Related to the post on agrarianism just below, this article in the Times discusses how many young people are leaving the city for the country, where they grow organic foods for a luxury market: “Their Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them.” 

Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.

Back in the day, say, in the 60s and 70s, it was cool to head to the country and make a living on the land, but the problem was, nobody could make a living.  Now, though, with boutique products like organic milk and free-range chicken and compost-happy vegetables, small farms and young farmers are finding a niche.

Man is everywhere split in two.  Fact and value, body and soul, science and religion: Modern Man has dissected himself and is left with two halves that don’t quite work without the other.  For many Christians, and many who are not, the new agrarianism is a way to mend those halves.  A return to Place, to Earth, to Dirt, becomes a place where we can come to the intersection of the physical and metaphysical.  The long and short of this is that it’s cool to be country.  Kind of. 

Scott P. Richert at The University Bookman reviews three conservative agrarian books by Agrarianism and the Good Society by Eric T. Freyfogle, Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters, and The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse by Gene Logsdon.  Dirt is good.  Farming is good.  Being connected to the land is good.  Urbanism has brought us a lot, too, but it has taken a lot from us.  Richert ends his review by suggestion that the reintegration of body and soul can be helped by agrarianism, but not completely.

[T]he very forces that have devastated the countryside, besieged agrarian communities, and attacked representational art and literature have the Church in their sights, too. Man is body and soul, flesh and spirit, and the reintegration of the two - the destruction of the fierce dualism that so bothers Berry - cannot be accomplished by agrarianism alone.

No, for body and spirit to come back together, the culture, just like the man, needs to be touched by the man who mastered both.