I have had the great privilege of talking with farmers over the past few months, all of whom are uncomfortable with the way agriculture in New Zealand is heading.
I freely admit my sample is biased. I've been talking to people who want change for a variety of reasons and in a variety of directions. Our common bond is our love of the land and our wish to still be farming and producing healthy food, for generations.
If you google farming, according to the Oxford Dictionary it's ‘‘the activity or business of growing crops or raising livestock''. There is no mention of the farmer's interaction with the land; actually no mention of persons or earth at all.
Interestingly, close on the heels of the definition above comes the second definition ‘‘Farming is a gaming tactic where a player, or someone hired by a player, performs repetitive actions to gain experience, points or some form of in›game currency. Farming usually involves staying in a game area with a spawn point that generates endless numbers of items or enemies. The player collects the items or continuously kills the enemies.''
Not surprisingly, many online games strictly prohibit farming.
In an attempt to find a description of farming that included land and people, I looked up animal husbandry - ‘‘the science of breeding and caring for farm animals''.
As far as I am aware, the scientific paradigm makes no allowance for care or connection - emotion is incalculable and in the realm of the anecdotal.
If one delves further solely into the origins of the word husbandry, the dictionary defines it firstly as the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals and secondly, as the management and conservation of resources.
I am curious as to why the introduction of ‘‘animal'', as in animal husbandry, turned the definition into science, but that is a digression.
Husbandry is certainly something more akin to my personal definition of farming. Apparently the notion of husbandry derives from Middle English, in which the sense of the word was farmer or husbandman. Husbandman in turn derived from Old Norse, husbondi (with accent over u and o), from hus (with accent over u) ‘‘house'' and bondi (with accent over o) ‘‘occupier and tiller of the soil''.
‘‘A husbandman was a person who lived on and cultivated the land, a farmer'' - the dictionaries' words not mine. Why has our modern definition of farming moved so far from the land?
I'm not blaming science - science has produced some truly wonderful options - but perhaps we have become bedazzled by the seemingly simple solutions and reluctant to address the consequences of our actions.
Perhaps we have been silenced by the arrogance of scientific methodology that if it cannot find an answer dismisses the question, rather than questioning the model and searching for an answer through an improved understanding.
We need a shared dialogue between science and the rest of the community, many of whom observe acutely and understand the problems to hand through direct experience on the land.
Many of whom, incidentally, have excellent solutions to the problems facing agriculture today.
This has been rather a convoluted way to get to my point that farming is more than just collecting endless products from the land while eliminating perceived enemies to production with whatever comes to hand.
If we go back in time, history and language, if we look to other societies around the globe who have maintained a direct association with the land, we find that farming is far more than just the business of growing crops.
Farming is about stewardship (the act of taking care of or managing something), about managing the land for future generations while ensuring that it provides for the present.
Next year is the International Year of Family Farming. Let's recognise that year and support farmers as the people who occupy and till our soil, who care for our land and manage and conserve our resources.
Let's give farmers the recognition they deserve and the resources to change the definition of farming to reflect their connection to, and care for, the land that supports us all.
• Dr Marion Johnson is a Nga Pae te Maramatanga research fellow based at the Centre for Sustainability at the University of Otago.