modified Organisms in Farming Farming is one of the backbones of the US economy given the fact the country is the leading exporter of various agricultural products.
• The Near-Shore Wind Farm Controversy Case The developers and the investors made the decision to persuade the residents to accept their position regarding the importance of the wind turbines.
• Farm Standard Council Case: Cost Allocation Some costs cannot be classified as either fixed or variable costs and yet they have to be allocated somewhere in the process of allocating costs to different cost centers.
• Greater Gabbard Wind Farm Mega Project The project management unit must understand the needs of all the stakeholders identified in the first stage, and how these needs are aligned to the needs of the project.
• Large-Scale Organic Farming and Food Supply The issue of environmental sustainability comes up due to the emerging ways of farming like the great shift of the farmers to the use of organic methods of farming.
• Compensation System of State Farm Insurance With the philosophy, State Farm should provide insurance brands to students and young adults falling in this age gap in order to detach them from other insurance and make them independent.
• Irrigation Systems in Farming Because of the changing climate, and the region landscape, most farmers use irrigation schemes to support their practices of subsistence farming.
• Swidden Agriculture: Shift Farming Although this farming technique has been efficient in the past, it has proved to be unsustainable with the current increase in the global population.
• Small Scale Farm-Household System In general, a farm household system is comprised of the various parameters that govern the operation and sustainability of the system.
• Farming and Animal Consumption In essence, debate on farming methods and animal consumption has been a challenge not only to farmers but also to the society. It is, therefore, necessary to consider that numerous changes would be required to […]
• Large-Scale Shift to Organic Farming to Increase World Food Supply However, the acceptance of non-organic farming as the solution to the world’s food problem is not unanimous and there has emerged a vocal group advocating for the use of organic farming.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Farmer Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on farmer.

Farmers are the backbone of our society. They are the ones who provide us all the food that we eat. As a result, the entire population of the country depends upon farmers . Be it the smallest or the largest country. Because of them only we are able to live on the planet. Thus Farmers are the most important people in the world. Though farmers have so much importance still they do not have proper living.

Importance of farmers

Farmers have great importance in our society. They are the ones who provide us food to eat. Since every person needs proper food for their living, so they are a necessity in society.

There are different types of farmers. And they all have equal significance. First are the farmers who grow a crop like wheat, barley, rice, etc. Since the maximum intake in the Indian houses is of wheat and rice. So, the cultivation of wheat and rice is much in farming. Moreover, farmers who grow these crops are of prime importance. Second, are the ones who cultivate fruits. These farmers have to prepare the soil for different types of fruits. Because these fruits grow according to the season. Therefore the farmers need to have a great knowledge of fruits and crops. There are many other farmers who grow different other types . Furthermore, they all have to work very hard to get maximum harvesting.

In addition to the farmers contribute almost 17% of the Indian economy. That is the maximum of all. But still, a farmer is deprived of every luxury of society.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conditions of farmers in India

The condition of farmers in India is critical. We are hearing suicide news of farmers every week or month. Moreover, farmers are all living a difficult life from past years. The problem is they are not getting enough pay. Since the middlemen get most of the money, so a farmer gets nothing in hand. Moreover, farmers are not having money to send their kids to school. Sometimes the situation gets so worse that they are not even having proper food. Thus farmers go in famine. As a result, they attempt suicides.

Furthermore, the other reason for the worst condition of farmers is Global warming. Since Global Warming is hampering our planet in every way, it affects our farmers too. Because of global warming, there is a delay in season. As different crops have their own season to ripe, they are not getting nourishment. Crops need proper sunlight and rain to grow. So if the crops are not getting it they get destroyed. This is one of the main reasons why farms are getting destroyed. As a result, farmers commit suicide.

In order to save farmers, our Government is trying to provide them with various privileges. Recently the government has exempted them from all the loans. Moreover, the government pays an annual pension of Rs. 6000 to them. This helps them to at least have some earning apart from their profession. Furthermore, the government provides quotas (reservations) to their children. This ensures that their children get a proper education. All the children should get a proper education in today’s world. So that they get a chance to live a better life.

