I win, you lose...or do you?...

I have been looking for answers to the problem of how to live on a farm and be happy, like many of you. One of the issues has been reference anxiety: we often measure our happiness not on an absolute scale, but relative to our positional status with others.

If everyone else we know is driving a new pickup, a perfectly acceptable old pickup may not bring us much happiness. If we are making good money with 180 bu. corn, guys averaging 200 can dampen our satisfaction.

When the relative position gets woven into public policy by say, progressive tax rates or consumption limits, the expectation is to relieve the reference anxiety for many at the expense of the few would-be winners. Sounds logical, and these types of ideas are enjoying considerable attention.

But the entire concept may rest on a flawed assumption: there is only so much status to go around. In an occasionally dense article, Wil Wilkinson explains how there is good news for participants in the rat race:

Where benevolence, fidelity, cooperation, innovation, and excellence are esteemed, positional races may produce mutual advantage instead of mutual destruction. And while the game of status may be locally zero-sum, it can be globally positive-sum, as scientific, economic, and cultural entrepreneurs identify new dimensions of excellence in which to compete and earn freely conferred prestige as payment for benefit to others. We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time. We can, like Gauguin, quit law and family to paint naked natives in Tahiti. Or, better, we can move the family to a quieter place where houses are cheap and schools are good. (‘Is this heaven?’ ‘No, Iowa.’) If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat. [More]

For those of us in farming, this idea of new arenas for competition and status seems to fit what I see going on. There is no single farm paradigm we all must follow to achieve recognition and satisfaction. I see the emergence of three large categories with multiple sub-groups and hybrids as well.

Industrial farms produce the overwhelming majority of our farm output - feed, food, fiber, and now fuel. (Isn't it great how they all start with "f"?) Agrarian farms sell products that have value not just for their intrinsic characterisics (protein level, flavor, etc.) but for their method of production - free-range, organic, local, etc. Finally, recreational farms satisfy owners first and any customers only when convenient.

Within these groups and subgroups all kinds of positions of status exist to feed our instinctive need for relative position. You could be the best organic milk producer even though your output pales compared to a huge dairy. Note that the status is conferred not by the producer so much as the final customer, so simply possessing a desire and even talent does not ensure reward.

This diversification of farming approaches is the most hopeful development I have seen for increasing the level of satisfaction in our profession. Best of all it is the action of individual choices and free market, not government edict. In fact, government will be I believe, powerless to prevent or even alter this progressive innovation.

In short, we now have a growing number of paths to choose (or blaze) on our quests to live on a farm and be happy.

Score another one for free minds in a free country...