An End to our Farm

Last November I had an accident. The surgeon asked me what I did for work. I told him I was a farmer. He suggested, given my injury, that I look for a different occupation. At the very least, he said, I would be unable to farm for 6 months. He also said I would be unlikely to run again.

Fortunately the surgeon's prognosis was a little pessimistic.

Sitting here, seven months later, the three steel plates and numerous screws holding my foot together have been removed.

There is still significant discomfort but I am far more mobile than I was led to hope.

However, we did take the surgeon's advice. Consequently, we no longer own a farm. My partner in life took the opportunity that our new freedom provided to move across the country to pursue the next step in her career.

I am contemplating my next steps.

In some respects the move has been in line with the natural evolution of my thoughts around farming. We had been comtemplating moving our farming business into town. One plan was to create a high intensity urban farm based on a smaller block of our own land and making use of some vacant community land.

That is where my interests now lie. I want to help bring farming back into people's lived environment and embed it in the experience of a community.

Ordinary Grief - the Hopelessness of Hope

Grief is an expression of letting go of our hopes - or our desire for the world to be other than it is - as those hopes dissolve and sink in the inevitable and uncontrollable tides of life.

A series of recent experiences find me grieving.

But the genesis of these thoughts on grief was in my first experience of total grief as an opening. A reservoir of grief associated with killing animals. Something I had done to feed my family for more than 10 years. Animals we raised on the farm. Animals that we treated kindly, fed and nurtured... only one day to separate them from their herd, single them out and then kill them. Up close and personal. Looking them in the eye. Ending their life. Skinning them, gutting them, dismembering them, slicing and chopping them. Feeding them to our children and our dogs.

The brutality and violence. The ultimate betrayal.

All this I had done willingly, without real reservation and only a little trepidation around minimising suffering for the animal. The grief was never acknowledged or even really sensed. But it was stored.

One day, when I had enough space to notice, it came pouring out, along with a thousand other griefs stored in my life, in a stream of tears that lasted days. An enormous reservoir of unacknowledged grief that cracked, crumbled and left me wondering if I would drown, if I would ever recover.

I didn't recover, nor would I want to. Since that time I have felt every grief more clearly.

What I did discover was an opening. The suffering was not necessary. Instead it was contingent on my confused relationship with conflicting hopes and desires that were overriding an innate kindness and compassion. I stopped killing animals and found different ways to feed myself, my family and my dogs. The font of that grief ceased to flow the day I resolved to stop killing.

But the sources of grief are myriad. Farming, like life more generally, provides endless circumstances to activate our complex and conflicting hopes. Little griefs around the weather, what people will pay for what we grow, the fickle markets, the relentless regulatory and administrative burden...

For the past few weeks I have been grieving the loss of more complex hopes - for unfulfilled plans for the farm, lost potential in relationships that I value, and the slow dismantling of stories that I have used to explain and justify my being here now.

I have the choice to sink or swim. Sometimes, even when I would like to swim, it is hard to know which way is up. It has been like that recently. Dumped by the waves of life's ocean, I have swirled, struggling to breathe, vision a blur, wondering, as so often before - When will I surface?

This time however, for the first time, there is a second question - Can I surface without clinging to a new set of hopes?

Hope is delusion

In Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that hope can be an obstacle to peace in our daily lives.

I had recently come to a similar conclusion.

Hope is about wishing for things to be other than they are. It is a form of desire, and an easily accessible distraction from being in the present moment.

Desire is human and probably unavoidable. Obviously, a capacity to succumb to our unskillful desires is a powerful source of suffering.

But not all desires are unhelpful or unskillful. Desire can help to develop intention and provide impetus for action in the present moment. When our desires are for skilful action, and to ameliorate suffering, they can be a powerful force in practice in the present moment.

However, even with skilful desires we can suffer. In this case it is the delusion around our skilful desires, rather than the desire itself, that can lead to suffering.

The delusions include the belief that we are in control of the fulfilment of our desires, that once fulfilled they will bring happiness, and that we can predict conditions for our future happiness. These are expressions of the fundamental human delusions about satisfaction, permanence and independence.

The attachment or clinging to the desire, in the face of these delusions, leaves no room for the present or for an uncertain future.

Recently I have been struggling with my hopes and desires.

We are changing our farm in a purposeful way in response to our values and our changing circumstances. This planning process is useful in coordinating our intention and motivating us to create a better farm.

