Means>Ends

If there one thing certain about farming, it’s that it can wear down your certainty about almost everything else. One goes into farming thinking that it will be a certain way. But, you don’t ever get there.

I feel like when I think in my imagined old farmer trope, the words that old farmer says the most are, “well, maybe”. That farmer is chewin’ on some oat straw, staring past all the work that’s been done, wondering what is worth what.

“Is it going to be a good year?” you might ask.

“Maybe” she might say, “Certainly know after the fact, won’t we”

“Will you be alive tomorrow?”

“Perhaps…but will the tractor start in the morning if I am? That’s the important question.”

I’m not at the oat straw chewin’ stage in my career (if you can call it that). But I have lost most faith that there is an ends to fight for in all this mess. In fact, in working towards any particular ends, not only will I not get there, but I’ll probably get lost along the way.

Ends are destructive. Ends are…The End.

The ends dictates that that we should do whatever is necessary to get there. Do you want to feed the world? Then you must use copious amounts of chemicals, strip the earth of topsoil, and poison the water. That is what the ends dictate. Never mind the fact that so many of the ends that we are sold are manufactured by those with their own ends (it’s all about the Benjamins!).

Get in line, even if it feels wrong, for the sake of the ends.

If there’s anything that this year has highlighted for me more than any other, it is that it’s all about the means. Forget the ends. We have no place to get to. And when we get to wherever we are going, not only will it not be the end anyway, but if the means are done well, we’ll likely be someplace better than we were thinking about in the first place.

Even though it’s not just with farming, farming plays an outsized roll in where we go.

“Forget about where you think you're trying to go." my old farmer mountain sage hybrid trope might say. "Forget the ends. They don’t exist. The means are the ends.”

It’s all about the means.