Envisioning a National Care Farm
Let’s imagine a society where we grow food together, for our families and communities, and feed our most vulnerable first.
Thus, learning the art of horticulture from experts, and trying experiments in different methods on small patches of soil reserved for the purpose, vying with each other to obtain the best returns, finding in physical exercise, without exhaustion or overwork, the health and strength which so often flags in cities — men, women and children will gladly turn to the labour of the fields, when it is no longer a slavish drudgery, but has become a pleasure, a festival, a renewal of health and joy.
— Peter Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 1893
Care farming is an evidence-based therapeutic paradigm in which people with disabilities and mental illnesses are provided opportunities to work on farms. While most common in Europe, care farming can be found in many parts of the world. Participants work on farms in order to socialize, gain skills, spend time in green spaces, exercise, contribute to the community, and cultivate relationships with plants and animals. Horticultural or occupational therapists are often available to help solve accessibility problems.
The UK, a country where care farming is prevalent, has “an estimated 8750 people attending these farms for therapeutic opportunities each week,” according to geographer Richard Gorman.
What might society look like if care farming was a central public institution?
Food: The missing Universal Basic Service
In his 2022 TED Talk, ‘A socialist perspective on the pursuit of happiness,’ journalist Aaron Bastani makes the case for four Universal Basic Services (UBS): education, healthcare, transportation, and housing. They would be “universally available, free at the point of consumption and paid for through progressive taxation, a bit like the NHS in the UK.” Additionally, according to Bastani, we’ll all finally have a four-hour work day.
Marx wrote that capital “usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.” Indeed, it seems many of us feel that to be true today— that the demands of work leave far too little time for wellbeing and enjoyment.
Peter Kropotkin advocated for a four-hour work day in the 1890s, the Wobblies organized for it in the 1930s, and John Maynard Keynes predicted we’d have it by 2030. Post growth philosopher Kate Soper argues, echoing Marx, that shorter working hours are necessary not only to tend to one’s own wellbeing, but also to care for others.
This may seem beyond the realm of possibility. After all, as the saying goes, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” But with enough movement-building, Bastani’s vision is entirely plausible — it’s not even all that different from social democracies today. “There are still markets for many, many things,” Bastani says. “The state isn’t involved in making chocolate bars or socks or silk ties. But it is the central player in these four things we all need for liberty: housing, education, health care and transport.”
Bastani’s larger utopia is chock-full of robots, asteroid mining, and other high-tech wonders. While I worry about the environmental costs and unintended consequences of such technologies, his case for four Universal Basic Services and a four-hour work day is compelling. When it comes to concrete demands for a post-capitalist future, they seem realistic, low-risk, and high-payoff in terms of social and ecological wellbeing. Exciting as it is to imagine this world, however, for me something essential is missing: something like a ‘National Care Farm.’
Introducing the National Care Farm
Akin to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a mainstay of the New Deal in the United States, the National Care Farm would be a federal job guarantee offering union jobs. (Now seems like a good time to apologize to Kropotkin, a revolutionary anarchist, who would shake his fist from the grave if he knew his words were the opening lines to this article. Sorry, Pete.)
Unlike the CCC, however, which only employed men between the ages of 18–25, the NCF would strive to employ anyone who applied. And whereas the former carried out a wide range of ecological projects on public lands, the latter would focus exclusively on regenerative agriculture (I discuss why below). In alignment with the ideal of worker self-determination, teams of farmers would be democratically self-managed. After feeding themselves and their families, they would distribute surplus food to public schools, hospitals, eldercare facilities, and food banks.
Plans for today’s Civilian Climate Corps, introduced in the US congress by Senator Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already include provisions for regenerative agriculture. Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association, writes:
The CCC rightly recognizes the importance of carbon-sequestering regenerative farming and ranching, urban farms and gardens, and local food systems, for climate mitigation and resilience. With food and farm workers drawing the lowest median wage of any sector, the CCC’s $15/hour minimum wage and right to organize would be a significant step towards economic justice.
A National Care Farm is merely an expanded and democratized version of this idea with a particular focus on accessibility.