It is also a trap. It is very easy to attach hope to the elements and timeline of such a plan. Inevitably, our hopes take us away from now, and freeze a view of our happy future. Suddenly the plan gets in the way of engaging with the present moment and accepting that the future is ultimately beyond our control. It gets in the way of accepting our ongoing capacity for dissatisfaction and the realities of future uncertainty and a conditioned arising well beyond our control.

In one short step our hope can become a source of agitation, frustration and misery.

Breaking up the Family Farm

A couple of days ago a wave hit my universe. My parents clearly indicated that they are looking to move on from the farm.

For 17 years we have run a family farm. My wife and I, our children and my parents.

During this time our circumstances have inevitably changed. We started with four adults working closely together on a common aim. Over the past 8 years I have increasingly worked alone with assistance from those around me when their time and energy permits.

That transition has not been an easy one. I have struggled with a sense of purpose, a sense of value, a sense of connection and usefulness, what it means to be a 'man', what it means to be human, what is required for a good life and what is enough.

All these questions have swirled in my head as I participate in (and try to manage?) the complex dynamics of eight closely related people while transforming a farming business to more closely align with my ethics, raising a family in a stable and loving environment, cultivating the loving relationship with my partner, supporting my parents and contributing positively to the broader community that supports our existence.

My parents' intention to leave presents a painful irony, and also provides a 'lesson' for practice.

A large part of our motivation for a family farm was to be available to my parents in the latter stages of their lives. To be close enough to offer support, but also to give them the opportunity to be involved in something meaningful (family & farm), at whatever level they were capable, for as long as they liked. I had imagined a contented and contributing 'retirement', a slow withdrawal to a comfortable and supported sunset of their lives.

The obvious irony is that, despite our good intentions, our fantasy was different to my parents' imagined future existence and from their lived experience. They no longer want what we thought they would want (if ever they did), and it is also likely that we behaved other than they expected.

The less obvious irony is that I have arrived at an intellectual resolution of many of my personal struggles. This allows a lived experience of relative joy, love, compassion and occasional equanimity.

However, I still find my tendency is to react rather than to respond in the face of this major and immediate uncertainty. Equally disturbing is my immediate reactive focus on material rather than emotional and existential concerns.

How easy it is for immediate circumstance to subvert the practice of years. How quickly the joy, love, compassion and equanimity flee in the face of difficult circumstances.

On the one hand it is a relief to be able to recognise that I have reached the boundaries of my skill. On the other, it is painful to know that the embodiment of my practice still rests on such ambiguous and fragile foundations!

Sitting vs Doing

This morning I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ. TNH writes:

If you read the Bible  but do not practice, it will not help much. In Buddhism, practicing the teaching of the Buddha is the highest form of prayer. The Buddha said, “If someone is standing on one shore and wants to get to the other shore, he has to either use  a boat or swim across. He cannot just pray, ‘Oh, other shore, please come over here for me to step across!’”. To a Buddhist, praying without practicing is not real prayer.

I have always thought of prayer as a form of meditation. I have always thought that prayer was designed to help inform our day to day interaction with the world. 

Similarly, I have always thought the object of formal meditation is to nourish and inform our daily practice of life/the dharma.

Formal mediation helps me to lead a more ‘meditative’ life. The experience of sitting meditation, in all the forms that I practice, assists me in more fully realising the dharma in my every day life. 

I agree with TNH - the practice of the dharma in the moment is the highest form of prayer. But in order to step towards this highest form I know I need the formal sitting. I also need the teaching, reading, thinking and support of the people and world around me.

Formal meditation, the guidance of skilful teachers and the love of those that support me have been crucial in my cultivation of the Path. Cultivating the Path in my day-to-day life is my opportunity to practice the highest form of prayer.

Engaged Buddhism: Personal Responsibility vs Proselytising

There is the temptation, in adopting a personal ethical framework for farming, that we feel impelled to promote its validity more generally. The compulsion might be motivated by good intention, an underlying sense of insecurity, or an egoist vindication of our choice.

It would be particularly easy in adopting a farming approach that attempts to eradicate human imposed suffering on animals to dive headfirst into the acrimonious political milieu surrounding animal rights that exists in most western countries.

Indeed, the relative merits of personally versus socially engaged practice is the subject of current and quite vigorous debate in the broader Buddhist community. While one side of the debate focuses on personal behaviour and enlightenment, there are many Buddhists who feel a responsibility to apply the insights of their practice in influencing social, political, environmental and economic injustice.

