Prodigal Farmchild: Parables
Prodigal Farmchild: Parables
by Scout Gabrielle Miller Torres of Geneva, OR
Are you familiar with the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant? As I recall it, several blind men hear that an elephant has been brought to town, but none know what an elephant is. They decide to go out and experience the thing for themselves, together. One touches the tail and declares that an elephant is a rope. Another touches the tusk and determines that an elephant is a spear. Still another touches the ear, and declares it a fan, someone else touches a leg and finds it to be a tree trunk. Two more blind men discover the trunk to be a snake and the flank to be a wall.
Are you familiar with the parable of the farmer’s problem? I doubt it, you see, as it’s a new one I just wrote. A few weeks ago, dad asked me to help him with a repair on the dozer.
“What is the problem we’re looking at?” I asked, peering at a muddle of wires and grease and dirt.
Dad pointed. “That right there is the problem – the solenoid.”
We collected the tools of our trade: a variety of socket wrenches, a flashlight, the replacement pieces, and the lifeblood of most farmers, coffee. We set-to the assembly of our workbench, spreading tools out onto the massive tread of the excavator.
“Where do we start, dad?”
“Well, that right there is the problem, sweetie. There’s a couple ways to go about it and I’m just not sure which will be best. Let’s start over here, and loosen these fasteners.”
A few minutes of frustrating fidgeting later, we both stood back, having struck out on reaching the things we needed to reach.
“Well, that right there is the problem.” Dad said, tugging at his beard. “If I’d put the bucket up in the air before I turned it off, I’d be able to reach these without trouble. Now that I can’t get it started, we’re just going to have to work around it.
It took us a little over an hour to get all the parts out and by that time, I had to go so I could get to an appointment. Eric stepped in to help and as I walked away I heard Dad say, “Now, Eric, you see that? That’s the problem, right there…”
A few months ago the editor asked me to write on a subject that took me a whole publication cycle to ponder. I’m still pondering, and I don’t know that any of what I contribute as an answer to the question will be worthwhile, or make a lick of sense. He said, “Where does an old man like me go to find young folks like you who might be interested in the Small Farmer’s Journal?”
I told him I imagined a great many young folks already took the journal, and he shook his head. Millenials, Gen Alpha, and Gen Z are only reading the publication if they find out about it through a parent or grandparent, or grew up reading it and seek it out again as an adult. There are a very rare few of you reading it because you discovered it yourselves in a library or a bookstore or online and decided that, if this treasure is the spring issue, you simply must see what happens next in the summer issue.
A life skill, a lifestyle, an oral tradition, a publication, a farm – they all must have someone of the next generation to wrap their arms around the thing and love it. A great number of these things are disappearing right and left because there is no one to love them, to learn them. The Heritage Crafts organization of the UK has identified 165+ heritage skills that are endangered because there is no natural influx of people learning these trades. (If you’d like to know more, look up The Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts.) If there is not a natural influx of people from the next generation into the readership of the publication, who will wrap their arms around The Small Farmer’s Journal?
To understand the problem, one must first find the shape of it. But if you only touch one part of the elephant, and you do not have a community who is also looking at the shape of things, how do you fully understand the task at hand? So, I started by asking friends my age in my immediate circle: if you wanted to learn a heritage skill, how would you go about learning it? And if you wanted to seek out a teacher, where would you look?
Well, there’s your problem right there. Immediately folks chimed in with things they wanted to learn: black-smithing, tatting lace, pottery, spinning thread, weaving, carpentry, leather-working. Most of them didn’t even include the answer to the question – where would you go? How would you go about it?
Because, well, there’s your problem right there. Folks don’t know where to go. Some of them had ideas of how to seek it out, but no one had ever attempted it. The answer I liked best, one of only a few answers to the real question: start by learning alone from easily available resources (like the internet), then observe online communities, and finally choose one to participate in that has worldviews that align with your own, to the best of your ability. My least favorite answer was from another person, who said they wouldn’t participate in a hobby or new skill if it began to feel like work.
And of course, there’s your problem right there. A lot of the people who are interested in learning things the Small Farmer’s Journal wants to teach have the thought that it would be nice to exit the cultural zeitgeist of technology and capitalism for something that aligns better with the innate human desire to create, but have become so comfortable with being comfortable and so dependent on the internet as a primary resource that the work it would take to move through that into a different place sounds like it would just be too much.
If the parable of the blind men and the elephant tell us we cannot understand the complete shape of something in a vacuum, then the parable of the farmer’s problem tells us that every time we identify the shape of the problem, we will discover a new layer of the puzzle to solve. Let me hit you with a third and final parable:
Three people step into a country fair fun-house. A very tall man, a short man, and a little girl. They all look into the same mirror.
The tall man says “Look! I’m short and fat now and my feet are tiny!” He is angry to see himself that way.
The short man says “Look at me! I’m tall and my shoulders are huge!” He is thrilled to see himself that way.
The little girl says “Look! Look! My height stayed the same, but my hands are huge and my head is tiny!” She is curious about why she looks that way.
Now, in this parable, which is another original and quite silly, the mirror doesn’t change. The mirror and the experience are the all same. It is the person who changes the mirror.
Let’s put it all together: We cannot understand the shape of something in a vacuum. The more we know about the shape of the problem, the more complex the problem becomes. And finally, for each person, the problem is the same but the approach and the outcome will be different, because the individual dictates their own experience.
Is the internet, as useful and as flawed as it can be, the problem? Yes, and no.
Are the people, as interested and uninterested as they might be, the problem? Yes, and no.
Is the model by which the publication reaches new subscribers the problem? Yes, and no.
Do I have an answer or a solution to the question that was posed to me? Yes, and no.
I am only one person – in my hands, the shape of the problem is just a rope, a spear, a fan. It is not the whole elephant. I know there are a lot of young people who have been feeling disenfranchised by the future they were promised and have begun to look to the past, to the margins, for a life that feels simpler and more rewarding. But do they know where to look? Do we know how to reach them? Ultimately, I believe the answer to the editor’s question requires more voices, more thoughts, to make the shape of the problem complete. I’d like to hear the thoughts of the readership on the matter, to see the question through each person’s fun-house mirror. How do we reach and engage the next generation? Not the one who is reading now, but the one that might not even know we exist? Together, we must find the shape of the problem, we must handle the elephant in the room.