At last, farming is a profession which hard labor and effort . Moreover seeing the growing population of our country we should take initiatives to help farmers of our country.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Who are farmers?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Farmers are the one who grows crops in farms. Thus they provide us food to eat.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why are farmers attempting suicides?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”Farmers are attempting suicides because their profession is not providing them even food to eat. Moreover, their farms are getting destroyed. As a result, it leaves them with nothing.”} }] }

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• climate change

America’s Young Farmers Are Burning Out. I Quit, Too

I n 2023, Scott Chang-Fleeman—a young farmer like me—put down his shovel. A post on his Instagram read, “Shao Shan Farm, in its current form, is going on indefinite hiatus.” From the outside, the burgeoning farm had the makeup of one that could stand the test of time. In reality, his experience of farm ownership was wrought with challenges.

A farmer in his late 20s, Chang-Fleeman started Shao Shan Farm in 2019 to reconnect with his roots and provide a source of locally grown heritage Asian vegetables to the Bay Area. He quickly secured a clientele and fan base—two of the greatest hurdles of starting a farm—and became the go-to for San Francisco’s high-end Asian eateries.

But after four years of creative pivots to withstand unexpected hurdles that included financial stress, severe drought, and a global pandemic, Chang-Fleeman made a choice that many young farmers are considering: to leave farming behind. Why he left and what could have kept him on the land are critical questions we must address if we are to have a sustainable and food-secure future.

The USDA Census of Agriculture reported that in 2017, nearly 1 in 4 of the 3.4 million agricultural producers in the US were new and beginning farmers. Many of these new farmers are doing exactly what it seems American agriculture needs: starting small farms. According to the most recent data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) in 2019 , farms with annual sales of less than $100,000 accounted for about 85% of all U.S. farms. And though not all of these small-scale farms are necessarily organic, small farms are more likely to grow a diversity of crop types, use methods that reduce negative impacts on the climate, increase carbon sequestration, and tend to be more resilient in the face of climate change.

Read More: How Extreme Weather Is Affecting Small Farmers Across the U.S.

There has been a growing interest among younger people in recent years in sustainable and organic farming practices, as well as in local food systems. This interest has led people in their 20s and 30s to enter into small-scale farming, particularly in niche markets such as organic produce, specialty crops, and direct-to-consumer sales.

As a result, both congressional Democrats and Republicans have maintained that encouraging young people to farm is of utmost importance in ensuring the stability of our food system. But getting young people into farming may not be the problem. Keeping them on the farm may be the hardest part.

I should know. I quit too.

Chang-Fleeman got his start in agriculture right out of college, where he spent several years working at the on-campus farm. As a third-generation Chinese American, he noticed a distinct lack of Asian vegetables at local farmers markets, particularly those that were grown organically, and suspected there would be a demand should a supply exist. He started trialing some varieties, and his suspicions were quickly affirmed when samples of his choy sum caught the attention of chef Brandon Jew of Mister Jiu’s, a contemporary Chinese eatery with a Michelin star in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Jew provided some seed funds for what was to become Shao Shan Farm in 2019.

During the first year running his farm, Chang-Fleeman focused his sales on his relationships with local restaurants, while attending some farmers' markets sales to supplement income. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, he lost all of his restaurant accounts overnight.

Like many farmers at that time, he pivoted to a CSA model, offering farm boxes that provide a household with an assortment of vegetables for the week.

“So literally over a night, I reworked my crop plan” he told me. “Just to get through that year, or through that season, not knowing how long [the pandemic was going to] last.”

As if a global pandemic wasn’t enough, in 2021, California entered a drought, and he lost the ability to irrigate his crops come mid-summer, which meant a hard stop for production.

“I was hoping to hit some sort of a rhythm, and every year felt a bit like starting from scratch,” Chang-Fleeman reflected.

Throughout farm ownership, he worked side jobs to compensate for the slow build of business income and the fact that he could only afford to pay himself a monthly salary of $2,000. He regularly worked 90 hours a week. At the same time, farm expenses were on the rise.

“The cost of our packaging went up like three times in one year and the cost of the produce didn't change,” he explained. “Our operating expenses went up like 30%, after COVID.”

In four short years, Chang-Fleeman experienced an avalanche of extenuating circumstances that would bring most farm businesses to their knees. But the thing that finally catalyzed the closing of his business was burnout. He relayed the experience of the exhaustion and stress building over time until he reached a breaking point. “If I don’t stop now, it’s going to kill me,” he recalled thinking.

