Some people believe that farming is for families. When you think about homesteaders or farmers, they almost always are a family. This is really troubling me. Why? Because I believe Farming is for everyone. Let me tell you something I saw on Facebook that made me sad.
There’s a Facebook farming (permaculture) group that I was in. I saw a couple who owned land and they wanted to give apprenticeship. They offered free lodging and lessons about their style of farming. However, their requirement is that (1) the trainee must have a partner, and (2) the apprentices have a family or are planning to. When asked about why these are their requirements, they answered that they believe the philosophy and purpose of farming are for families.
That’s a big thing to say, especially since the rise of people wanting to stay single is getting bigger and the percentage of couples who do not want to have children are also rising. There are more than a million teenagers to young adults today that are choosing to focus on themselves and their careers more than creating families.
These are people on the planet that rely on supermarket food and the majority of them have very little experience with farming, or even growing plants. Do I need to mention that the prices in the supermarkets are two times more expensive than the local and/or wet market?
These types of philosophies from farmers who are supposed to open their doors to nature make me sad because I think it’s obvious that every single human being eats food. That means that everyone should learn how to connect with their food. The most effective way of doing that is to learn how to grow it. We need more open farmers that have good natural farming practices. We need them to open their land and teach more people to be independent in food and connect with what they put inside their bodies.
We don’t need any more families to grow food, neither do we need any more humans to sustain agriculture. We can grow food as a community; we can help everyone’s hunger. Whether you are a teenager, a single mom, or a retiree, I want to welcome you to farming and I want to completely remove this idea that farming is naturally allotted for families. Even my husband and I started at the age of twenty-three (23), and we didn’t know anything about Filipino crops or farming. We also don’t have children and are not planning to at all.
In the end, we are all connected to the environment. We are all children of the soil, and once we stop dividing ourselves to each other only then do we grow closer to Mother Nature.
