I have had the extraordinary good fortune in my life to study with some brilliant people.
At Carnegie Mellon, where I studied classical piano performance and composition, I studied with Doc and Claudine Wilkins, themselves students of the infamous Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Boulanger taught many of the defining musical minds of the twentieth century.
My piano training carries another remarkable inheritance. Its direct pedagogical lineage can be traced:
Beethoven → Czerny → Liszt → Leschetizky → Busoni → Petri → Pressler → Coleman → Me.
I don't mention that because I imagine some portion of Beethoven's genius trickled magically down the family tree into me. It most certainly did not. I mention it because I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my teachers and humbled by their wealth of knowledge, skill, and hard-earned wisdom.
That lucky pattern has continued throughout my life.
When my life turned towards producing artisanal spirits, I had the privilege of learning from Dave Pickerell, former Master Distiller of Maker's Mark, the man instrumental in creating WhistlePig, and one of the most respected distilling consultants of his generation. I learned from other true master distillers, at home and abroad, and eventually had some success of my own, winning Double Gold in the Rum Category at the New York International Spirits Competition, and Spiced Rum Distiller of the Year at the same competition in 2018.
Later, I studied ancestral health with Mark Sisson. I studied regenerative agriculture with Richard Perkins of Ridgedale Permaculture, one of Europe's leading regenerative farmers, and Joel Salatin of Polyface farms in Virginia. I studied ecological and social design with Andrew Langford, one of the founding figures in European permaculture.
There were other teachers and other adventures along the way. I trained as a yacht captain under the British Maritime Coast Guard Agency. I received an honorary diploma as a Master of Music Composition from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece. Years later, in Tuscany, I was honored with the Lucchesi che si sono distinti all’estero—The Award for International Professional Accomplishment. Somewhere along the way I became an Italian citizen.
I don't tell you any of this because I expect you to care very much about my résumé. We all have one. Frankly, nobody cares much about mine. I tell you because I want to establish something before making the observation that follows.
I have spent a substantial portion of my life fortunate enough to learn from people who became exceptionally good at difficult things, and when I stood on their shoulders, I succeeded.
And then I became a farmer.
Sadly, our culture has inherited a peculiar caricature of farmers. The farmer is supposed to be a simpleton. Uneducated. Backward. Provincial. The fellow in dirty overalls who never quite made it out into the sophisticated world.
Having now lived on both sides of that caricature, I find it almost comical.
Some of the smartest and most capable people I have ever encountered are farmers.
There was a time when this would not have been a surprising thing to say.
The farmer was often among the most indispensable people in his community. He knew animals and plants, weather and water, soil and timber. He could mend a fence, repair a roof, sharpen an implement, set a post and dig a ditch. Depending upon the place and century, he might know something of carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, animal husbandry, butchery and medicine. In the absence of a veterinarian, mechanic or doctor, somebody still had to know what to do.
When something broke, somebody went to get the farmer.
Thomas Jefferson represents the intellectual version of this older agrarian ideal. He could move without embarrassment from political philosophy to architecture, horticulture, animal breeding, crop rotations and the design of a plow. He called cultivators of the earth America's "most valuable citizens" and wrote that those who labored in the earth were, if God had a chosen people, His chosen ones. George Washington was in much the same boat, and John Adams too, was famous for his farm at Braintree.
The cultivated man and the cultivator of land were not opposites - one informed the other to create a renaissance man.
A man might read philosophy in the evening and study drainage the following morning. He might care about political liberty and fruit trees, architecture and animal breeding. There was nothing contradictory about an educated person putting his hands into the soil or watching the rain clouds with curiosity and a notebook.
Knowledge of the land was part of being educated.
Somewhere along the way, however, we separated the two, and now, we live in the vapid age of the specialist.
