A Manifesto on the Teaching of Agriculture

A number of reasons, both practical and emotional, why I believe that the addition of gardens to every school is key to ameliorating the mental health crisis that rots this country.

I continue to struggle with any positive vision of the future after the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. This article can be viewed as a sequel to “On Political Violence” as I haven’t felt much like writing since then. Last week’s article was something that has sat in draft form for weeks and required a few small stitches to be acceptable to publish, and even then I don’t consider it my best work. I am struggling with the situation so greatly because I have not been able to answer why this continues to happen and what I can possibly do to stop it. Yes, this is a gun violence problem: America’s widespread culture of gun ownership as a signifier of (or replacement for) masculinity: our statistics for domestic gun deaths per year outrank some countries’ annual totals while at war. On a different level, this is a violence problem. In countries where guns are banned there are still knife attacks and fights and bullying, but none happen with the same frequency that ours do. This is an anger problem too. America has become an angry country. With the future of the world continuing to look bleaker and bleaker, this should come as no surprise. The impending climate crisis has robbed children of any expectation to live at the same level of comfort as their parents. Wages have failed to keep up with inflation while the expectations of productivity have skyrocketed. What are we supposed to point to that will give any child hope? 

In my eyes, the practice of agriculture is the best way to demonstrate that the continuation of the human race is a worthwhile achievement in and of itself. My experiences with gardening took place from a young age. Though my interest was later reinvigorated with the video game Stardew Valley, those productive hours I spent outside were some of my best childhood memories. The infamous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” that the Nazis plastered above their death camps is a sick bastardization of a truer sentiment expressed throughout history.¹ It is not the “work” itself that sets a person free, but rather that the fruits of one’s labor allow one to externally purchase goods for otium and internally discover a purpose for existence. We analyzed this sentiment in a minor poem by Petronius, but other Latin authors like Varro, Columella, and the well-renowned Vergil have written about the pleasure that working the land can bring. Even the famous German philosopher Karl Marx described how, under the current economic system, the growth of large-scale industrial farming² would squeeze any peasant-farmer out of the market. Indeed, the small-scale growers we see today either operate to accommodate a niche market for a crop or out of necessity, like subsistence farmers or homesteaders. Gardening made a brief resurgence in the ‘40s because nationalist politicians asked the people to install “victory gardens,” but the practice ended with the war. 

In addition to teaching the subject of agriculture itself, agricultural instruction serves as a supplement to existing areas of study. Carolus Linnaeus first used Latin in its capacity as a dead language to codify plant names. As textbooks in the field tend to prepare readers for military and political works, vocabulary surrounding food is often neglected in studies. This becomes a problem in the study of the authors mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as Cato and Pliny the Elder(s). A common word in binomial nomenclature, for example, is the Latin word sativum. It is used to distinguish wild-growing species of certain plants from their sown, or intentionally planted cultivars. Students of agriculture can also gain a deeper understanding of applied mathematics. A common lamentation in classrooms across America is that some fear that the information they learn will have no practical use in their future careers. This is a valid concern: no matter how much time Johnny spends buying 7 apples to take on a train going to St. Louis at 92 miles per hour, word problems will not convince the broader population that math is fundamentally necessary. Instead of hypothetical problems, teachers need to give students information with real stakes. Both subjects can use data from the previous years’ harvests to calculate harvest size, profit margin, and annual efficiency with information that their class has an emotional investment in. Even chemists benefit from this relationship: breaking down the common components of fertilizer into their base elements demonstrates potency. Testing the pH of soil is a common method of analysis that can be done cheaply while fulfilling a lab requirement.