The University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity advanced its own vision of UBS: “a collection of 7 free public services that enable every citizen to live a larger life by ensuring access to safety, opportunity, and participation: TRANSPORT, FOOD, INFORMATION, LOCAL DEMOCRACY, HEALTH & CARE, SHELTER.” The NCF would check boxes for food, local democracy, and care.
Consider: “If I was already living in this future world, how would the neoliberal food system appear to me?”
Including food as a UBS seems reasonable enough, but why not simply have the government buy it from regenerative farmers and then dispense it in the most efficient way possible? We should do that, too, but access to food production (not just consumption) should be guaranteed for a number of reasons:
- A National Care Farm ensures every person’s right to produce their own food from the earth. (Wait, do we have that right? I argue that we do and that people have fought for it since the beginning of capitalism, if not since time immemorial.) Without a public institution which guarantees equal access to the tools, land, time, knowledge, and community needed to produce one’s own food, some people are bound to fall through the cracks.
- A job guarantee encouraging participation in regenerative care farming would yield substantial social dividends in terms of public health, inclusion of people with disabilities in the formal economy, and societal resilience to natural disasters and other shocks.
- Integrating more of the population into socialized and ecological forms food production will both infuse ecological wisdom into the body politic and help mend what Marxist scholar John Bellamy Foster calls the “metabolic rift” between human and more-than-human worlds.
Like many on the Left who value utopian thinking, I believe concrete proposals are needed to inspire us, give us direction, and stir up healthy debate. Walidah Imarisha writes in the introduction to Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (a collaboration with adrienne marie brown):
We want organizers and movement builders to be able to claim the vast space of possibility, to be birthing visionary stories. Using their everyday realities and experiences of changing the world, they can form the foundation for the fantastic and, we hope, build a future where the fantastic liberates the mundane.
So let’s imagine a society where we grow food together, for our families and communities, and feed our most vulnerable first. Through the lens of mundane capitalist realism, it may appear fantastic — but as its contours come into focus, continue to ask: “if I was already living in this future world, how would the neoliberal food system appear to me?” Once the status quo bias is flipped, does it really seem so radical?
Land reform and tending to social wounds
Caring means tending to social wounds, not ignoring them. That’s why land reform is a key requirement of this vision for a National Care Farm.
Regenerative agriculture originated with Indigenous peoples around the world. As A-dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa), the Director of Programs: Agriculture and Food Systems at the First Nations Development Institute, describes:
At the heart of the concept regeneration is wanting to renew and correct some of the missteps that have taken us to the point of environmental damage and degradation. We want to create systems that are rebirthing a healthy environment. In order to do that, we need to include Indigenous People. So, my definition of regenerative agriculture is one that includes a true history of land and the environment and people’s health that starts prior to contact.
But as Westerners come to terms with the catastrophic consequences of industrial farming, they are increasingly co-opting Indigenous knowledge. Permaculture — a philosophy and set of practices that work with, rather than against, nature— is a key example.
In Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science, Jessica Hernandez points out that “…Mollison [Bill, a co-founder of permaculture] learned how to observe the natural world through the Aboriginal Tasmanians’ Palawa lens because he lived with them.” She continues, arguing that “since permaculture is Indigenous co-opted knowledge and is seen as effective in conservation efforts, it is important to indigenize conservation so that we can create holistic solutions in a changing climate.”
Without land reform, a National Care Farm wouldn’t live up to its name.
Given the ongoing history of genocide against Indigenous peoples, action-backed commitments by colonial nations to reconciliation, reparation, and land rematriation (i.e. Land Back) are needed for true regeneration.
In the United States, white people own an estimated 98 percent of all agricultural land and run farms on 94 percent of it. Additionally, 63 percent of farmland owners and 86 percent of operators are male. Behind these numbers are real human lives impacted by patriarchy, slavery, state-sponsored terrorism, displacement, dispossession, discrimination, redlining, voter suppression, mass incarceration, and, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “organized abandonment and vulnerability to premature death.”
We need action to get more land into the hands of women and BIPOC. Without land reform, a National Care Farm wouldn’t live up to its name.
