Within twenty-five years, there may be no farmers left in America. The Department of Agriculture estimates that by mid-century the last extant family farms will die out and American farmland equivalent in size to three-and-a-half Californias will have been sold to multinational agricultural corporations. Farmers are, on average, the oldest workers in the country, and they’re retiring in droves. As the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging recently announced, “The median age of a farmer is 57.5 years,” over “two years older than any other job,” with a third aged sixty-five or older. Over half work a second job to maintain their livelihoods.
These downward trends aren’t limited to domestic-born American farmers. Migrant and immigrant workers, who before Covid made up around half of the country’s agricultural laborers, are increasingly leaving behind farming for more lucrative opportunities. Labor shortages, already endemic to the industry before the pandemic, have risen to the point of crisis, while food production worldwide will need to increase 70 percent by 2050 to feed the growing global population.
Of course, even if farming as the profession we know today fades out of existence, the land will be cultivated by someone. Farmers will be replaced by farming technicians, who will implement technological solutions to drive profitable farms. This technical revolution is already underway. In Maryland’s northern Frederick County, where I live, farmers were recently encouraged to invest in the “bioeconomy,” which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) supported with more than $200 million in 2023. The bioeconomy includes projects like “advanced biofuels,” “biofuel infrastructure,” and expansion of the “BioPreferred Program,” a federal initiative that “harness[es] the powers of certification and the marketplace” to help “purchasers and users identify products with biobased content and [assure] them of its accuracy.” Essentially, these projects incentivize the growth and cultivation of crops like maize, soybean, and oil palms on a massive scale so that they can be turned into ethanol and biodiesel.
It’s possible to grow these crops in a way that preserves biodiversity, ensuring the land isn’t stripped of its nutrients or made uninhabitable for the animal species that live there. But it’s much cheaper and more profitable to clear vast swaths of farmland to grow these plants as a monoculture, which reduces local biodiversity. This is not the first time the USDA has connected monoculture with success: in the 1980s, former secretary of agriculture Earl Butz encouraged farmers to “get big or get out” and plant crops like corn “fencerow to fencerow,” leading to a massive decline in family farming.
The land is not a problem to be solved. Treating it as mere matter for technocratic management can only lead to the degradation of the human person. The land is a part of us, a living thing with a nature that must be seen and listened to in order to be understood and stewarded. Though the government might claim that “family and small farms are vital to our economy and well-being as a nation,” its idolization of bioeconomic techniques places massive barriers to entry for those who want to farm. For biofuel crops to be profitable, farmers must dedicate huge portions of farmland to them. This, in turn, requires they invest in more farmland than is manageable without significant technological interventions like soil-compressing tractors, planters, and harvesters, as well as fertilizers and herbicides that destroy carbon-reducing fungal networks.
Moreover, careers in farming are locked behind many tiers of professional specialization and technical certification. Organic certification for a farm can take up to six years—a process delayed even further by Covid—and can cost thousands of dollars. Add on top of that further complications like traceability—a food-safety requirement that holds farmers “responsible for tracing product back to the specific field [in some cases even the row] where it was grown,” with records including “harvest date,” “field identification,” “harvesting personnel,” and dates for packing and shipping—and it’s no wonder people are leaving farming. It feels impossible to continue unless you have the resources of a megacorporation.
Pope Francis has stressed that we cannot abandon our connection with the land to technocracy. In Laudate Deum, he calls for all people, following the example of the Church, to make a “pilgrimage of reconciliation with the world that is our home and to help make it more beautiful, because that commitment has to do with our personal dignity and highest values.” In Francis’s comments, we find a scathing indictment of the United States’ elevation of the agricultural technician.
Reconciliation is only possible if we open ourselves to a loving relationship with the other: in this case, with the earth and, more specifically, our local land. This reconciliation cannot be effected by “new technical interventions” (methods that Francis calls “a form of homicidal pragmatism”). Rather, healing occurs when we “listen” to what the land around us is saying by paying attention to what it reveals through its being. Healing is impossible when we exploit the land and impose our demands on it.
What practical steps can American Catholics take to answer the pope’s call to reconciliation? How do we respond to the loss of family farms and the increasing corporatization of the land? The worthy nonprofit Catholic Rural Life proposes that Catholic congregations “show solidarity” with family farmers by hosting farmer’s markets on parish property, selling local farmers’ crops at cost, or simply buying local food, including through community-supported subscription programs. Catholics who feel particularly called to the care for creation could also begin homesteading themselves, becoming the farmers local parishes support.
I want to propose another way as well, one that recognizes, as organizations like Catholic Rural Life do, that true subsidiarity means working on the parish level. But I believe the parish’s role can be more than a passive intermediary between Catholics and the land. The parish should instead become a direct means for us to engage with the earth around us. I propose that Catholic parishes open farms.
This is not a new proposal. Despite the pope’s plea to those of us in the technocratized West, the U.S. Church lags significantly behind other Christian denominations that have more concretely taken up the call to heal our relationship with the land. In 2018, the agricultural news outlet CivilEats highlighted a growing grassroots movement among American Christian congregations, from Episcopalians in Florida to interdenominational consortiums in California, to transform neglected or legacy church-owned land into sustainable food sources for their local communities. Although the Catholic Church owns “an estimated 177 million acres globally,” no parallel Catholic efforts were featured. That year, Reuters also celebrated efforts by Baptists in Baltimore and Episcopalians in North Carolina and Michigan to develop local church farms that provide healthy food to inner-city and underprivileged populations. The article also commended the Catholic Church for transforming some of its land holdings into community farmland—but this was an initiative of the Church in Kenya, not the United States. The Catholic Church in America is being lapped by domestic Protestant denominations actively linking care for creation with addressing food insecurity.
