[agricola laboriosus]

“What was the meaning of this so steady and self respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows,my beans, through so many more I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Anteus”, opens the Bean Field, with Thoreau overlooking the fruits(vegetables) of his loving labor (Thoreau 146). The act of farming becomes a central defining characteristic to Thoreau’s experience at Walden. Transforming the land from wild to a fruitful, cultivated plot is a process that also transforms the laborer. Thoreau’s work in his fields became a meditative process of furthered intimacy and observation with his surroundings, he describes in poetic his environment, “When I pause to lean on my hoe , these sounds and sights I heard and saw any where in the row, a part of the inexhaustable entertainment which the country offers” (Thoreau 150). Renegade farming he did well and as a retort to bypassers gossip Thoreau poses the question, “And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? (Thoreau 149).

In the chapter Baker Farm, Thoreau happens upon an Irish immigrant family while taking shelter from a downpour in their home he thought abandoned. The patriarch John Field, bound by a vicious cycle of as Thoreau describes, “When he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of the system..indeed it was broader than it was long,for he discontented and wasted his life into the bargain” (Thoureau 193). Field worked another man’s land to pay for luxury goods (meat,butter,coffee,tea,milk) for himself and his family, this leading to exhaustion and impoverishment. Thoreau, urges Field to cultivate his land and live simply as he himself does. All of the Field’s disparities are associated with their dependence on luxury items(as we can with most of the current world issues), and coupled with the family’s arithmetic-polluted though process.. the cycle continues and their own land provides them no sustenance.

Comparing the sowing of seeds to that of the truest values of men, Thoreau asks which is most important to our human legacy and imagines a man “paritally risen out of the earth,something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground” (Leopold 156). This was a critque on the modern farmer, who defiled the land by understanding it only as an economic commodity. I interpet this as Thoreau correlating the value of a man with the way he values the land he works.