Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

more on making a living farming, this time from Wendell Berry

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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from An Interview with Wendell Berry
November 8, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/healy11082010.html

TPH: The son of a family friend wrote you to ask if there is a future in 
organic farming, and what can a young man do? You responded to him and he was 
so taken by your response he became an apprentice at an organic farm in 
California.

WB: Well, I’ve gotten a lot of people in trouble I’m afraid...

TPH: Do you think it’s still a viable way to make a living? I see these 
people at the farmers markets and see how hard they work - is it still a 
viable thing to do?

WB: Of course it’s a viable thing to do and it does involve hard work, but 
the important question is about work and who you’re doing it for and whether 
or not you like to do it. If you’re working for yourself, working hard for 
yourself and your family on a little farm, that’s quite a different thing 
from working hard for a boss or working hard at a job you despise—which most 
people seem to do. Why else would they keep saying, “Thank God it’s Friday?” 
So the right questions are, who you’re working for and what the work is and 
whether or not you are in some sense called to do it.

TPH: The calling?

WB: Calling - vocation—that’s another idea that has declined maybe 
disastrously among us. The decline of the idea of vocation into the idea of 
“a job” is really a catastrophe in a way. “Vocation” suggests that all of us 
have some work that we’re called to or fitted for. “A job” means some way to 
earn a living whether we like it or not - whether we like the work or not - 
or even whether the work is damaging to the world or our neighbors or not.
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