If there is one idea I want you to take home today, it is this:  community is essential to agrarianism.  To take up an agrarian life style, we must build communities, and these communities must leaven the rest of our society, because the modern world has gone so far wrong that it cannot be corrected; it must be rebuilt.

THE HYPE AND THE HOPE   To begin with, it’s a good idea to separate the hype from the hope in agrarianism.  There’s nothing actually “evil” about hype.  Think of it as the icing on the cake.  Without icing, it would be much harder for the cake to attract kids – or flies.  But the hype is only the promise to call us in.  Once we get beyond the allure, what remains to hold us?  After the hype of agrarianism has excited us, what hope will strengthen us to persevere?

THE HYPE   Although I am poking fun at it now, the romanticism of Agrarianism is really indispensable.  Whose heart has been so thoroughly asphalted over that it does not leap at the thought of owning a little place in the country?  Add to that  the very real joys of agrarian living – clean air, serenity, good neighbours, plenty of exercise,  and good wholesome food and drink  -- farm fresh eggs, milk still warm from the cow, steaming hot biscuits, home-made ham and sausage, and a dipper full of crystal clear cool  water from the well  – Whew!  It sounds like a combination health camp and vacation home.
   Then add in  the siren call of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and independence.  To be free, really free.  To be your own boss, standing on your own two feet like some time-warped transplant from colonial times.  Heady . . .  The picture Andrew Lytle paints in his essay, “Hind Tit” in I’ll Take My Stand offers an unforgettable picture of that self-sufficiency.  From waking in the morning until the day’s end, the man of the house is master of all that he surveys.
   And think of the ideal rural community.  The little village with all the picturesque if sometimes cantankerous farmfolk.  Why, they’re practically wearing their regional peasant outfits from the old country, complete with smocked shirts and embroidery.  Man, pull out the accordion and let’s start the polka!  Or at least pull out the banjo and let’s have a bluegrass festival.  I can’t keep my feet from clogging.
   And really, it’s not all hype.  In fact, it’s all true, every bit of it.  The farm fresh food is there.  The fresh  air.  The exercise.  The neighbours.  The escape from the frenzied friction of city life.  The fishhook is, those things don’t come alone, and they don’t come without effort.

A TYPICAL DAY ON THE FARM   Your typical day on the farm might start this way.  You pull up at your barn to find two sections of wooden fence completely obliterated, as though a small but very accurate tornado had passed in the night. 
   Further investigation reveals that your big bull has demolished the fence to get into the pasture with all the cows and your little bull, who you’ve been keeping separate from the big bull so the big bull wouldn’t use him for goring practice.  A quick glance over the pasture shows that the little bull is still alive, but all your breeding plans have now been ruined for another year, thanks to the big RED bull hopping the fence into the pasture with the little WHITE bull and all the cows that were only supposed to socialise with the little WHITE bull.
   And look over there on the other side of the barn.  Are those pigs?  Yes, and they’re not where they’re supposed  to be.  They’ve escaped again.  And they are headed for your neighbour’s pasture, where the nine of them will do more damage to his turf in one hour than eighty-eight men armed with shovels, picks, and a destructive attitude. 
   Now follow me to the barn to feed animals.  When you try to take the lid off the barrel, you quickly learn where the chickens have been roosting.  Don’t forget the other smells of agrarianism, manure being the chief one.  Some of it simply won’t wash off.  Pigs, for instance, produce about four times as much manure as humans.  Every day.  And pigs have a smell, well, peculiar to pigs.  You can scrub it off with Clorox or sulphuric acid or mildly radioactive nuclear waste, but that’s about all that will wash it off.
   Anybody ready to milk the cow?  First, get a cow.  Whoops, first find the cow.  Then get the cow into the stall.  Then get the cow to hold still.  Then sit on your stool and put your bucket under her udder and your head in her flank.  Wash off her udder.  Now, what are those pointy things hanging down there?  Where’s the tap? 
   FLAP!  The cow smacks you in the face with her tail.  You persevere.  FLAP!  She smacks you again.  You’re pinching her.  FLAP!  You grab a piece of baling twine off the floor to tie her tail to her leg, reach her around behind her to grab the tail, and that’s the time she picks to . . .  well, you get the picture.
   How about some farm fresh eggs?  You’ll have plenty, if your dogs have left you any chickens. 
   Whoops!  No time for breakfast now, you’re out of feed.  Have to drive in town for corn and sweet feed and scratch feed.  Whoa!  Look at the price on that stuff.  I’m going to have to put my animals on a diet.
   Now imagine all this in the rain.  And let’s stretch that rain out for a week.  Let plenty of cold rain trickle down the back of your neck, and let your feet step into mud a foot deep.  Walk out into the barn. 
   Look at the milch cow.  Isn’t there something unusual about her?  What’s this?  She can hardly stand, and she’s swollen twice her size.  O, no!  It’s bloat!  Who left the cover off the feed barrel?  The cow ate half a barrel!  Call the vet!  No, never mind the vet, hand me that water hose. 
   Quickly you cut off the brass fitting and begin stuffing hose down the cow’s throat, hoping that your hose enters her esophagus and not her windpipe.  If you are really devoted, you will suck and blow on the free end of the hose. 
   WHOA!  Cow!  Don’t lie down!  If she lies down it will kill her.  Got to keep her moving, got to keep feeding that hose down her gullet until it hits the gas pocket and deflates her.
   And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes you may find your horse down with colic, and call every friend you have, and pour Wesson oil down him by the gallon and walk him and walk him and walk him from here to New York, and leave him at 1:30 in the morning thinking he’s okay, only to find him on his back dead as a hammer in the morning.  And you think back and remember that yesterday morning he was just fine, but this morning he’s dead, and even in death the burden doesn’t leave because you have to call the rendering plant to haul him off.  And all this happened because some child  -- or maybe even you yourself – left a top off a feed barrel.
   When you drag yourself to bed at night wincing in every joint and muscle, you realise that agrarian life is as far from city life as the Moon is from green cheese.  The responsibility and initiative, the risk, and the unforgiving vigilance that farm life demands tower orders of magnitude above city life, not to mention the physical labour.

