I don’t like to dwell on big catastrophes though. I agree with the philosopher Slavoj Zizek that it’s sad that the only time world peace occurs in movies is when the earth is about to be hit by an asteroid or attacked by aliens. I don’t think we should base our food system on a “what if a nuclear bomb hit” sort of argument. I think that decentralized and local agriculture should be the standard way to feed ourselves simply because it’s neighborly, better tasting, and more fun.

There is a joy in the task of growing things—a joy that comes from our 10,000 year old agricultural habit.

That joy has been lost for the most part and most sadly it has been lost in the rural places where it was once a given. Most rural people now get the majority of their food from the grocery store, even though they have ample access to land on which to grow at least some of their own food. But there are some exceptions and two I know of are my guides to the joy of growing your own food.

I once met a man at a bee-keeping conference from Missouri who said that he and his wife had developed a taste for rabbits and that they raised them because, “We don’t really like going to the grocery store so we grow just about everything we eat at home.” He found it easier to grow his own food than go to the grocery store! When I pressed him on this he said that he didn’t like the taste of store bought food or the price. This was once a common attitude, but to find someone under fifty with that attitude was something like finding a treasure.

My other guide is the grandfather of one of my high school friends. I’m not sure exactly how old he is, but he’s somewhere over seventy. This man is a compulsive gardener. He has gardens all over his little rural town—spilling over from his yard to ditches, woodland edges, anywhere where he can sneak a garden in that will last the summer. He’s never heard of guerilla gardening, but he’s discovered it all the same through his natural joy of growing things.

We don’t need to grow our own food or buy it from farms that we can visit because of the possibility of a nuclear attack. We need to develop a local food economy because it is a joyful thing that has been the habit of our kind for over 10,000 years.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer and farmer living in the mountains of central Arkansas. After earning a degree in philosophy Ragan spent some time working in Chicago, but decided that he'd rather be back in the rural Arkansas of his childhood. After two years apprenticing with an organic sheep farmer Ragan set out to start his own farm, called Adama Farm (‘Adama’ is the Hebrew word for ‘soil.’) He raises sheep, cattle, chickens, and a very rare breed of pig called the Gloucestershire Old Spot Pig. In all aspects of his farm he tries to use sustainable practices and he experiments constantly with finding better ways to farm at nature's pace.