The farmer-entrepreneur

I once heard that an entrepreneur is "one who bears risk," but I'm beginning to think an entrepreneur is "one who plants seeds."

I once heard that an entrepreneur is "one who bears risk," but I'm beginning to think an entrepreneur is "one who plants seeds." An initial business idea, the processes for making it happen, and the risk-taking steps to get it going are like planting a seed in the topsoil.

The topsoil is a simile for the market. It has to be right for the opportunity to yield results. It needs the right food, nutrients, water, and climate to provide your go-to-market fit. The topsoil could also represent the human capital represented in the seed sower—your emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and social nutrients that feed the new growth.

Then, that seed evolves into something different than what began. Sure, you add a trellis, nurture soil, clear weeds, and so on—further representing your business and relational acumen—but it continues to grow and develop in new, unexpected ways.

What that process really requires is enough time, enough patience, to watch it mature and give the tendrils the right care as they go along doing what they've done since eternity began. My business is taking shape in new ways—or, rather, it's shaping me in new ways—that I didn't expect, and perhaps it has a near future I don't expect.

I'm learning that my role is to care for it like a farmer cares for a garden. So much of life is this way, which is perhaps why Jesus frequently taught in agricultural similes. Faith is like a mustard seed. The wise person is like a great tree. Heaven is like a vineyard, and so on.

As a result, I've recently picked up a Wendell Berry reader called The World-Ending Fire. In the introduction, the editor recalls a 1988 essay called "The Work of Local Culture," and I found its opening image to be a rather poignant example of how a business can take shape, especially one that aims to impact its employees, their families, and communities for years to come.

For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

I wonder what it would be like to see a business like that bucket. An entrepreneur merely plants a seed, creating and nurturing a space in which the earth can go on earth-making in a healthy, sustainable way, however that may look for that owner's particular bucket. And over time the growth continues to mature and bloom into something wonderful.

Instead of bearing risk, in other words, consider your venture as bearing fruit. You're merely the farmer welcoming it into the world before passing it on to the next generation.

Thanks for reading.