Peasant… And Proud to Be
First Published Defender, Summer 2025 edition
I’ve been trying to come up with a concise way of describing what we do. Yes, “farmer” comes to mind, obviously. We live and work on a small farm, after all. But what kind of farmers are we?
These days, with many industrial-scale farmers attempting to lay near-exclusive claim to the word “farmer” despite the fact they don’t actually grow much that actually feeds people, makes the word a little murky on its own.
I had a commodity crop farmer once tell me someone isn’t a “real farmer” unless they farm at least 100 acres. Funny. Given that the average Amish farm is only 80 acres, it seems this group, whose community has been largely predicated on agrarian ways for over 300 years, aren’t “real” farmers after all. Who knew? Anyways, what this one farmer was pointedly telling me was, our little farm isn’t a real farm and we aren’t real farmers. Not like him. I suppose everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Seeing many of these self-described “real farmers” working with largely-automated, massive machines like they do and their industrial-scale production of genetically modified and chemically-dependent crops that are far more likely to end up in your gas tank than on your dinner table, makes their sort of farming closer to manufacturing or even akin to mining. The word I was seeking to amend “farmer” would lend clarity to the disparities I saw between their ways and ours. Then it came to me.
We’re peasant farmers.
Here in America, a land where everyone can ostensibly be a billionaire (or at least a YouTube sensation) if they just put their mind to it, “peasant” is almost an obscene word. Yet all over the planet, from Europe to Asia and Africa and all across Central and Southern America, there is a historical context to the peasantry that goes far beyond our own nation’s myopia and foreshortened history. Here in the United States, the notion of making one’s life center around what is seen as menial work without huge financial reward is often construed as not the sort of thing any sensible person with intelligence, let alone basic common sense, should aspire. To do so would be so… un-capitalist.
Thomas Jefferson came closer than some with his idealized notion of the “yeoman farmer.” But even that misses the mark by a wide margin since the precedent he was drawing upon was gleaned from British royal household hierarchy (which in turn was drawn from chivalric rank in the late Middle Ages), with the “yeoman” being of middle standing and therefore, well above peasants and serfs and other unsavory characters who may grow the food the nobility ate but certainly wouldn’t be allowed in their dining rooms. Jefferson’s archetype is hardly an aspirational role model, in my opinion.
So then, what is a peasant?
According to the 2020 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas…
“A peasant is any person who engages or who seeks to engage alone, or in association with others or as a community, in small-scale agricultural production for subsistence and/or for the market, and who relies significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, on family or household labor and other non-monetized ways of organizing labor, and who has a special dependency on and attachment to the land.”
In a nutshell, that’s us.
Peasant. Campesino. Contadino. Paysan. After all, the word “peasant” has its etymological roots in the 15th c. French word, païsant, which is, “one of the countryside.” No linguistic indication of social rank or status. That was superimposed later. Simply translated, a peasant is a person whose life is bound to and reliant on the earth. In my mind a peasant farmer is the real farmer.
But a name is just a name, so call me what you wish. Just please, not “gentleman farmer,” which implies someone who lives on a farm yet who has others do the farm work for him. Thomas Jefferson took advantage of this sort of arrangement, but I digress.
Because, as the saying goes, “A gentleman farmer is neither.”