Waiting for a life-changing event

"A lot of farmers," said my brother-in-law, "won't move from their unsustainable farming practices until they have some sort of 'life-changing' event."

We were on a tour of the farm where I grew up in the 70's and 80's that he now runs with my sister and he was lamenting the unenlightened habits of many Australian farmers.  As I've mentioned before, he's an enthusiastic (evangelical) proponent of holistic farming.

I suppose the 'life-changing event' he imagines is some not-quite-fatal event like a heart attack or having the bank seriously question whether the farm's debt should be allowed to roll over.   But as any doctor will tell you non-fatal heart attacks are rarely life-changing.  We're humans and we hold our habits, good and bad, far closer than we'd like to admit.

It is useless to try and reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

My brother-in-law has it wrong.  The 'life-changing event' he's seeking isn't for the farmer but the farm.  The best hope for changing practices on a given bit of dirt comes with change of ownership through inheritance or sale; and new ideas are far more likely to be trialled under totally new ownership of the asset.

The land we drove over was first used for grazing cattle in 1819 by a man named William Lee who helped build the very earliest road over the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney.  Lee was granted title to something like 60,000 acres in 1832.  Over the years that holding was broken up into smaller properties although the Lee family are still prominent in the district.  My father bought our farm (4300 acres) from the Lees in the early 1960's.  The land has been owned by only two families in the almost 200 years since white settlement reached that part of Australia. Not a lot of scope for 'life-changing events' in that timeline.

It's a great modern example of the most persistent economic unit in history: the family owned and operated farm, reports of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated.  That persistence is borne of an old fashioned mindset; farmers who create a life that serves an asset that will outlive them.  This is at odds with the way that almost everyone in the rich world lives; we build a life that serves the personal needs of our families and ourselves.  We build unremarkable bourgeois lives instead of creating then stewarding some good thing that will outlive us.

As much as we freelancers believe that we're different from the wage slaves we used to be, in this respect we're exactly the same.  Seriously expecting your son to one day take over your web design business is as weird as assuming that he'll ascend to your regional sales manager role.

We have to admit that we're not building assets, just lives, and the best we can hope for is that most bourgeois of aspirations: leaving enough cash in the kitty for our kids to have their choice of futures.