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Sustainable agriculture is not a farming method. It is an economic model — one built on the premise that the health of the land, the wellbeing of the people who farm it, and the resilience of the communities that depend on it are not costs to be minimized, but foundations to be invested in.
Wendell Berry's vision in The Unsettling of America outlines what that model looks like in practice: diverse cropping systems that build biodiversity rather than deplete it, soil management practices that maintain fertility across generations, water conservation embedded in the design of the farm rather than added as an afterthought, and fair treatment of the people whose labour makes it all possible.
This piece traces Berry's argument from principle to practice — and asks what it would mean to build an economy around agricultural health rather than agricultural extraction. The answer has direct implications for how we grow food in Toronto and across Ontario.
