The Eightfold Agrarian Way

The "Eightfold Agrarian Way" is an outline of an agrarian philosophy for the twenty-first century. It is both a catalog and a prescription: a catalog, because it began as an attempt to find the common ground in three thousand years of agrarian thought; a prescription, because I believe that the philosophy I found is as valid for the future as its first authors thought it for the past. But it is only a beginning, a starting point for further discussion and debate. In later essays I will try to flesh out some of these ideas.

New Agrarianism, most importantly, is not about preserving a way of life or recreating the past; it is about building the future. These eight principles draw heavily on past expressions of agrarian thought, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century America, but they are not bound by them. Agrarians have few models but the past, and the past is valuable for the lessons it teaches, but each of us must live in the present and plan for the future.
New Agrarianism is about creating a new kind of rural community, one that is genuinely rural but that is fully a part of twenty-first century American society. The old ways don't work any longer, as mid-size farmers and residents of dying towns have been slowly recognizing for decades. Large-scale commercial farms apply an industrial model to agriculture that is destructive to rural culture and community.

Sustainable agriculture is a beginning, but New Agrarianism is about more than agriculture. It is about a search for sustainable community, sustainable culture, sustainable life. A New Agrarian may not be a "family farmer," nor a full-time farmer, nor even a farmer at all. Agriculture is not the only possible expression of agrarian values; many forms of craft or community building could be thought of as agrarian.
No philosophy can succeed if it applies only to a small minority within a society, and New Agrarianism is about deep, broad, long-term change. We live in a society that is majority urban, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. New Agrarianism, creatively interpreted, could apply equally well to life in the city—to any life, in fact, that values connections with nature, with place, and with community.

If you re-visit these pages discover that they have changed, don't be surprised. The Web is not a book, and the "Eightfold Way" is a work in progress. And I hope that, like any good philosophy, it remains so!

The eight principles

1. A New Agrarian sees human life as a part of nature and believes that human and natural processes should be integrated.

2. An agrarian believes in, if not the primacy, then at least the uniqueness of agriculture among human endeavors.

3. A New Agrarian tends to be conservative in philosophical and practical terms, if not necessarily politically.

4. A New Agrarian believes in the worth of old-fashioned virtues, but also believes that one doesn't have to be a prude about them.

5. A New Agrarian prefers informal means of social and economic organization to formal ones.

6. A New Agrarian strives to integrate the economic and spiritual aspects of his or her life.

7. A New Agrarian embraces "neighborliness" as a practical and informal balance between individualism and communitarianism.

8. A New Agrarian believes in the importance of place—that localities should be distinctive and that how one lives should be tied to where one lives.