Farming as art

After the wonderful dinner on Saturday with a group of friends, my host asked me whether farming is an art. Being an artist who lives on a farm, I had a hard time initially answering his question. I mulled it over and formed this opinion:

Art is a compulsion, an involuntary process, like retching. Artists are compelled into their work like a pregnant woman is compelled to start a full term labor until the delivery of a new creation. Organic farming is not art.

The organic farmers whom I know enter into their work voluntarily and knowingly, like ecological missionaries. Farming (when not soldiering against the natural system) is a voluntary testimony of faith, an act of daily worship and submission to God’s natural system. The net result is not a new creation, but the stewardship of creation.

The artists whom I know channel something inside that must come out. The farmers in contrast orient themselves willingly to larger forces that flow around them symbiotically. Both farmers and artists become great by the degree of their compliance and humility in the process.