Chang-Fleeman’s burnout reminded me of my own story. In the fall of 2018, I took what ended up being a two-month medical leave from an organic farm I managed in Northern California in order to try to try to resolve a set of weird symptoms that included dizzy spells and heart palpitations. If you know anything about farming, fall is not the time to be absent. It’s peak harvest time and the culmination of all of your work is underway. But as my medical anomaly continued to worsen, I came no closer to getting back to work. After many doctor visits, several trips to the specialist, a flurry of blood tests, and a week of heart monitoring, it took one Xanax to solve the mystery.

Read More: ‘ They’re Trying to Wipe Us Off the Map.’ Small American Farmers Are Nearing Extinction

The prolonged physical stress that I had been harboring at work had triggered the onset of panic disorder, a nervous system affliction that had led me into a near-chronic state of fight or flight mode, causing a swath of physical symptoms not typically associated with “anxiety.”

For me, this was a wake-up call. I turned to a slew of Western and naturopathic remedies to alleviate my symptoms, but ultimately, removing the stressors of farm management was the thing that allowed me to, mostly, reach a nervous system balance. Even still, six years later, I’m constantly navigating the ‘new normal’ of this diagnosis.

A pilot study conducted by agriculture researcher Josie Rudolphi and her colleagues in 2020 found that of 170 participants, approximately 71% met the criteria for Generalized Anxiety Disorder. By comparison, in the US, an estimated 18% of adults experience an anxiety disorder. Rudolphi’s work indicates that these disorders maybe three times more prevalent in young farmer and rancher populations.

This rang true as I went from farm to farm trying to figure out what so often goes wrong in a new farm operation. Again and again mental health was a through-line. Collette Walsh, owner of a cut-flower operation in Braddock, PA, put it to me bluntly: "I usually get to a point in late August or early September, where there’s a week where I just cry.”

How can we build a farming economy that helps young farmers not only stay, but also thrive on the land? The Farm Bill , a federal package of legislation that provides funding for agricultural programs, is one route. As the reboot of the Farm Bill approaches, it’s a critical time to ask these questions and advocate for policies that support young farmers and the barriers they’re facing in maintaining a long-lasting career in agriculture.

Take for instance, Jac Wypler, Farmer Mental Health Director at the National Young Farmer Coalition (Young Farmers), who oversees the Northeast region’s Farmer and Rancher Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN). The organization was established by the Farm Bill in 2018 to develop a service provider network for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural workers that was dedicated to mental well-being. Through the network of service providers she directs, called “Cultivemos,” Wypler and her colleagues utilize a multi-tiered approach to address mental health in farming spaces. Cultivemos partners provide direct support in moments of stress and crisis as well as peer-to-peer support spaces.

An expanded (and subsidized) program that scales efforts like Cultivemos to a size commensurate with the young work force is clearly needed. But it’s only part of the picture.

“While we believe that it is important to make sure that farms, farmers, and farmworkers are getting direct support around their mental health,” Wypler explained. “We need to alleviate what is causing them stress.” 

Cultivemos works to address the structural root causes of stress which can include climate change, land prices, and systemic racism, to name a few. They focus on communities that are disproportionately harmed by these structural root causes, specifically Black, Indigenous, and other farmers of color. Finally, they seek to make this impact by regranting funding directly into the hands of these farmers.

“The way I think of regranting is that the USDA and these large institutions are the Mississippi River of funding.” Wypler says. “We’re trying to get the funding into these smaller rivers and tributaries to disperse these funds and shift that power dynamic and leadership dynamic.”

The next Farm Bill cycle will be critical in ensuring this work is continued. In November of 2023, lawmakers signed a stopgap funding bill that allows for a one-year extension on the 2018 Farm Bill. Lawmakers are currently in deliberations over the bill until September when it will be up for a vote. Young Farmers underscores the importance of the appropriations process, which is when program areas that are authorized in the farm bill are allocated funding.

Back-to-the-landism has waxed and waned throughout the last hundred years, booming in the pre-Depression years of the 1930s, dying in the war years and then storming back in the 60s and 70s. When my generation’s own farming revolution came along in the early 2000s, I was similarly swept up. I imagined when I chose to farm that the path would be lifelong. What I hadn’t accounted for, as a determined, starry-eyed changemaker, was the toll that a decade of farming through wildfires, evacuations, floods, power outages, and a global pandemic would take on my mental health.

Don’t get me wrong:  I was happy working hard with my two feet planted firmly on the land. In a better world I and people like Scott Chang-Fleeman would have kept getting our hands dirty, making an honest, if modest, living providing good and wholesome food in synch with the rhythms of the planet.