The right to produce our own food from the earth
Indigenous and peasant movements for food sovereignty have resisted colonial capitalism since its inception. In Europe, from the 13th to the 19th century, peasant struggles against enclosures were fundamentally about access to the means of subsistence: pastures and farmlands. Likewise in colonial territories, Indigenous peoples have fought for their right to produce their own food, on their own lands, according to their own cultural traditions.
While food sovereignty movements are largely oriented toward collective rights (i.e. the rights of sovereign nations or peoples to internally determine their own food systems), an individual right is also warranted in the context of the liberal nation-state. Here, the rights of the individual are foundational to ethics and law.
All rights require at least one public institution to guarantee them — otherwise there is no recourse when they are violated. And where there is no recourse, there is no right, practically speaking. The NCF would fill this vacancy and uphold each person’s right to produce their own food from the earth.
Incidentally, I agree with Igor Shoikhedbrod and Vivek Chibber that the rights of liberalism were won by the working class but cannot be adequately upheld unless democracy is actualized in the economic sphere. Bastani made a similar observation when he said, “It turns out that liberal ends of self-authorship, of determining how your life should unfold, require socialist means.”
Anti-ableist by design
Ableism, a system of oppression targeting people with disabilities, takes a unique form under capitalism. As Marx pointed out, a capitalist society’s central organizing principle is the growth of capital. Common notions of ‘ability’ are shaped by this imperative. People who can generate the most profit at the fastest rate are deemed ‘highly capable’; those who struggle to generate profit at a competitive rate are excluded from the formal economy. This relegation to the margins often results in poverty, discrimination, and incarceration. In the United States, according to a 2022 paper in HealthAffairs, “Sixty-six percent of incarcerated people self-reported a disability, with Black, Hispanic, and multiracial disabled men especially overrepresented in prisons.”
Because a National Care Farm is not a capitalist enterprise, work can be organized around the needs of workers.
What kind of economy, or economic firm, would value a broad array of abilities? Disability justice activist Lateef McLeod writes:
Disability justice states that people, especially those with disabilities, need to live in societies where they have the freedom to pace themselves as their lives are conducted, and not feel pressured to perform at a capitalist level of production. Individuals with disabilities need to be able to rest while at work or have the option to stop work altogether to sustain their health.
Because a National Care Farm is not a capitalist enterprise subject to what Marx called the “coercive laws of competition,” work can be organized around the needs of workers, not capitalists. Murray Bookchin imagined a communalist version of popular, post-capitalist agriculture:
I believe that a free community will regard agriculture as husbandry, an activity as expressive and enjoyable as crafts. Relieved of toil by agricultural machines, communitarians will approach food cultivation with the same playful and creative attitude that men so often bring to gardening. Agriculture will become a living part of human society, a source of pleasant physical activity and, by virtue of its ecological demands, an intellectual, scientific, and artistic challenge.
Care farming is already designed to actively engage people with disabilities and mental illnesses in meaningful, useful, and therapeutic work. In considering models for a job guarantee, then, it’s a promising candidate.
Benefits to public health
What makes care farming such an effective therapeutic intervention? Humans evolved as foragers, scavengers, hunters, and practitioners of various agroecological techniques. Capital, however, selects against such modes of food production, instead favoring increasingly large-scale, industrial, and extractive systems.
Why are ecotherapies effective? The most straightforward answer is that they balance a deficit caused by our economic system.
In the film Jurassic Park, Dr. Alan Grant says “T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct.” That’s likely true for all animals. In its feeding guidelines for captive wild animals, the Nutrition Advisory Group recommends zoos should:
Provide a diet that reasonably stimulates natural feeding behaviors. A nutritionally complete diet that stimulates natural feeding behaviors encourages the animals to obtain food in a manner similar to that in the wild (e.g., giraffe and gerenuk reach up for food). The diet should, whenever reasonably possible, encourage methods of consumption similar to methods in the wild (e.g., chimpanzees work for food in termite mounds), should be of a form as close to natural as possible (e.g., forage for ruminants, whole food/roughage for carnivores), and should allow a similar amount of time spent on feeding (e.g., giant pandas spend most of their day eating; lions spend a relatively short time).
