Play, Community, and Right Scale

At Little Loaves Farm we are pretty small scale, use small equipment, and about as much as possible work by hand.  The other day Rita ran across a lovely quote from Wendell Berry on work and play that really got me thinking on Hosea 4:1-3, right sized farming, and what that means for community.  We have been blessed with a child who loves to do farm work, who is happy with almost any task, from broadcast seeding to tucking in rice seedling.  What I didn't realize before is what a blessing it is to have the farm work at a scale where she can participate, it is safe, it isn't too loud; where she can play.  In our context this brings me to Hos 4:1-3 (a verse I often use when talking about creation care), which focuses on broken relationships: “Hear the word of the LORD, you Israelites, because the LORD has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.  There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.  Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying." I am not to worried about the actual sins mentioned, what strikes me is how there are three broken relationships, between humanity and God, within humanity, and between humanity and the rest of creation.  I love the scale of our operation, because it allows the fixing of all three of those relationships, and when kids can be involved and play during and at the work, certainly there is healing in the break with in humanity itself.  So much of our work as a society has that segregation, it is difficult for Emily to participate in and play at my scholarly work; which makes the farm an even greater blessing, it is so much easier to see how relationships can be healed in that environment.

A passage from "Economy and Pleasure"
On many days we have had somebody’s child or somebody’s children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children. As industrial work excludes the dead by social mobility and technological change, it excludes children by haste and danger. The small scale and the handwork of our tobacco cutting permit margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children. The children play at the grownups’ work, as well as at their own play. In their play the children learn to work; they learn to know their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.
Wendell Berry, http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/mayjune/feature/excerpts-the-writings-wendell-berry

Rita, Stephen, and wee Joseph transplanting upland rice to the field.  Emily is taking the picture, yet another farm task she enjoys and treats as play (and without which we wouldn't have nearly the record of our activities that we do).