Joel calls each of his stacked farm enterprises a “holon,” a word I’d never encountered before. He told me he picked it up from Allan Nation; when I asked Nation about it, he pointed me to Arthur Koestler, who coined the term in The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler felt English lacked a word to express the complex relationship of parts and wholes in a biological or social system. A holon (from the Greek holos, or whole, and the suffix on, as in proton, suggesting a particle) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained whole, and from another a dependent part. A body organ
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