Are humans exceptional in this regard? Can we be kept from engaging in our full spectrum of feeding behaviors without adverse health consequences? Probably not. A substantial body of research suggests that horticultural therapies, wilderness therapies, animal-assisted therapies, forest bathing, and other ecotherapies are effective interventions. Why? The most straightforward answer is that they balance a deficit caused by our economic system.
The leading causes of premature death and disability worldwide are noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) including cancers, cardiovascular diseases (i.e. heart attacks and strokes), cardiopulmonary diseases (i.e. asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and diabetes. Such diseases have been called “lifestyle diseases” due to their links with unhealthy behaviors. This term implicitly blames the victim, however, by emphasizing individual choice. Other scholars have taken to calling them “mismatch diseases,” pointing to the discrepancy between our modern environments and those in which our bodies evolved. Evolutionary mismatch has also been implicated in a wide range of psychological disorders.
By providing access to physical activity, nutritional food, green space, and community engagement, a National Care Farm is a quintessential public health measure.
While regenerative care farming may not reconstruct our Paleolithic ancestors’ means of procuring food, it comes much closer to it than neoliberal agriculture. By providing everyone access to physical activity, nutritional food, green space, and community engagement, a National Care Farm is a quintessential public health measure.
Improved public health would, in turn, have knock-on benefits for the economy. In the United States alone, “90% of the nation’s $4.1 trillion annual healthcare expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Taking seriously the aphorism “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” it’s an open question whether the NCF couldn’t pay for itself and then some.
Fostering community resilience
“Nothing is more fundamental to a state’s security than the health of its people,” write the authors of an article from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Their argument is simple: a nation of unhealthy people is “persistently vulnerable to security threats from state and non-state actors or from natural threats like climate change and diseases.”
A National Care Farm builds community resilience by decentralizing food production and widely distributing agricultural know-how.
The NCF builds community resilience vis-à-vis natural disasters, supply chain disruptions, and other shocks in two ways. First, it decentralizes food production. In order to be accessible, it has to provide services within a reasonable distance of workers’ homes. This entails a diffuse network of small farms rather than a few large ones in central locations. Second, by encouraging more of the population to participate in local food production, agricultural know-how is more widely distributed.
A quick detour to head off a probable objection at this point: the NCF is not a wholesale return to pre-industrial agricultural techniques. As a democratic institution, it would be heterogeneous and ever-changing. The technologies and methodologies deployed across time and place would vary tremendously. While all co-ops would have to adhere to broadly agreed-upon regenerative and democratic principles, there could and should be rich biocultural diversity within this space.
Mending the metabolic rift
Competition between capitalist firms requires them to minimize costs (the other side of which is maximizing profits). This often takes the form of suppressing wages and externalizing costs to the environment and public health. The overall effect is that capital is not so much antagonistic toward human and more-than-human life as it is indifferent to it. That which some fear will come true with Artificial Intelligence — an Alignment Problem — has already come true with the egregore of capital.
This systemic indifference determines the character of society-nature relations. The environmental ‘sacrifice zones’ of capitalism are generally where it feeds (i.e. mining, logging, and extractive agriculture) and defecates (pollution and landfills). Marx himself was highly critical of capitalist agriculture:
Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility…Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.
Repairing this ‘metabolic rift’ with the land requires “a conscious and rational treatment of land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.” While not exactly what Marx had in mind, the NCF would be governed by the State, the union of cooperatives which negotiate with the State, and the individual cooperatives which comprise the union. As a whole, then, it would (only) be as democratic as the institutions at these three scales. And so long as this tripartite polity decides to fund the NCF through progressive taxation and distribute its produce to workers, schools, hospitals, eldercare facilities, and food banks, it would remain largely free from market pressures.
Democratic management of common lands may be a necessary condition for mending the metabolic rift, but it isn’t a sufficient one. If these institutions remain anthropocentric (human-centered), they will likely continue exploiting more-than-human communities for human ends.
