Resume Building

I never expected the word ‘agriculture’ to appear on my resume as often as it does. In fact, when the concept of a resume first met my unwitting mind, agriculture was probably the least likely word to appear on it. As a child and then a teenager, I never gave much critical consideration to what sort of job I wanted to have when I would grow up. For a long time a combination of action toys, war movies, and a victor’s reading of history planted in me the idea of being a soldier. That vague plan was abandoned sometime during adolescence when I realized that there is no black and white in world affairs, and there is no such thing as a glorious battle. For a couple of years, perhaps from the ages of nine to ten or eleven I was drawn to becoming a comic book artist, but my talent never passed far beyond the ability to create scruffy looking faces in the margins of my notebooks. My interest in the comic books themselves waned in the middle school years, and that fancy died out.

My one distinct memory of agricultural planning occurred when I was perhaps five or six years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s car with a good friend. I decided that we would one day have a farm together. This decision was predicated on my then love for animals, and the premise that on a farm one could have a wide assortment of them. This experience was the only mental preparation I had done for a career quite literally in the field. Beyond these passing thoughts, no real plans for employment ever developed in my mind. School always seemed to provide something to do the next year. Now, some twelve years or so from the time I first tried vainly to encapsulate experience on a sheet of paper in order to get a job, the amount of time I have spent wandering through fields with farmers is somewhat astounding. It is odd both in that such an experience ever happened to a kid from the suburbs with little applicable knowledge, and in that said kid kept going back.

I enjoy my time in the field. I enjoy growing plants, hoeing rows, plowing up an acre of land, and walking around inspecting crops. I enjoy driving tractors and planning management schemes, thinking about logistics and having my hands in the soil. Yet there are many things I enjoy just as much as the aspects of agricultural work that have not kept me in their respective fields. I enjoy languages, but I’m not a linguist. I enjoy games, but I’m not a game designer, nor a gambler. As much as I enjoy being on farms and would love to have my own, those things that I enjoy about the field are not what have kept me there. What have kept me going back are the small farmer, and the idea of justice.

In comparison to the world I come from, there is a beauty in the relationship between the farmer’s labor and the fruit it bears. I do not intend to romanticize the condition of billions of people living in poverty. Quite the contrary, I have found in my years working with populations of small farmers that there is nothing romantic about the life. It does strike me, however, as a lifestyle of reason. There is a clear relationship between the labor, the weather, the crop, the animal, and the land. You take what you are given, and you do what you can with it. There is a meritocracy in it, not to say that a farmer deserves too little rain or poor soils, but that given those conditions, a farmer can affect their outcomes in a way that is proportional to their knowledge and labor. Obviously, no amount of labor can make up for the rains not falling, but the inputs and outputs of the small farm are close and understandable.

If, as John Rawls put it, justice is fairness, then provided inputs are in fair and direct proportion to the outcome, it is a just outcome. A farmer puts labor into growing a crop. Without that labor, the crop would not bear fruit. Up to the natural limits available to the farmer, such as the amount of water or nutrients he or she can access, the farmer’s labor is the factor that makes the difference in the outcome. There is a just relationship between the labor and the outcome, provided that the labor is the limiting factor, not the elements. Does this mean that for some people, poverty is a fair outcome? For those who put no effort in, is it just that they live in poverty?

The failure of our world to reach this ideal of justice is not in its outcomes; it is in the opportunities provided and the lack of balance in the relative inputs and outcomes for various people. A small farmer can work very hard, strive to attain more knowledge, put that knowledge into practice, and still earn a dollar a day. An investment banker can work very hard, strive to attain more knowledge, put that knowledge into practice, and earn thousands upon thousands of dollars a day. The difference between the two is not the amount of labor they put in nor intelligence they possess, but the opportunities available to them. Equality of opportunity is the goal to strive for if one wants to live in a just world; equality of outcomes is not.

Perhaps the relationship between the inputs and outcomes of various jobs is skewed and unfair, providing more fiscal compensation than their true value merits. CEO compensation packages spring to mind. Overcompensation, however, is not the heart of the matter; it is a symptom. The problem is that the limiting factors themselves, the opportunities, are unfairly distributed to begin with. I would like to live in a world without poverty, but I would rather live in a just world. In a just world it is possible that there would be no poverty, but the burden would lie upon each person, not upon society. If society can provide the conditions for justice- a fair opportunity- then the outcomes would be up to the intelligence and labor of the individuals.

It is likely that educating small farmers and providing them with opportunities is not the most efficient way to a just world, but I never claimed to be the most intelligent person on earth. Going the other way by telling people in certain professions that they are overcompensated for their labor will not get you very far. The small farmer’s is the one profession I know to have a fair field to play upon, all other things being equal. The problem is that not all other things are equal, and poverty is a terrible outcome.