A Hard Day's Work

The farmer feeds a nation and goes broke feeding it; the rest of us forget how to feed ourselves at all—and learn to look down on the dirty hands that keep us alive

Walk into any supermarket in America and you are walking into a miracle that no king of old could have dreamed of.

Mountains of oranges in the dead of winter. Bread in forty varieties. Milk, meat, coffee, rice—an abundance so total and so cheap that we step over it without a second glance. And every last crumb of it was put there by somebody's hands. Somebody woke before dawn and worked in the cold and the heat and the dirt so that you could push a cart down a bright aisle and never once think about where any of it came from. Here is the thing I want to sit with you about today, because it is one of the strangest facts of our age: the man whose hands filled that store is very often, at that exact moment, three counties away at a kitchen table, going broke. He feeds a nation. He cannot make a living feeding a nation. And most of us, walking past his oranges, would not lower ourselves to do his job for a single day.

That is the subject of this report: the oldest virtue there is, a hard day's work—and the three ways we have found to dishonor it all at once. We refuse to pay the people who do the essential work, until they're ruined doing it. We have stopped doing hard work ourselves, until our hands have gone soft and the plain skills of self-sufficiency are slipping out of living memory. And we have taught our children to look down on the work and the worker both, and to chase, instead of competence, the hollow business of being watched. Each of these is a wound. Together they are a society quietly sawing through the very branch it is sitting on.

Let us start with the man in the field, because he is the plainest case of the whole disease. Of every dollar you spend on food in this country, the farmer who grew it gets back about twelve cents—and after he pays for his seed and his fuel and his machinery, he is left holding closer to six. The other eighty-eight cents are spread among everyone who handles the food after it leaves his gate.

Now, why so little? Because the farmer is what the economists call a price-taker, which is a polite way of saying he is squeezed from both ends by people far bigger than he is. He buys his seed, his fertilizer, his fuel, and his equipment retail, at prices set by a handful of enormous suppliers. He sells his corn, his milk, his cattle wholesale, at prices set by a handful of enormous buyers—in beef, just four packers control around five-sixths of the market. He is a small man standing between two giants, and both giants have their hands in his pockets. He cannot raise his price and he cannot lower his costs, and so when the weather turns or the market dips, it is always his neck in the press.

And it shows up in the cruelest number I came across in all my reading. The median American farm household—the one right in the middle—does not make money farming. It loses money farming, on the order of a couple thousand dollars a year. The only reason the lights stay on is that somebody in that family drives into town and works an off-farm job—for the paycheck and, just as often, for the health insurance—earning around eighty-seven thousand dollars so that the other one can afford to keep farming at a loss. Read that again. The family that feeds the country cannot feed itself by farming. It subsidizes the nation's groceries out of its second job.

So what happens to a man who does the most necessary work in the world and cannot make it pay? He quits, or he dies and his children do not take it up, or he is bought out and folded into an operation a hundred times his size. We have been watching it happen for ninety years. In 1935 this country had nearly seven million farms. Today it has fewer than two—even as the number of mouths to feed has more than doubled. The land did not disappear. It was consolidated, swept up into ever-larger operations, while the families that once worked it scattered to the towns and the average age of the American farmer crept up toward sixty, with too few young ones coming behind to replace him.

And that should frighten everyone, not just the farmer—because a country that drives its food growers to ruin and folds them into a handful of giants has not made its food supply stronger. It has made it brittle. Fewer hands know how to grow the food. The knowledge thins. The towns that depended on those families hollow out and board up. And we all sit down to eat at a table held up by people we have arranged to bankrupt. That is the first dishonor: we will not pay for the work that keeps us alive.

Here is the second dishonor, and it is the one we have done to ourselves. Having decided that real work is beneath us to pay for, we decided it was beneath us to do. Our hands have gone soft. We can buy anything and make almost nothing. We summon dinner to the door and could not dress a chicken to save our lives; we drive cars we cannot fix, live in houses we cannot wire, wear clothes we cannot mend, and eat from a land we would not know how to plant. A whole people is forgetting the plain competences that every generation before us simply assumed—the skills that are the actual root of self-sufficiency, and therefore of freedom. A man who can feed and fix and build for himself can stand up to the world. A man who can do none of it is at the mercy of whoever can.

And let me put myself in the dock first, because I'll not preach this one down from a clean porch. By every measure the world bothers to keep, I am an educated man. I can take an argument apart and set it back together and write you a tidy paragraph about it. And I cannot sew the button back on my own shirt. The washing machine quits, and I stand before it like it's a riddle in a tongue I never learned. There's a fellow I pay to tend my yard, too—and that's the one that shames me, for I love the garden; the dirt under my own nails is about the most honest pleasure I've got. Somewhere along the line I got the fool idea that the doing of it was beneath my time, and I hired it out. Let the power go down and stay down a week, and I'd be a helpless creature—because the plain skills that carry a body through, the mending and the growing and the fixing and the making, were never put into these soft pink hands of mine. I don't tell you this to beg your pity. I tell you because if a man like me can't stand on his own two feet the day the lights go out, then something has been picked clean from the whole lot of us, schooled and unschooled alike—and the first honest step to getting it back is to quit pretending we're too good to have lost it.

You can see the bill coming due already in the trades. We spent two generations telling every child that the only respectable path ran through a college and into an office, and that the kid who picked up a tool belt had somehow failed. We cut the shop classes. We sneered at the vocational track. And now the men who can actually build and repair the physical world are graying out all at once—the average tradesman is past fifty, and for every five who retire only about two come up behind them. The country is staring down a shortage of millions of electricians, plumbers, welders, and machinists. We are about to be a nation that cannot wire its own buildings or fix its own pipes, full of people with soft hands and important-sounding titles, all waiting for someone to come who knows how to actually do the thing.

