I have spent much of my life exploring this question. Farming hasn’t always been enjoyable for me, especially when I was a teenager working 400+ hours a month on the family farm. However, as I was nearing the end of my graduate training I began to feel a deep longing to return to farming. I felt envious when I would ride my bike home from my postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz CAPS and see CASFS students sweating and smiling together in the fields. This feeling could be temporarily soothed by hiking in the nearby forest, but remained until I started farming again. For me, there is something undeniably healing about farming and gardening. But…why?

Seth Gillihan shared some great insights in his article 10 Mental Health Benefits of Gardening on Psychology Today. Check it out!

Fortunately, there’s a decent amount of anecdotal and (more recently) empirical evidence exploring the relationship between farming/gardening and mental and physical health. Yet, I still have so many unanswered questions. For example, do certain types of farming and gardening tasks better support specific areas of healing? Can they soothe different areas of emotional pain? For example - if someone is feeling sad or depressed, does harvesting vegetables help? If someone is grieving, sowing seeds?