THE HOPE   So does that mean we ought to tuck tail and run back to the city before we all die of muscle cramps and lockjaw?  Absolutely not.  In the first place, the romantic visions of agrarianism are not mere hype.  They are the cream of agrarian life, even though the way to that cream  leads through a trail of tears, mud, and manure.  Above all there is the hope --the great hope -- that even in an insane and inhuman modern world agrarian living can restore sanity and humanity for our children and ourselves.  Speaking as one who for years has butted his head against the granite fortress of modernism, I am more convinced than ever that our only way out is cultural secession.
   What is cultural secession?  To build, in effect, a new world parallel to the existing world.  I am not talking about monastic communities where we just retreat into our cells and let the world go to hell as it may.  I am talking about building a new world right in the middle of the old world, rebuilding society along lines more fitly proportioned to the nature of man, a world that moves at man’s pace for man’s ends, and not a machine’s pace for a machine’s end.  (And let me make myself clear, I mean nothing coerced.  Agrarianism must be voluntary or it will be stillborn.)
   To build that new world we will have to build not only new communities but also new institutions.  We have to examine the values of our modern world – money, power, success, Big Brother government, frenzied consumption, the ever-bigger-ever-better notion of progress – and we have to ask which ones really fit into the Christian civilisation we want to leave our children, and which do not. 
   We have to reject all the prizes and rewards of modernism, in other words, we have to re-align our own values.  Then we have to build the institutions that will support those values and credential our own leaders – families, communities, schools, universities, professional and trade and business organisations.  We have to transfer our loyalties to these new institutions, honour their credentials, and we have to abandon and boycott the old institutions.  We have to build a new world parallel to our old, dying world.
   Nor is this a new idea.  It is exactly how the primitive church grew to change the entire Western world.  In the parable of the leaven Christ explains to us how it is done. (Luke 13:21)
   A woman, he says, took a lump of leaven and hid it in a three pecks of meal until the all the meal was leavened.. 
   Quoting this parable may make you squirm a bit, because you will remember that the parable refers to the Kingdom of God.  And you may be asking yourself, isn’t he going too far identifying agrarianism with the Kingdom of God? 
   No, for this reason.  I am a Christian, and whatever I do, whatever goal I set for myself and for society, must first serve the Kingdom of Christ.  But there is another forceful reason. Modernism – all that comprises the secular, materialist worldview -- is dying exactly because it has abandoned the God of the Scriptures.  As it becomes more consistent with its own false presuppositions, it chokes on its own falsehoods. I do not say that Christianity is the answer merely because I have no other answer, but because that is the correct answer.

