Principle 2

A New Agrarian believes in, if not the primacy, then at least the uniqueness of agriculture among human endeavors.

Agriculture, which is simply the production of food and fiber for human use by natural means, depends more closely on natural processes than any other human endeavor. It is dependent upon natural processes for its success, processes that remain outside human control despite our attempts to reproduce or manage them—the weather, the life cycles of plants and animals, the workings of life on a cellular level.
     To borrow an idea from Wendell Berry and countless others, while most human endeavors are linear processes, agriculture is cyclical. Manufacturing extracts resources from the earth and converts them to a new and permanent or semi-permanent form for human use. Recycling aside, those natural resources, once turned into a manufactured human process, never return to their natural state. Even in non-industrial societies, objects such as pottery, tools, and weapons may outlive their creators by millennia. The products of agriculture, by contrast—food, at least, if not fiber—are consumed and converted, via digestion and decay, back to their natural constituents—which are made, by other natural processes, into food for another season.
     I should say that sustainable agriculture, at least, is cyclical. "Modern" agriculture is more likely to follow the one-way industrial model of production. A New Agrarian, believing that agriculture is and must be different from other human endeavors, believes in the need for sustainable agriculture.
     The New Agrarian also believes that that it is both possible and desirable for some forms of manufacturing to take advantage of natural processes (see principle 1) and thus become more agrarian. But agriculture above all must work with nature rather than against it.

>> 3. philosophical and practical conservatism