For example, Thich Nhat Hanh’s reinterpretation of the five precepts for lay life could be viewed as a call to act in the face of suffering wherever it may occur, not just in our personal sphere.

In our case, farming represents our major interaction with the broader community. It is not a private practice. These views have been published for anyone to read. Nor do we remain silent on our values when questioned. In that sense we are highly engaged, particularly in our local sphere.

However, as individuals and farmers, we steer clear of instructing others on the ‘shoulds’ of life. We provide an unambiguous example of our interpretation of Buddhism’s implications for farming. We make our interpretation freely available for all to see. But we avoid actively ‘convincing’ others of the ‘truth’ of what we do. The judgement of others is beyond our control, as are most things in our lives. There are cycles of suffering in trying to control the uncontrollable.

We also suspect that proselytising as a misinterpretation of engaged Buddhism. Instead, engaged Buddhism asks us to respond skilfully to the suffering we see in the world where we can – in other words to enact our ethical underpinning. It is in our actions that we hope to provide not only a concrete response to suffering that results from injustice but an example that inspires others to examine more closely our motivations.

Engaged Buddhism does not ask us to actively solicit conversion to our point of view. Rather it opens a door to a different view on life, a door through which people may choose to pass.

We leave it to others to notice or seek out our example if and when it is relevant and to make their own judgement on its value. They will either find the ‘truth’ in our practice and respond, or our concerns and considerations will seem irrelevant.

What is Buddhist Farming?

It is clear that there are three key dimensions to a Buddhist farming practice. These are the:

1. Overarching commitment to decision-making and action that concords with Buddhist principles.
2. Implementation of a system of farming in line with these principles.
3. Particular commitment that, as moral agents, our actions do not cause suffering to the animals that share the farm with us.

The first requires a focus on acting skilfully with respect to suffering in each moment and not attaching to either our future aspirations and fears or historic achievements and failures.

There is no question that we will make both skilful and unskilful decisions. Sometimes they will be made purposefully, sometimes in ignorance, and sometimes in the absence of all the relevant information. They will, in turn, ameliorate or promote suffering.

Our aspiration is to cultivate the Path in all its dimensions to the best of our understanding in every present moment and in every present circumstance. Remonstrations for past failures of commission or omission (be they near or far) or aspirations for future successes will only lead to more suffering.

For the second, it is apparent that is possible to devise systems of farming that are consistent with a broader Buddhist life practice and in particular do not require animals to suffer. These systems are also capable of producing food and maintain functional ecological systems.

However, they will not be found in the agro-industrial world. Agro-industrial systems are highly problematic at best and, where they involve farming animals for human consumption, anathema to basic Buddhist philosophy[1].

Agro-ecological systems that do not involve the slaughter of animals for food, crop protection or other purposes provide a suitable starting point for Buddhist farming. These systems can be designed to incorporate animals to underpin their ecological integrity. Unfortunately, there are few existing examples to serve as models for the aspiring Buddhist agro-ecologist.

For the third, simple and objective standards exist to guide a farmers interaction with other sentient animals on the farm. Both the UNESCO Universal Declaration of Animal Rights (1978) and the Declaration of Animal Rights[2] written by Orian and Penzel (2011) offer such standards. Neither declaration precludes the interaction of humans and animals. The former provides for humane killing of where justified. The latter sets more stringent and detailed standards to ensure that human needs and desires do not cause suffering for animals.

For the Buddhist farmer the UNESCO standard would offer a minimum benchmark, with Orian and Penzel’s declaration providing a more refined goal. In either case a Buddhist agro-ecology would exclude animal slaughter for any reason except perhaps for compassionate and humane euthanasia in dire circumstances.

This allows a clearer statement of our intention as Buddhist farmers. We aspire to coordinate our ethical beliefs with our day-to-day actions by:

1. Acting skilfully in each present moment to ameliorate suffering caused by attachment, aversion or delusion.
2.  Letting go of our attachment to perceived past and potential impending failures and successes with respect to those aspirations.
3. Working to create functional and sustainable ecosystems that grow food for our community.
4. Encouraging animals to be integral components or our agro-ecology.
5. Ensuring that all animals on the farm are free to be animals, and to lead a life without fear of suffering at the hands of humans.

At present, though our farming practice meets much of this intention, some practices on the farm do not.

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[1] With respect to animals, this is a view clearly supported by Singer and Mason’s (2006) last chapter titled What Should We Eat, which judges all forms of industrial animal farming as unethical.

[2] http://declarationofar.org/declaration.html