THE ONE OR THE MANY?   One of the modern errors that agrarianism must overthrow is extreme individualism.  Every good lie – and every good heresy – contains a little bit of truth.  So individualism contains some truth, but not the whole truth.  In our day men have abandoned practical Trinitarianism, so they cannot help but fall into one of the twin errors of extreme individualism (egoism) or socialism (communism). 
   Whoa!  What is practical Trinitarianism?  I thought there was only theological Trinitarianism.  Wrong -- the Trinity is not only the greatest mystery in the cosmos, the greatest riddle of theology, it is also the only practical pattern for living, for the Great Trinitarian God has made the cosmos in his own image, both many and one.
   The Trinity reconciles the question, Which is ultimate, the many or the one?  Is the individual supreme, or the community?  In modern life that question is viewed as an irreconcilable opposition.  Either the many rule, or the one:  socialism or the ruthless free market.  They cannot be reconciled.  In many places our modern world (primarily in our private lives alone) has answered in favour of the one, but without lasting satisfaction – as Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones lamented in their great hit song. 
   Extreme individualism isolates the individual from that web of normal human relations that defines us all.  Atomised into individuals without roots, place, or community, even the tender bonds of family between husband and wife and parents and children are dissolving.  Wealth increases, while love and trust disappear. One by one rugged individualism has shut them out, painting itself into a very lonely corner.
   Of course, the opposite – the supremacy of the many – doesn’t solve the problem, either.  The Soviet Union and socialism around the world have proved that with miserable failure.  Nevertheless, in our public lives, modernism has subjected us to the ultimate rule of the many.  The collective supreme in our public lives, the individual supreme in our private lives, and what is the result?  Slaves distracted by the bread of consumerism and the games of immorality.
   What is the Trinitarian answer to the problem of the one and the  many?  Equal ultimacy.  Subordination in love.  Reconciliation into the ordained harmony.    We learn that answer first of all in the family, with its hierarchy and chain of command upwards and downwards, ruled, restrained, and motivated by love.
   The next level of Trinitarian harmony lies in the community, and this is the focus of my remarks today.  As you no doubt suspected when I recounted the perils of farming, you simply can’t go it alone.  I have a big family (seven children, three of them married, six living with or near us) and we still need outside help.  If we are to build viable agrarian communities, we have to help each other.  We can’t do it by ourselves.  We have to work through communities. 

PERSONAL PRECAUTIONS   For those of you who want to try agrarian living, I have a baker’s dozen worth of tips.  Some of these come from my own experience in the last three years, some from a recent conversations with Allan Nation, editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer, Lynn Miller, Editor of the Small Farm Journal, and Charlie Walters, editor of Acres, USA. 
   Don’t quit your day job.  Even the best farm will take three or more years to reach profitability, so you will have to subsidise your farming activity with outside income.  Don’t leave yourself high and dry without money.  It takes a lot to build up a place and keep it up.
   Don’t spend money yet.  Once you have a place, observe it for a year before you do anything.  Jim Kibler told me that you have to live in a place a year before you even begin to know it, and I have found that true, but incomplete.  He should have said a dozen years.  Observing means looking at what grows at what time of year.  That will tell you a lot about your soil and what you need to do.  Successful farmers walk their land.  Walk yours.  Listen to it.  Don’t even put down lime before a year of observation has passed.
   You cannot compete with commodity farming.  Don’t even try.
   Study out how to farm.  Farming is not instinctive.  Read books and periodicals.  Watch.  Ask questions of those who are already doing it well.  Approach it with humility.
   Most farms fail from what Allan Nation calls “heavy metal poisoning.” They are overcapitalised, i.e., they have more capital invested in tractors, trucks, trailers, and equipment, than they can use, on land overvalued by real estate development.  On land that overpriced you can’t make an adequate return farming. 
   Tie up money in assets gaining value, not losing value.  Assets losing value are land, tractors, buildings, etc.  Assets gaining value:  cows, calves, ewes, lambs, improving pastures.
   Rent before you buy so that you can perfect your skills.  You have to be able to make the land pay.
   Never take government money.  What the government pays for, the government controls, including you. 
   Never borrow money.  Doing so seals your doom and forfeits all independence.
   Pragmatism doesn’t work.  You may think that it is pragmatic to follow the so-called “proven” methods of commodity farming, but in fact their pragmatism doesn’t work.  It requires huge capital and labour inputs that will break you and destroy your soil.
   Grow grass & let the animals do the work.  Not marijuana-type grass but green grass.  Concentrate on growing fine grass and let the animals do the harvesting.  You’ll build your soil and develop a crop at the same time. 
   Ultimately, you have to develop your own market.  If you’re not willing to do your own marketing, you shouldn’t do your own farming.  You cannot compete with commodity farms.
   Raise food for yourself and your family.  If you have to maintain your off-farm job so that you can stay in the country but you’ll never be able to earn a living off your farm, so be it.  Better half a loaf than a mouth full of gravel.