Modern civilization rewards extraordinary depth within increasingly narrow boundaries. A physician specializes in one system of the body. An engineer in one class of problems. An academic may devote an entire career to one small corner of one subject.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Specialization has given us extraordinary things - Tchaikovsky, Monet, the Dali Lama, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela…
But it has also created a bizarre kind of fragility.
A person can become astonishingly competent at one thing while remaining almost helpless before many of the ordinary requirements of being alive. We can manipulate enormous quantities of information without knowing how to sharpen a blade. We can design satellites without knowing where our water comes from. We can understand an organ at the molecular level while knowing almost nothing about soil, weather, animals, timber, fire or food.
The farmer remains an odd exception.
He is one of the last Renaissance men.
Not because he knows everything. No farmer does. But because farming refuses to allow knowledge to remain neatly divided into departments.
Grass is connected to the soil. Soil is connected to the rain and microbial activity. The rain in turn is connected to the contour of the land and the natural biota is connected to the animal. The animal is connected to the rotation. The rotation is connected to the fence.
And sooner or later the fence is connected to the electrical system, the electrical system is connected to the water system, and the water system breaks somewhere damn inconvenient at 3am on a holiday.
Now the philosopher of grass is standing knee-deep in a muddy hole trying to remember how a compression fitting works while his flashlight, gripped grittily with his teeth, flickers and goes out.
That is farming.
A farmer becomes plumber and electrician, carpenter and mechanic. Botanist and amateur veterinarian. Meteorologist, hydrologist, businessman and bookkeeper. He learns something about engines, something about medicine, something about construction and a great deal about biology.
He must understand money because the business has to survive.
He must understand ecology because the land has to survive.
And he must understand animals because they have an inconvenient habit of becoming sick just when you think everything is going swimmingly.
The remarkable thing is not that the farmer masters every one of these disciplines.
He doesn't.
The remarkable thing is that he learns enough of each to see how they fit together.
That may be precisely the kind of intelligence our age is losing - a sense of Holism.
Authors Daniel Quinn in Ishmael, Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens approach the Agricultural Revolution from very different directions. None of them is particularly sentimental about it. Quinn and Harari are deeply suspicious of much that followed, and rightly so. But beneath their disagreements lies an enormous historical fact.
Agriculture changed the human story.
Human beings had hunted, gathered, made tools, used fire, formed families and created art for an immense stretch of prehistory. Agriculture did something different. It created increasingly reliable concentrations of food and, eventually, food surpluses large enough to support people who did not themselves have to produce food.
Nothing could ever be the same after that. Now a community could support the full-time blacksmith, priest, soldier, scribe, merchant, architect and philosopher. There was time to develop law, and to enforce it.
Eventually it could support the university professor, concert pianist, master distiller, software engineer and artificial-intelligence researcher.
Every one of them is standing on somebody else's field.
We tend to tell the story of civilization through its monuments: the pyramids, the Parthenon, Rome, Chartres, the printing press, the steam engine, the computer, the rocket.
Underneath every one of these is a less glamorous prerequisite though. Somebody produced more food than his own family needed to eat and that surplus made for extra time. Leisure was born and specialization became possible. It made much of what we call civilization possible.
For all our astonishing technological accomplishments, that dependency has not disappeared. We have merely built an increasingly magnificent structure on top of it. And magnificent it is.
A modern combine is one of the great achievements of agricultural engineering. Modern medicine is miraculous. Electricity, satellites, refrigeration, computers and global transportation have allowed billions of human beings to live in ways our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
But all of these things share a characteristic we seldom notice while they are working. They depend upon scaffolding.
A combine needs fuel. Fuel requires refining and transportation. The machine needs bearings, belts, tires, hydraulic fluid, electronics and replacement parts manufactured hundreds or thousands of miles away. Modern grain production may depend upon fertilizer, herbicides, financing, weather information, grain elevators, dryers, railroads, mills and electrical power.
It is an astonishing system.
It is also a long chain.
And a long chain has many places where it can break. Read the brilliant essay “I, Pencil” to see how not one human can make a pencil, but it requires all of humanity to accomplish it.
