A Gardener’s Eulogy to the Penny

Say farewell to one more victim of a culture of optimization


By Adam Hanft

The penny, which itself is an instrumentality of measurement, has been, ironically, eliminated by brutal math: it costs 3.7 cents to manufacture each one of them.

So, from the point-of-view of the U.S. Mint — and speaking in today’s jargon of late-state capitalism — the penny has negative ROI and is unmonetizable.

The penny has counted itself to death. Been DOGE’d out of circulation.

While this may be an occasion of pragmatic joy (if there can be such a thing) for romance-freeeconomists, for many of us gardeners — which I am confident is how many of the readers of thisdescribe themselves — it is a grim reminder of so much that is despondence-producing about ourcurrent culture.

We have been made penniless in more ways than one.

After all, the metaphorical and symbol connections between the tiny penny that grows to be a Muskian fortune, and the tiny sapling that becomes a tree under which generations gather, are too striking to be overlooked.

When Martha Stewart showed me around her farm, she proudly pointed out the thousands of mature, imposing plants that she planted, as tiny embodiments of the future.

If her plants were pennies, they never would have stood a chance.

The penny once represented our tiniest unit of value; in gardening speak, it acted as the microbial layer of the American economy.

A Society That Loses Patience Loses Itself

The Martha story is a reminder that gardeners are, by definition and character, forward-looking people who believe in the potential of small, the dream of growth, and possess the patience of atrowel-wielding Job. We live in a thriving realm of infinitesimals: spores, trace minerals, micronutrients, beneficial nematodes where imagination turns into reality on an agronomic level.A penny is metallic dreaming, and as Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”Abolishing the penny violates our commitment to both imagination and incrementality, it signals a culture that collectively fails the marshmallow experiment, that dismisses the cumulative —which is, appositely, the essence of soil health and regenerative agriculture.


Pennies are temporal anchors

Another reason why our dirty fingernail community needs to note the passing of the penny is that it marks time, like gardeners do. Pennies track eras and bear dates — the Flying Eagle Cent, the Indian Head cent, the Lincoln Cent, the zinc penny during World War II, these are jingling little encyclopedias — while gardeners track far shorter trajectories: the first frost, the last frost, how long it takes for a flower to set on a tomato plant. The garden is one way to tell time, pennies were another.


Pennies Are Tiny Canvases

Another reason why our dirty fingernail community needs to note the passing of the penny is that it marks time, like gardeners do. Pennies track eras and bear dates — the Flying Eagle Cent, the Indian Head cent, the Lincoln Cent, the zinc penny during World War II, these are jingling little encyclopedias — while gardeners track far shorter trajectories: the first frost, the last frost, how long it takes for a flower to set on a tomato plant. The garden is one way to tell time, pennies were another.


Preserve, Don’t Destroy

Gardeners are, at heart, preservationists. We harvest our bounty and keep it for the winter in the ancient mason jar ceremony. We buy old houses with gone-to-seed gardens and spend backbreaking weekends bringing them back to glory. Speaking of seeds, we buy heirloom varieties of non-hybridized fruits and vegetables – including, yes, the Abe Lincoln tomato, which was released by H.W Buckbee’s in 1923 (and I don’t have to tell you the best way to feed it).


The Problem is Bigger Than Pennies

In brutal terms, the penny has no utility, it can’t justify itself on a spreadsheet. That’s why so many singularly diverse figures have rallied around permanent penny preclusion. Greg Mankiw, a New Keynesian economist, declared in the Wall Street Journal back in 2006, in prose as icy as a frozen penny used in a snowman’s eyes, that “the purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange, but I have to acknowledge that the penny no longer serves that purpose.

”Even Barack Obama join the firing line, although somewhat reluctantly: “I don’t know, it may be time” he said, failing to exhibit the decisiveness that led him to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden.

The penny, sadly, has no place in a culture of optimization, an AG1, back-to-back meeting, TimFerris-y, life-hack-y universe where every input, every decision, every calculation is assessed against a reductionist calculus of efficiency.

Gardeners should resist that slide rule measurement of life’s values, for if we didn’t, we could find a far more efficient use of our time. I asked ChatGPT to run an analysis of gardening’s efficiency — as if it were an economist — and it found a net negative return of $215-$330 per plant, assuming a $20/hour wage for the backyard gardener.

“Gardening yields many things” the LLM hastens to add “…joy, meaning, connection to nature – but not dollars.”

Or pennies.

Gardeners celebrate the immeasurable every day, and even without pennies jingling in our pocket, we’ll continue in the glorious practice of the counter-pragmatic.

About the Writer

Adam serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Scotts Miracle-Gro, works as a brand strategist, futurist and writer, and is in perennial search for those willing to give him a penny for his thoughts.