PRACTICAL COMMUNITY CONSIDERATIONS   We must have communities to survive.  Through communities we can enjoy and establish for our children and ourselves a lifestyle independent of the present world.  Call it modernism or techno-fascism or simply insanity, I don’t want to live there anymore, and I want to leave something better to my children.  This is what I call “cultural secession.”
   I advocate that people who share traditional Christian culture form communities -- not as a method of retreat, but of rebuilding.  Our job is to create parallel institutions and a parallel worldview that by its excellence and beauty will supplant the current culture and economy.  Now, I am not numb to the dangers.  The opportunities for stupendous pharisaical legalism abound here, so we must take great care not to end up worse off than we started.  Here are a few practical considerations, another baker’s dozen.

•  ** Communities ought to be in rural areas or small towns, it seems.  You can certainly try one in an urban setting.  Let me know how that works.
• **  As much as possible, communities ought to grow organically, rather than centrally planned from the top down, adding one family at a time rather than a mass migration.
• ** The community must be open and not closed, must look and reach outward and not inward.  Think of it as an advancing beachhead, not a besieged  enclave.
• ** Individuals must be able to support themselves.  Many will have to keep one foot in two worlds, to earn a living outside the community.  (Long live the Internet and modern telecommunications!)  That will enable them to get started and live within the new community.  (I don’t see how anybody could move to a small farm and get it paying in less than three years, unless it was exceptional to start with.)
• ** Starry eyes ought to be de-starred.  Rural life is physically challenging.  Its monotony can deaden.  You have to work at providing intellectual and artistic stimulation.  Count the cost before laying the first brick. 
• ** Individuals settling in new communities ought to want a lifestyle change.  Move from the city to the country expecting to live as a mall-rat and you’ll just disappoint yourself and annoy the folks at Wal-Mart. 
• ** Individuals in the community must be self-supporting, and communities economically viable.  At the beginning, members probably ought not depend on the new community alone for sustenance.
• ** The community must work like leaven in the local area and culture where it finds itself.  Unless the members of the community cultivate social intercourse with their neighbours, they won’t transfer anything, and certainly not ideas.  You can’t sit there like a scab on the land.  You have to put down roots and mingle with your neighbours.
• **  Humility, humility, always humility.  You’ll never make it in a rural locale if you show your neighbours that you’re a smart aleck know-it-all.  You probably have more to learn from them than they do from you anyway.
• **  Physical does matter.  A community is physical.  People ought to work and live conveniently close together.  (Think of urban churches, where members might drive an hour or two just to get to church. Under those circumstances physical fellowship is practically impossible.)
• **  A community must have a transcendental center.  It must self-consciously know what it is and what it stands for.
• **  A community must have continuity.  There is no covenant without a covenant people.  The culture must self-consciously pass itself on to the next generation.
• **  But a community that is all rules and rigor without compromise or compassion will shatter shortly on its own tyranny.  God is gracious, and has decreed freedom for us.  In fact, he insists on it.  I think Robert E. Lee’s single rule as president of Washington College sums it up best:  “Make no unnecessary rules.”

   I originally wrote this piece as a speech for the Virginia League of the South Agrarian Hedge School on Dec. 8, 2001.  If you are serious about agrarianism or living on a farm or even thinking about it, you ought to subscribe to these three publications:

Small Farmers Journal
P.O. Box 1627
Sisters, Oregon  97759
www.smallfarmersjournal.com 
Quarterly, $30/year, 125 folio pages

The Stockman Grass Farmer
P.O. Box 2300
Ridgeland, Mississippi  39158-2300
(800) 748-9808
www.stockmangrassfarmer.com
Monthly, tabloid, $28/yr.

Acres, USA
P.O. Box 91299
Austin, Texas  78709
(800) 355-5313
www.acresusa.com
Monthly, Tabloid, $27.00

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