a Cultural Product

A good farmer...is a cultural product; he is made by a sort of training, certainly, in what his time imposes or demands, but he is also made by generations of experience.  This essential experience can only be accumulated, tested, preserved, handed down in settled households, friendships, and communities that are deliberately and carefully native to their ground, in which the past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.

Wendell Berry The Unsettling of America 1977 pg. 45