That last one deserves a word, because it joins both halves of this story in a single outrage. The American farmer—the original self-reliant man, who for two centuries fixed his own equipment in his own barn with his own hands—now buys tractors so locked down by software that he is legally forbidden to repair them. A broken sensor on a half-million-dollar machine, in the middle of the harvest, and he is not allowed to fix it; he must wait, and pay, for an authorized dealer to plug in a laptop. Farmers had to fight, state by state, for the plain right to repair the things they own. Think of what we have come to: the most capable hands in the country, told they may not use their own skill on their own property. That is the soft-handed society made into law.

And do not let anyone tell you this manual competence is a lesser thing than the work done in clean clothes at a desk. The man who fixes the engine has to think—diagnose, reason, test, and answer to a reality that does not care about his opinions. The writer Matthew Crawford put it better than I can: there is a quiet that comes over a person who can manifest himself in the world through real skill, a sufficiency that frees him from the endless need to explain his own worth. He doesn't have to argue that he matters. He can simply point: the building stands, the car runs, the lights are on. That is a kind of dignity, and a kind of peace, that no salary and no title can hand you. We are raising it out of our children.

Which brings us to the third dishonor, and the saddest, because it is the one we are teaching the young. We have become a nation of debutantes—soft-handed, well-dressed, and looking down our noses at the very people who make our lives possible. We will eat the lettuce and despise the hand that cut it. We will flush the toilet and sneer at the plumber. We will summon the driver, the picker, the line cook, the nurse's aide, the sanitation man—the whole vast army of people who literally keep us fed and clean and cared for and alive—and we will regard them as our lessers, as people who simply hadn't the sense to become something better. We clapped for them out the window for a few weeks once, when we suddenly remembered we could not live without them, and called them “essential.” Then we went back to paying them least and respecting them least of all. To call a worker “essential” and pay him like he's disposable is about the most contemptible thing a society can do, and we have made a habit of it.

And the children are watching. We have shown them, by every signal we send, that the goal in life is not to be useful but to be seen—and they have learned the lesson with a vengeance. Ask a child today what he wants to be, and more often than anything else he will tell you: an influencer. Better than half of the rising generation say they would take it if they could; a third of the little ones name “YouTuber” as their first dream, ahead of doctor, teacher, builder, or anything that touches the actual world. Now, I bear these kids no grudge—they did not invent the machine that is reshaping them; we handed it to them and walked off. But look hard at what we have aimed them at. It is, in the main, a great clamoring for attention—a child holding up a phone, performing for strangers, refreshing the screen for the little hit of validation, the likes and the follows, a hunger that can never be filled because the next empty morning it must all be earned again.

I want to be careful here, and fair, the way a labor paper must be. I am not romancing drudgery. There is nothing noble about being worked to ruin, and I would not send one child back to a coal mine or pretend a bleeding-handed poverty is good for the soul. Nor am I sneering at the work of the mind—the head and the hand were never enemies, and the best work of all marries the two. The teacher, the engineer, the nurse who must know a great deal to do her job—these are honest labor too. My quarrel is not with thinking, and not with the young, and not even with a soul who films himself for strangers to make an honest dollar. My quarrel is with an arrangement and a vanity: an economy that pays its makers in red ink while the middlemen take the eighty-eight cents, and a culture that has taught us to prize being seen over being useful, and to look down on the dirty hands that hold the whole thing up. Those are the thieves here. Not the worker. Never the worker.

Now hear the good news, because not one piece of this is fate—every bit of it is a choice, and choices can be unmade. We have honored labor before and we can do it again. We once wrote the idea of a fair price for the farmer right into the law and called it parity—the principle that a man who feeds the country is owed enough to live by doing it. Farmers banded together into cooperatives to claw back a little bargaining power from the giants, and the law protected their right to do it. We can break up the handful of packers and processors who set both the price the farmer gets and the price you pay, so the spread goes back to the people at both honest ends of it. We have begun, state by state, to win back the right to repair the things we own—to put the wrench back in the farmer's hand. And the young are not lost: enrollment in the trades is climbing again as a new generation discovers that a skill is a thing no algorithm can take and no boss can outsource—there's talk of a “tool-belt generation,” and good riddance to the snobbery that shamed them out of it.

So here is the work in front of us, and it falls to all of us, soft hands and calloused alike. Pay the people who do the essential things—pay the farmer, the aide, the picker, the builder—enough to live in dignity by their labor, because a society that bankrupts its makers is eating its own seed corn. Bring back the shop class and the apprenticeship; tell every kid that there is honor in a trade and freedom in a skill. And get your own hands dirty again. Plant the garden. Fix the leak. Learn the one thing you swore you'd always pay someone else to do. Not because we must all return to the farm, but because a people who can do things for themselves cannot be so easily ruled, or fooled, or sold a hollow dream of being watched in place of a real life of being useful.

Get Your Hands Dirty

The hands that feed you and fix your roof and bathe your dying mother are not your lessers. They are the floor you are standing on, and we have spent too long pretending the floor holds itself up. Honor it two ways at once: pay the people who do the work, and do some of the work yourself. Teach your children that the crop coming in and the weld holding and the lights coming on are worth more than a stranger's glance that's gone by morning. Take the calluses back as a badge, not a shame. A nation that gets its hands dirty again—and pays the people who already do—is a nation that can feed itself, fix itself, and look itself in the eye. And don't you dare lose hope.

Notes On The Record