Farming for the Long Haul

“Farming is a vocation . . . not a job. Starting there is already a step toward resilience, because it means we recognize that we are in this for the long haul and that it will take a great deal to drive us out.”—Michael Foley

Over the past seventy years, the industrial farming system and its ruinous practices have exhausted our soils, poisoned our groundwater, and provided the basis for a food culture that is making most of our population sick. In order to move forward, toward a more regenerative and sustainable form of agriculture, author and organic farmer Michael Foley suggests we will have to look back to recover the lessons that traditional agricultural societies can teach us about subsistence, stewardship, social organization, community, and resilience.

Farming for the Long Haul is a guide to building a viable small farm economy—one that can withstand the economic, political, and climatic shock waves that the twenty-first century portends. It draws on the innovative work of contemporary farmers, but more than anything else it appeals to the experience of millennia of farming societies that maintained resilient agricultural systems over centuries of often turbulent change.

“Beyond advice on how to farm,” Foley writes, “we need to take seriously the advice implicit in older cultures about how to live.”