That doesn't mean we should abandon the chain. It means we should understand what it is.
When the scaffolding is standing, specialization gives us powers no individual human being could reproduce. But when enough of that scaffolding disappears…through war, prolonged power failure, natural disaster, political upheaval or some calamity we haven't thought of yet…the specialized pieces become remarkably helpless without one another.
The satellite cannot feed you and neither can the microchip. For that matter, neither can the combine sitting silent without diesel or the grain waiting for machinery that no longer comes.
But grass still grows. A sheep can turn that grass into meat using nothing more sophisticated than the astonishing machinery inside a ruminant. A hen scratches through the barnyard and lays an egg. Garlic waits beneath the soil. Beans climb a pole. Cabbage stands through the cold. A person with a knife, a shovel, a bucket, a few hand tools and enough accumulated knowledge can take these things remarkably far.
The difference is not primitive versus advanced. It is the length of the chain between sunlight and supper. This is where the farmer becomes interesting again. The broadly capable farmer understands the short chains…. sunlight to grass to lamb. And soil to potato to cellar. And seed to vegetable to table.
These systems aren't indestructible. Drought comes. Disease comes. Crops fail. Animals die. Human beings knew famine long before they knew electricity.
But there is something different about these systems. They remain comprehensible at the scale of a human being. One person can understand them, one family can operate them, and one village can repair them.
That is profoundly different from a system whose individual participants understand only tiny portions of an immense technological chain. And I am not pointing toward the “prepper” movement here. I am not arguing that we should abandon technology, flee the electrical and financial grid or sit around waiting for civilization to collapse.
I am arguing for a fuller conception of the human person.
For most of history, a capable person possessed a broad constellation of practical, intellectual, social and spiritual competencies. He might cultivate land, repair a building, read serious books, care for animals, participate in local government, teach his children, help a neighbor and lead a prayer. He wasn't an expert in all of these things but was something we increasingly struggle to produce…. a whole person.
This is what farming keeps demanding. Weather will not respect your specialization and neither will a sick ewe, a frozen pipe, a washed out lane.
The farmer must continually move between thought and action, biology and mechanics, economics and ecology, between what ought to happen and what the living world has decided will happen instead.
If he stays at it long enough, he becomes difficult to categorize. Part mechanic. Part naturalist. Part businessman. Part veterinarian. Part carpenter. Sometimes poet. Sometimes teacher. Sometimes first responder. Sometimes the neighbor who simply shows up because something has gone wrong and another pair of hands is needed.
In older communities he might also have been deacon, elder, councilman or keeper of some portion of the community's memory. Maybe even a shaman. Not an expert in everything, still, something more valuable perhaps: A small repository of human culture walking around in muddy boots.
That is what I failed to understand before I became a farmer. I thought farming was an occupation. Now I think it may be one of the most complete life-long educations a person can receive.
So yes, I've been fortunate enough to sit at the feet of some remarkable teachers.
Beethoven's lineage passed through Czerny and Liszt. Boulanger taught generations of composers. Dave Pickerell taught me something about spirits. Perkins and Salatin taught me something about land.
But the strange thing about farming is that eventually the divisions between subjects begin to disappear, and slowly, if you are paying attention, the farm begins teaching you something about the whole. Perhaps that is why I have come to respect farmers so deeply. In an age that keeps making human knowledge narrower and deeper, the farmer is still being asked to become broad.
The farmer preserves a body of knowledge that is useful when everything works and indispensable when it doesn't. He knows how to shorten the distance between the elemental world and human life, from sun to food, fuel, and shelter.
Civilization can add layer upon magnificent layer above these things. It can build cathedrals and concert halls, laboratories and universities, satellites and super-intelligent computers. But it can never abolish them.
However sophisticated we become, somewhere underneath the servers and satellites and electrical grids, somebody still has to arrange for sunlight to become supper.
