Walden: The Bean-Field Summary & Analysis

Thoreau's daily work is hoeing his bean-field, which he says connects him to the earth He remembers that when he was four years old he saw this land where he now lives, which he now cultivates and which many peoples before him have cultivated. He doesn't use workers or machinery to work his land, so he says he is more intimate with the beans and takes pleasure in laboring with his own hands.

Thoreau does his work in the bean-field daily, in the early morning. The pigeons and hawks and other birds that fly overhead while he works, as well as the other animals, offer him "inexhaustible entertainment." From the town on festival days he can hear music and the sound of guns firing, which he says sound "as far away as Palestine." Meanwhile, Thoreau is at war with the weeds that threaten his beans.

Thoreau harvests twelve bushels of beans from his bean-field and sets out charts of all the money he spent in growing the beans and all the money he earned from selling the beans. He gives advice about planting the beans and advocates for planting different kinds of crops and undertaking new adventures, not following what one's predecessors have done.

Farming, which Thoreau calls "husbandry," has sacred origins and, as ancient poetry reminds us, was once considered a great art. Now, however, pursued with greed and haste by those who want only large farms and lots of crops to sell, it has been ruined, the landscape has been deformed, and the life of the farmer degraded, who "knows Nature but as a robber."