Agriculture is a petri dish in which we can examine and bring to light a culture’s understanding of the human, and of nature. The agricultural enterprise expresses a whole way of being human; reflectively or not, it expresses an understanding of what human beings should or could do in the world, assumptions we can broadly describe as metaphysical. The material questions about how we obtain our food reflect and reproduce our more-than-physical understandings of nature and the human. When we ask how we should farm, we cannot evade the issue of what we think human life should look like. The paper argues that an agricultural future worthy of human beings needs a metaphysics which takes human earthliness seriously but does not absolutise it. In turn, a consideration of agriculture pushes us to reconcile ourselves to the human condition: a condition of ambivalence and fracturedness, as well as fellowship and belonging. Accepting that agriculture puts us at a definitive distance from ‘nature’ and reveals to us, whether we like it or not, something of our un-naturalness, is the condition for making a meaningful critique of current industrial norms.