Practical ecological wisdom
How much energy, land, and resources are required to meet all human needs within planetary boundaries? Depending on one’s definition of ‘human needs’ and ‘planetary boundaries,’ prescriptions range from anarcho-primitivism to AI-driven space communism. Largely absent from the debate is what urban planning scholar Wei-Ning Xiang calls “ecological practical wisdom,” or ecophronesis:
ecophronesis is the master skill par excellence of moral improvisation to make, and act well upon, right choices in any given circumstance of ecological practice; motivated by human beings’ enlightened self-interest, it is developed through reflective ecological practice.
While “human beings’ enlightened self-interest” might at first sound quite anthropocentric, Xiang goes on to clarify that
…it is in human beings’ self-interest — ethical, moral as well as material — to respect and appreciate the intrinsic value of all living and non-living beings on the earth…and that human beings’ own flourishing, at individual and collective levels, should be conceived and pursued in ways that both sustain and depend on the flourishing of the entire “more-than-human whole” of which humans are part…
Supposing our social metabolism with nature is no longer governed by capital, the question remains: how will society ensure it’s governed ethically? The answer must be something like ecophronesis. While scientific tools and theories can provide ecological data which we can use to inform ethical decisions, the latter cannot be outsourced. They necessarily rely on human moral intuitions. Such intuitions can be suffused with ecophronesis, devoid of it, or somewhere in between.
There is arguably no more intimate relationship with the earth than growing one’s food.
In a democracy, it follows that the more people who embody ecophronesis, the more likely society is to govern its metabolism with nature ethically. How, then, could a society committed to ethical governance ensure that ecophronesis is sufficiently represented in the body politic? (I acknowledge that “sufficiently represented” is a vague term in need of elaboration. Nevertheless, the notion that a society can have sufficient or insufficient levels of ecological wisdom seems self-evident).
Xiang posits that ecophronesis “is developed through reflective ecological practice.” This makes common sense. Who better to teach us how to treat the land than the land itself? While Xiang doesn’t specify particular ecological practices, there is arguably no more intimate relationship with the earth than growing one’s food. Regenerative agriculture requires all the qualities of a good caretaker: patience, attentiveness, and a gentle touch. It seems like just the kind of practice that could yield wholesome food and people alike.
Bookchin was a theorist who believed in the power of popular agriculture to transform culture. He writes:
Nature and the organic modes of thought it always fosters will become an integral part of human culture; it will reappear with a fresh spirit in man’s paintings, literature, philosophy, dances, architecture, domestic furnishings, and in his very gestures and day-to-day activities. Culture and the human psyche will be thoroughly suffused by a new animism.
By cultivating symbiotic relationships between human and more-than-human beings, the National Care Farm infuses ecophronesis into the body politic. The more workers it has, arguably, the more society can trust its ethical compass for ecological decision-making.
The cherry atop a utopian sundae
As a job guarantee program offering union jobs in regenerative agriculture co-ops with an emphasis on accessibility, a National Care Farm is the cherry on top of a utopian sundae already articulated by democratic socialists — one which features Universal Basic Services as opposed to Universal Basic Income. In alignment with the long term goal of a fully decommodified food system, NCF food would be distributed to public schools, hospitals, eldercare facilities, food banks, and its own workers.
While universal access to consuming food is a worthy UBS, there are good reasons to support universal access to producing food, from the earth, in community with others. We indeed have the right to participate in this most basic human occupation. By upholding this right, the NCF ensures the inclusion of people with disabilities in the formal economy, promotes public health, builds resilience to climate disasters and other shocks, and generates the ecophronesis required to set the rhythm of social metabolism.
Solidarity with movements for Indigenous sovereignty, land reform and rematriation, reconciliation, and reparation is a yardstick by which the integrity of the NCF, as a truly regenerative institution, is measured.
Inspired? Here’s how we can start co-creating this vision
- Find care farms near you and volunteer on them.
- Support BIPOC-led farmer movements and associations like La Via Campesina, the National Black Farmers Association, Navdanya International (founded by Vandana Shiva), and Ekvn-Yefolecv.
- Help build a fighting labor movement.
- Elect democratic socialists to office.
- Imagine post-growth, post-scarcity, and post-capitalist futures together with others.
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The author would like to thank Amine Mezouar, Lina Lefstad, and Natalie Holmes for their valuable editing contributions.
