I have spent much of my life exploring this question. Farming hasn’t always been enjoyable for me—especially as a teenager, when I worked 400+ hours a month on my family’s farm. Yet as I neared the end of my graduate training, I began to feel a deep longing to return to farming. I noticed this most clearly while riding my bike home from my postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz CAPS, passing CASFS students sweating and smiling together in the fields.
That longing could be temporarily soothed by hiking in the nearby forest, but it never fully disappeared until I started farming again. For me, there is something undeniably healing about farming and gardening. But… why?
Seth Gillihan offers some compelling insights in his Psychology Today article, “10 Mental Health Benefits of Gardening.” It’s well worth a read.
Fortunately, there is a growing body of anecdotal—and more recently, empirical—evidence exploring the relationship between farming and gardening and both mental and physical health. Still, I’m left with many unanswered questions. Do certain farming or gardening tasks support specific forms of healing? Might different activities soothe different kinds of emotional pain? For instance, if someone is feeling sad or depressed, does harvesting vegetables help? If someone is grieving, could sowing seeds offer comfort?
