Recently, many farmers seem to have begun converting their family businesses into agricultural corporations. One of them hired several young people from the city and I thought it might be a new beginning. However, when I spoke to the CEO of that company not long ago, he told me that in fact only one person had stayed with the job. The apparent gap between the ideal and the everyday is what makes it too difficult.
It is a shameful story that I myself hated farming as a student. When I was still in elementary school, my hardworking father who was in his early 40s then, cleared a mountain to set a field of about three hectares. He soon planted about 6.000 little saplings of tangerines, each 7 to 80 cm in height. To enrich the exposed, nutrient-poor soil, chicken manure was given to the small seedlings. On sunny days, poultry farmers would bring the fertilizer to the fields every day. Nowadays, plastic bags are used, but back then the manure was still in rice paper bags. We used to spread them during the daytime as the moist air at night would make them too heavy.
There was a lack of manpower at the time and I had to help every day after school. I would arrive at around three o’clock in the afternoon and stay until it was dark, covered from head to toe in chicken manure from spreading 200 to 800 bags of fertilizer. When I was in high school, I decided to go to an American university because I wanted a different life than that of a farmer. I was a student of computer sciences, when one morning the phone in the dormitory kept ringing. “When are you coming home?” It was my father who had been diagnosed with late stage liver cancer. He told me he had three months left to live.
Forty years have passed since. The once little saplings, fed with chicken manure, have grown to over three meter tall trees. Today, we can harvest the most delicious mandarin oranges from this grove that once was a plain field. These trees have grown on the time axis of nature, not human perception of time. I am now a parent of two children myself, past the age of my father when he began his work. He told me that he cultivated this field in the hopes that I, a little child back then, would one day succeed him. However, my quiet father only ever said, “do what you like,” and never pressured me to take over the farm.
Today, the life of a farmer that I once rejected, even hated, is very appealing and I fully believe that farming is wonderful work. As the digital and virtual world continues to expand, so does its relation to the real economy. The world in which money produces money itself is expanding. I came to think that work that can only be produced by accumulated labor will be of real importance.
Being a farmer means cultivating agricultural products by touching the soil while confronting nature. Production efficiency cannot be measured by the standard of economic efficiency, and it cannot be cheated. Despite the universal sciences, humans could not make a single leaf. Yet, how important it is to remember that the oxygen released by these leaves so naturally keeps us alive. By the way, it is said that the amount of oxygen that one adult inhales in a year is equivalent to 1.4 trees of two meters in diameter. At some point, an imbalance might develop somewhere and there no longer is enough oxygen. If that happens, humans will surely produce and sell oxygen.
Consider this and destroying nature for the sake of economic gain is out of the question. How humbling to think that a single weed can provide you with oxygen. Be humble about nature. I really feel Humans can only live with the support of nature. I can’t do big things myself, but I will protect the fields, protect the nature of the woodland and village, coexist and co-prosper even with weeds.
When I think about it, I feel proud to be born in the family of a farmer.
TANIIFARM By Yasuhito Tanii