The Art of Farming
From my second-floor office window, I love to watch the strawberry pickers. In the chill of February, they are a confetti of brightly colored hoodies, vests, and knitted caps, tossed against a green expanse. They work fast. Ripe berries dance from basket to box to forklift to transport in choreographed efficiency. As I arm wrestle with spreadsheets and sales quotas and supply chains, the vista soothes my stress with its earthy simplicity.
Painters and poets have long idealized pastoral settings. I get it. What’s not to love about the interweave of man and nature, cute domestic animals, and amber waves of grain? Even Hollywood has jumped on the hay wagon, setting epic stories against the beauty and romantic charm of rural farmlands.
I also get that what I see and what we depict in art is not reality, but our brushes blurring the hard edges of agriculture’s financial, physical, and political challenges. Farmers struggle to remain profitable against an assault of natural and man-made forces, with almost half of them also holding down a day job to help make ends meet, according to author Sarah Searle in her article “Stop Romanticizing Farms”. Many have succumbed to the allure of agritourism, creating Instagram-worthy moments for customers infatuated with the quaint farm experience.
My uncle, the pig farmer, was a noteworthy exception. When our family would drive to visit our cousins in Southern Illinois, no child’s voice ever piped up, “Are we almost there yet?” Our noses told us without question when we were within several miles of their homestead.
Though far from picturesque, that hog farming operation was highly successful. With his suspendered, bacon-fed girth, my uncle would inhale deeply and proclaim, “Ah! That’s the smell of money!” His native business savvy ultimately enabled him to buy the local bank and finance the college educations of his nine offspring.
Still, what I see from my window are not farmers but migrant laborers, working harder each day than I ever have. I am grateful and I lift a sweet red strawberry in salute with a smile: “Thank you.”