I think about this scene from Rogue One from time to time, I can’t remember much about the rest of the movie but this one scene speaks out to me. This scene has been immortalized in meme format and spread across the internet far and wide because I think this sentiment cuts deep into our modern psyche. There is something about farming and the self-sustaining nature of it that speaks to us at a fundamental level. Though historically speaking we have only been farming for a very short period of time, the activity has radically altered our behavior and how we interact with the world and each other. The implications of those alterations are another discussion entirely, what I want to explore in this blog post (briefly) is what farming really means culturally from my viewpoint. There are many caveats to this exploration. I will be looking from the viewpoint of agrarian societies. These are the societies that have eventually conquered the planet and invented most of the technology we have today due to the division of labor and food storage. Other methods of living, such as hunting and gathering and horticulturalist societies, will not be covered though they represent, by time, a much greater swath of human living and development.
One of the big draws of the lone farmer/homesteader myth is the simple life imagery it invokes of our past. Until recently most people were involved in agriculture. With the largest shift away from this trend starting in the industrial era and truly accelerating with the invention of the internal combustion engine and the Born-Haber cycle which allowed the true industrification of agriculture. The appeal of returning to this ‘simpler time’ that we have of this mythical past before industrialization seems to pull at something deep inside us. Most modern people do not realize how technical farming has always been and the sheer amount of work and knowledge that is needed to get a field of plants from seed to crop without it being eaten, destroyed, or just dying. Still this myth has appeal to our complicated lives where there seems to millions of subjects pulling at our attentions at all times.
Another way in which farming appeals to us is in its apparent self-sufficiency. The myth that once you get a farm going you can rely on yourself and no one else. This of course ignores the fact that most of the tools used are made through industrial processes. Even if you can make all of the tools yourself, most homesteads failed with lethal consequences. Entire civilizations fell to famines and other natural disasters that a lone farmer would not be even remotely able to contend with.
Still the appeal persists, even for me, despite the hardships and risks. I think some of the appeal is the self-determination aspect, where you succeed or fail based on your own efforts and not of those we perceive as unreliable (and ignoring nature). You don’t feel like a cog in some unknowable alien machine, but you are the whole machine yourself. There are no emails to answer, no meetings to attend, no space lasers to build. All of your efforts all focused on keeping yourself alive for another season without all of the modern complexities and bullshit.
So when it comes to farming, we really have a soft spot for it. Despite having talents that lie in so many fields the myth of the solo farmer still pulls us.
Originally published 14-Mar-2021
Republished 30-Oct-2025 after finally getting around to restoring this website after a server nuking