There is also significant historical precedent for local farms run by the Church. In the Middle Ages, many monastic communities ran farms not just to benefit or sustain their own orders, but for the common good. In particular, in the early-medieval grange-farm model, the local laity worked together with religious orders to steward monastic farmland in exchange for food and pay. In some cases, lay workers were invited to participate in the life of the monastery, joining the monks for prayer. In the high-medieval period, orders like the Cistercians leased their land directly to local lay farmers. Similarly, Anglican vestries helped local farmers recover during the post-Napoleonic economic depression by hiring out parish fields to assuage unemployment.
Some of the practical benefits of parish farming are obvious. It would be a concrete answer to calls from groups like Catholic Rural Life for domestic magisterial leadership to address agricultural issues and fulfill the “Gospel imperative” of “providing food for all.” Parish farms would offer healthy, nutritious, and affordable food to Catholics and other community members, regardless of wealth or status.
Other practical benefits to parish farming are less immediate, but equally valuable. A parish farm would offer opportunities to pursue a deeper connection with the land to laity who want to farm but cannot afford land, lengthy certification processes, or the technological means necessary to comply with USDA regulations. Parish farms would encourage laity to engage with their church community outside of Sunday Mass and provide those on the fringes a way to engage with parish life outside of social organizations. They would offer clergy and laity a chance to work together on common ground without the usual parochial stiffness. They might even bring some of those concerned about environmental issues back to the Church.
It can be difficult to imagine a proposal like this working, both because of how divorced we are from the land and because most of us only participate in parish life once a week at most. But I have seen it happen. Three years ago, while completing my dissertation, I visited the city of Modena, Italy, where I stayed for eight months with a graduate-student community hosted in a monastery guest house run by the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Modena exists in tension between its agricultural and automotive production, and nothing reflects this better than the monastery, which abuts on one side a neighborhood filled with industrial steelworks and on the other vast fields used to cultivate grape must for balsamic vinegar. Between the monastery and the guest house is a decrepit early-modern church, almost the size of a basilica, a parish for sixteenth-century nobles that now serves Modena’s burgeoning immigrant community. Behind the church is the monastery garden, which was cultivated by the graduate students, the monks, and volunteers from the parish. Food from the garden served all of us and became a center for community. Volunteers would work on the garden throughout the week according to their availability. On Sundays groups would congregate at the garden after Mass to show off their work and collect fresh vegetables for family dinners.
Today, I’m blessed to live in another community where the work of ecclesial ecological healing is already taking place. In northern Frederick County, Maryland, my colleague Stephen McGinley runs Good Soil Farm LLC, a regenerative-agriculture farm founded on the principles of adequate anthropology and land stewardship articulated by St. John Paul II, Pope Francis, and the writer and farmer Wendell Berry. Stephen worked with the Daughters of Charity, whose presence in Emmitsburg extends back to the ministry of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821), to lease four vacant plots of land that had fallen victim to over-farming and pesticide use. Over the course of several years, Stephen—whose educational background is in economics and theology, not agriculture—restored the land’s biodiversity and fungal networks and made it fruitful again. Plots that previously sustained only cover crop became fecund ground producing enough for an annual community-supported agriculture program. Stephen eventually bought the plots outright; he and his family now live on the land and coordinate with the propaedeutic curriculum at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary’s Rother House to help men in their first year of priestly formation develop healthy work habits and practical virtue. Like the garden in Modena, Stephen’s farm has become a center of Catholic community, especially in our local parish. It is a vital educational resource for those seeking a healthier and more authentically Christian way of relating to the land.
How exactly parishes serve as mediators healing their congregation’s relationship with the soil would vary drastically. Some parish farms might just be a volunteer-run community garden in which clergy and laity work together to grow food to support local culture. Other farms would look like Stephen’s, which resembles the granges of the Middle Ages, in which land would be leased out to be cultivated. Each parish has its own particular set of needs. In Modena, uncultivated land was available to be transformed into a garden. But a parish located in the downtown of a city, with land holdings that barely extend beyond the church’s front stoop, will have to think creatively about how to recover parishioners’ connection to the ground under their feet. In some cases, of course, contingencies may prevent parishes from providing any such opportunities.
I don’t believe the Church has a responsibility to make its land profitable. Profit is not the standard for how well we are stewarding local land, nor, certainly, for the dignity of the land itself. Church land, like the sacraments, does not have to be “useful” in order to be good or beautiful. Arguments that parochial land must be made productive risk falling prey to the same intellectual bear trap the USDA has been repeatedly sticking its leg into for the past fifty years. The point of our relationship with the land is not to “succeed,” according to the technocratic models of efficiency and productivity. As the Japanese philosopher-farmer Masanobu Fukuoka has observed, “The more a farmer increases the scale of his operation, the more his body and spirit are dissipated and the further he falls away from a spiritually satisfying life.” Spiritual satisfaction is not a concern either for state or federal agricultural authorities, though perhaps it should be. It is, however, most certainly the purview of the Church.
It is not a moral imperative that every parish in America start a farm, but it is vital that the U.S. Church begin to think about how to restore the connection between humus and human beings—between adamah (the Hebrew word for dirt) and Adam’s sons and daughters. It must also begin to put its land on the line to prove our love for this world and our commitment to its health. Catholics can extol Laudato si’ and Laudate Deum all we want and soak up the praise these documents rightly receive for emphasizing the Church’s historical commitment to ecological justice. But if we want secular society to change the way it approaches the land, we must provide a lived witness. We must get our hands dirty.
