514 Modern Agricultural Reforms
large extent, driven out of our image of farming. And indeed most farms today do
not feel remotely like gardens. Nor do most of our towns and cities, our schools and
neighbourhoods, our workplaces and our public life, at least not much of the time.
These too are increasingly a form of Big Ag, farming us all, not farming for us all.
So let us put the culture back in agriculture of all forms and in all places. Let
cultivation of what Friedmann has termed the ‘gardens of Gaia’ become our under-
standing of what the rural is and what farming should be – of what we sometimes
succeed in and so often fail to attain in actual social and ecological life in both
country and city.^34 To speak of agriculture, then, in this ideal sense, is to consider
the degree to which a state of mind and action brings out, or fails to bring out, the
gardener’s capacity of care for creation.
Which brings us back to dialogue and sustainability. It is something of a
romance, I freely confess, to consider agriculture as cultivation in this largest sense,
as care of the earth. But it is a romance that allows us to appreciate how the current
structures of production so overwhelm our better intentions for the cultivation of
the garden. It is a romance with material consequences. It is a practical romance.
But only if we all engage in the conversation of agriculture.
For we probably do not all agree about what it means to care for the earth and
its ecological and social creation. And that is fine. More than that: it is great – as
Figure 20.2 Virginia Moser, PFI member, at the CSA farm she operates with her
husband, Marion Moser, 1999