Farms versus Gardens

I do not believe that farms are apart of nature. I feel as though gardens are definitely more “natural” than a farm however it’s weird to generalize like this because in a way farms and gardens can be seen as doing the same things with similar outcomes. On page 185, Pollan talks about how farms work to “…get us what we want from nature” and I feel that gardens do this as well, but in my mind I feel that farms and gardens are very different in how they are treated.  Before reading this chapter, I read the blog questions and felt this very way about gardens versus farms; this feeling was reaffirmed when I read on page 185, “Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature’s incomprehensible complexity to something humanly maneagable…” I feel that exact sentence is where you can draw the differences from a garden to farming/agriculture. A garden is something that is done for personal pleasure. We grow a garden, without being brutal or simplifying nature. People who grow a garden do it because they enjoy it. Although similar to agriculture we choose what we want to grow, I feel that nature has more variety in a garden than it does in a farm. People are working for a living on a farm as opposed to choosing to start a garden. I think the pleasure versus work aspect is what really separates a garden from a farm.