But to borrow a word from the world of ecology, being a young farmer in today’s economy is “unsustainable.” The numbers don’t work economically and, eventually, any mind trying to square this un-squarable circle is going to break. The economic, physical and mental challenges are all interconnected.

It’s hard to find an American, Republican or Democrat, red or blue state resident that doesn’t want more young hands on the land. We all rightly see agriculture as a pathway to personal fulfillment and a way to make our food supply healthier and more secure. But words and intentions can only do so much. We must answer these very real problems with very real subsidy.

If we don’t, my generation might be the last to think of going “back-to-the-land” as something actually worth doing.

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Vertical farming technology could bring indigenous plants into the mainstream

ABC Rural Vertical farming technology could bring indigenous plants into the mainstream

One of the most modern and high-tech farming methods may soon bring some of Australia's oldest surviving plants into the mainstream.

It's all part of the long-term plan for Indigenous-owned company BoomaFood and its indoor vertical farm in Cessnock in the NSW Hunter Valley.

The farm is producing greens like lettuce and micro herbs, but BoomaFood founder Corey Robertson hopes to expand into native herbs and crops.

"We're working with traditional owner groups wherever possible to understand where they have access to certain indigenous seeds … and working with them on how to propagate those," he said.

Mr Roberston said the business was finalising testing of its mainstream lines before launching into the market, with plans for native plants to follow in the future.

What is vertical farming?

Vertical farming is exactly what it sounds like — plants are grown in vertical rows, rather than horizontal as in traditional farming.

The method is increasing in popularity  due to its "season independence" and more sustainable production.

The farms can be in built in warehouses, greenhouses or, in the case of BoomaFood, specially designed shipping containers.

The farms use artificial light, temperature, water and humidity control, meaning they can provide more food on a smaller footprint than traditional farming.

At the BoomaFood farm, micro herbs can go from being planted to ready for harvest in just seven days.

The operation has the capacity to produce more than 5,000 heads of lettuce in 36 days, 22,000 plugs of herbs in 28 days and 80kg of micro greens from each food box every seven days from its 2,000-square-metre shed.

University of Queensland protected cropping expert Paul Gauthier said vertical farming used 92 per cent less water than traditional farming methods and cut land use by 52 times.

Dr Gauthier said that was all while increasing crop output tenfold.

Dr Gauthier, who is one of the world's leading experts in vertical farming, said the practice would prove even more important as climate change progressed.

"We can't even predict the weather for one week," he said.

"But when you put all the plants indoors, you can predict the weather inside your cubic farm for the next week, the next month, the next year … for the next 100 years, as long as you have power."

Dr Gauthier said, as well as the environmental benefits, the automation involved with vertical farming reduced labour cost.

"We have some of the highest wages in the world, so the labour cost is quite significant," he said.

"And in farming at the moment, that is critical, because it's very difficult to find people to get into farming."

While automation requires fewer entry-level jobs, it does demand skilled and educated employees to oversee the process, which often comes at a higher cost.

For Mr Robertson, that's exactly the point of BoomaFood.

The project will create at least 16 local jobs and aims to employ young people, women and Indigenous workers.

"We have … accredited units of training to make sure that the staff who come on board here and are part of our supply chain have those units of competency to give them qualifications," Mr Robertson said.

"That gets our mob above award wage so we can start closing some poverty gaps as well."

First Nations knowledge

One element of the project is seed germination and propagation services with plans to supply seedlings to clients in traditional in-field farming and regeneration.

Mr Robertson wants to experiment with native herbs and is working with plant biologists at the University of Newcastle.

"We're on a discovery tour, a discovery session," he said.

"We've had some Aboriginal corporations from across the state, and interstate, come to our farm already and we're having those conversations … so you just don't know where it leads."

Dr Gauthier estimated there were about 2,000 Indigenous crops in Australia, of which only about 50 are used commercially.

"We will need more and more [Indigenous] knowledge, because they have seen way more than we have seen," he said.

The National Farmers Federation (NFF) estimated Indigenous farmers made up fewer than 1 per cent of the workforce.

Mr Robertson said that while he was proud of what this project would do for sustainable farming, the most important aspect was the impact it would have on Indigenous people's involvement in the agritech industry.

"[We are] showcasing that First Nations businesses are taking their seat at the table to go and help lead the market and be part of a broader supply chain," he said.

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