The Agrarian Male: Economic and Ecological Challenges in the New Century

Insofar as most farming and otherwise agrarian families are still primarily male head-of-household families, examining the challenges facing agrarian communities is necessarily to examine the challenges facing the agrarian male. Those challenges fall mainly into two categories—economic and environmental (or ecological). Men in agrarian communities are wrestling specifically with the constrictions of (1) the increasing agribusiness pressures that continue to endanger the small-scale farmer, (2) the “Wal-Martization” of the agrarian economy that not only raises ethical questions but also limits local economic options, and (3) the suburbanization of the land, as more and more farms are sacrificed to economic realities and converted into upscale housing developments for the economically privileged. This essay elucidates a number of the challenges facing agrarian men—whether full-time farmers, part-time farmers, or others embedded in local agrarian communities and their interrelated economic and ecological systems. The intellectual framework draws heavily on the wisdom of eastern Kentucky's own “gentlemen farmer,” Wendell Berry, as well as upon a number of ecotheologians, while pragmatically drawing equally heavily on the lived experience of specific men in rural western North Carolina. The paper argues that the 19th-century paradigm of virtually self-sufficient, small family farms no longer works and must be superceded by an alternative 21st-century paradigm of small farms, full- and part-time farm families, and their communities in collaborative networks, thereby collectively challenging the predominating and ever-globalizing 21st-century economic, geopolitical, and environmental status quo.