Sustaining Cultivation 503Moreover, most farmers find themselves trying to live on borrowed time with
this borrowed power. So many acres, so little time. The speeding of the treadmill
associated with the Big Ag way is itself a structure of monologue, encouraging
farmers to seek the quick answers, the readily available answers, the silver bullets,
even if one has a slightly uneasy feeling about the shooters of those bullets. No one
can rely on their own experience for everything. We simply don’t have time to
reinvent the many wheels of our lives. We all have to rely on what others tell us. It’s
inescapable, unless your plan is to stay in bed for the rest of your life. But the
problem gets worse and worse the faster the treadmill spins. And given the local
intensification of this treadmill through the farmer’s problem, farmers are increas-
ingly less likely to look to their neighbours for answers, lest either party gain an
advantage over the other thereby. Instead they turn to the monologic answers that
the treadmill itself provides (only sending it spinning all the faster). The Big Ag
phenomenology of doing agriculture thus becomes as well a phenomenology of
knowing agriculture, of the cultivation of knowledge, of the cultivation of the
ignorable, of the cultivation of the self, in this case a largely monologic self.
Cultivating oneself within the monologue of Big Ag does not ultimately ease
the lives of most farmers, despite its lure of easy answers. The bankers of borrowed
power and borrowed time occasionally call in the loans – not every year, and not
on every farmer. But there are payments to be made here, even if they are not in
the currency of money alone. This is a deeply disorienting experience for those
who have little connection with other conversations of life and self.
To change metaphors, the structures of agriculture are a tough ride, and a lot
of farmers get bucked off. It’s a real shock when it happens – what I have called a
phenomenological rupture. When you’re flying through the air, everything you
know and do and are comes suddenly into question. Most farmers hit the dirt in a
bit of a daze, get up, dust off and see little else to do but to try to get back on the
rampaging horse, if they can manage to get a foot in the dangling stirrup and with
a mighty heave swing their way back up onto the saddle. And if they can’t ...
But while you’re flying through the air, if the winds are right, you may hear, at
just the right moment, of a safer way to land on the rodeo dirt, and of a whole
different way to ride when you dust off and get back up. (Maybe you’ll even hear
of a different, gentler horse.) Not every farmer does. But when you’re flying through
the air, you listen to the voices in the crowd like you never have before. This
moment of phenomenological rupture can actually be a kind of opportunity. So
many of the sustainable farmers we interviewed described their decision to change
practices as a sudden event. Given the connections between the structures of doing
and the structures of knowing, and given the connections of these to the structures
of self, there is so much that has to change that very often it needs to be all changed
more or less at once – if it is to be changed at all.
PFI is one of those voices in the crowd, and it is a voice with a distinctive man-
ner of speaking. It is a dialogic voice. It is a voice that tells you that you don’t have
to go along to get along. It is a voice that the farmers of PFI have come, not to
adopt as their own, but to adapt to their own.