Farming (1871)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION: Society and Solitude. 1871. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerso,  Vol. 7. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904. 135-154.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0007.001/1:10?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

Depicts farming and the farmer as in consonance with nature and the land. In a sense, the farmer is close to both the wise man of the woods and the poet. Farming is a good approximation of the simple life. Plus, farming furnishes our food; intersection of land usage / environmentalism and labor.

KEYWORDS: food, animals, land usage, environmentalism, Transcendentalism

Emerson argues that it is good and natural to cultivate the earth for mankind’s benefit; the farmer is a man to be celebrated for his simplicity (due to living in a sustained relationship with the natural world). The farmer does what he needs to improve the output of his farm (including feeding meat to his plants, and fattening his animals). “The glory of the farmer,” Emerson begins his essay, “is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be” (137). The creativity and self-reliance of farming produce, for Emerson, the conception of the farmer as the natural abolitionist: “If it be true that, not by votes of political parties but by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a slave state as fast as it is surrounded by free states, then the true abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws and constitutions, stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and making a product with which no forced labor can compete” (141).

Nature functions according to the natural cycles of the earth, and the earth works in harmony with the farmer:
“Science has shown the great circles in which Nature works; the manner in which marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants supply the oxygen which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon which the plants absorb. These activities are incessant. Nature works on a method of all for each and each for all. ... The earth works for him [the farmer]; the earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect” (143-144). Hence, Emerson claims the natural proclivity of the earth towards human labor:

On the prairie you wander a hundred miles and hardly find a stick or a stone. At rare intervals a thin oak-opening has been spared, and every such section has been long occupied. But the farmer manages to procure wood from far, puts up a rail-fence, and at once the seeds sprout and the oaks rise. It was only browsing and fire which had kept them down. Plant fruit-trees by the roadside, and their fruit will never be allowed to ripen. Draw a pine fence about them, and for fifty years they mature for the owner their delicate fruit. There is a great deal of enchantment in a chestnut rail or picketed pine boards” (146-147).

His final statement about “enchantment in a chestnut rail” is paradigmatic of Emerson’s overall support for humanity's “improvements” on nature; the improvement goes both ways, as the farmer becomes a man of nature’s cycles and seasons, but, like his friend A. Bronson Alcott, Emerson supports the idea of improving upon nature by cultivating it and making it work for humanity’s interests.

Emerson then provides a rhetorical history of farming, beginning with the “savage” who does not know how to farm, but gets by with a stick and hunting:

The first planter, the savage, without helpers, without tools, looking chiefly to safety from his enemy,—man or beast,—takes poor land. The better lands are loaded with timber, which he cannot clear; they need drainage, which he cannot attempt. He cannot plough, or fell trees, or drain the rich swamp. He is a poor creature; he scratches with a sharp stick, lives in a cave or a hutch, has no road but the trail of the moose or bear; he lives on their flesh when he can kill one, on roots and fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is lame; he coughs, he has a stitch in his side, he has a fever and chills; when he is hungry, he cannot always kill and eat a bear,—chances of war,—sometimes the bear eats him. 'T is long before he digs or plants at all, and then only a patch. Later he learns that his planting is better than hunting; that the earth works faster for him than he can work for himself,—works for him when he is asleep, when it rains, when heat overcomes him. The sunstroke which knocks him down brings his corn up. As his family thrive, and other planters come up around him, he begins to fell trees and clear good land; and when, by and by, there is more skill, and tools and roads, the new generations are strong enough to open the lowlands, where the wash of mountains has accumulated the best soil, which yield a hundred-fold the former crops. The last lands are the best lands. It needs science and great numbers to cultivate the best lands, and in the best manner” (151-152).

Emerson ends with the image of the farmer as the simple man of Nature: “That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young children belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor,—the man who lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is the naturel of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards” (153-154).

 

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