I was very pleased to see a day later an article in the New York Times interviewing Wendell Berry. And what was he talking about? The need to get economics right on the farm to protect the environment.
I did want to thank all of the people who came to the lecture. Thoughtful, mindful consumers are essential to getting our food system right and fair for everyone, and there was a whole roomful of these wonderful people that night. Inspiring for me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/wendell-berry-agriculture-farm-bill.html
Wendell Berry’s Right Kind of Farming
Gracy Olmstead
Agricultural
choices must be made by these inescapable standards: the ecological
health of the farm and the economic health of the farmer.
Ms. Olmstead is an Idaho native living and writing outside Washington, D.C.
How
we farm matters. For the past two centuries, America’s farms have
expanded and homogenized, and farming equipment and chemicals have
replaced personnel. Farmers have grown older and more isolated and are
retiring without successors.
Our
embrace of industrialization and “factory farming” has not resulted in
greater economic security for most American farmers. The nation has
suffered a historic slump in prices for corn, soybeans, milk, wheat and other commodities. It has lost half its dairy farmers in the past 18 years. And The Wall Street Journal warned in early 2017 that “the next few years could bring the biggest wave of farm closures since the 1980s.”
The farmer, essayist and poet Wendell Berry
has long argued that today’s agricultural practices are detrimental to
ecology, community and the local economies that farms once served. A
native Kentuckian, Mr. Berry has written over 40 works of fiction,
nonfiction and poetry, and has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the
National Humanities Medal and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished
Achievement Award.
Mr. Berry argues
that healthy forms of agriculture require intentional cultivation on
the part of both consumers and farmers. Americans presume there will
always be enough — money, clean soil, healthy water — to fulfill our
desires. But our ravenous economic disposition goes against the very
nature of our world and its finite resources. Advocates for sustainable
agriculture argue that we ought to recognize the limits of our world
and, as Mr. Berry writes, “live in it on its terms, not ours.”
This
year’s proposed Farm Bill awards millions of dollars to wealthy
agribusiness and factory farms in the form of commodity subsidies and
crop insurance, while cutting funds for important conservation and
stewardship programs and offering little to beginning farmers and
ranchers or local farmers markets and local food promotion.
Mr. Berry, as an ally of Wes Jackson of the Land Institute and others, has long argued for a 50-year Farm Bill that would rejuvenate our nation’s ecosystems while fostering long-term food security in the United States.
Gracy Olmstead:
The Farm Bill usually promotes short-term economic gains over long-term
ecological health (something the 50-year Farm Bill seeks to fix). How
do we get Washington politicians to support more sustainable forms of
agriculture?
Wendell Berry:
The problem here is not so much that of the shortness of the term of
planning or of shortsightedness as it is of ecological and agricultural
ignorance and a sort of moral blindness. The problems we ought to be
dealing with are not problems because they are going to cause us trouble
in the future. They are problems because they are obviously and clearly
causing trouble right now. We ought to be doing our best to solve them
right now.
If
politicians and journalists want to know about the problems of
agriculture, they are not likely to go out into “rural America” to
observe the condition of the fields and the waterways or to talk to the
farmers and the ex-farmers, the ex-merchants of the small towns, or to
talk to the mayors and county judges of rural counties. Instead, they
are very likely to talk to academic and bureaucratic experts, who are
tightly bound within the industrial structure of agriculture,
agri-science and agribusiness.
Alan Guebert was right when he said
in one of his columns that this farm bill will be much like the last
one insofar as it will not address the real problems of agriculture.
Those problems, as you know, are soil erosion, soil degradation, the
pollution of waterways by sediment and toxic chemicals, various
ecological damages, the elimination of small farms, the destruction of
the cultures of husbandry and the ruin of country towns and communities.
And maybe we should add specifically the curse of overproduction, which
at present, as often before, is the major and the cruelest problem.
Those
problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and
industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the life
of the living world. The preferences and choices of industrialism do not
imply a limit of any kind. They rest instead upon the premises of
limitless economic growth and limitless consumption, which of course
implies limitless waste, and finally exhaustion.
Nothing
can take form except within limits. No cure is possible, either in
policy or practice, except within understood limits, which is to say
within a correct diagnosis. This requires patience. A good solution has
to begin with a description of the problem that is full, clear, and
reliable.
Olmstead: The
Farm Bill addresses many issues, including “rural development” — and
rural communities desperately need help these days. Could the government
help combat these issues, in your community and elsewhere?
Berry:
A farm bill sincerely intending to help rural communities might begin
by proposing a program of production controls and price supports for
every product of farming and forestry. At present, for example, the
dairy “industry” is increasing milk production
by millions of gallons every year, thus reducing prices and driving
small dairies out of business. This of course serves the interests of
large dairies.
A bill
intending to help rural communities, furthermore, might forbid the large
chain stores to underprice their goods in order to destroy locally
owned small stores. I don’t see why the government should not enforce
honest prices for the same reason that it enforces honest weights and
measures. I am sure that a lot of conservatives would object loudly to
such “regulation.” But for small farms and small businesses, the “free
market” is not a “level playing field.”
Olmstead:
Many conservatives and libertarians see the Farm Bill’s handouts to
large agribusinesses as the opposite of a free market. If small farmers
are given a level playing field, they argue, more will succeed — and
industrial agribusiness will no longer have a government-provided
financial cushion.
Berry:
I distrust entirely the terms “free market” and “level playing field.”
Those phrases are intoned as if they were the names of gods, but what do
they mean? How exactly do the conservatives and the libertarians think
small farmers would be served by the free market and the level playing
field?
The problem
that has impoverished and destroyed farmers nearly always is that of low
prices resulting from surplus production. That is also, obviously, a
land-destroying problem. The only solution to that problem that can
sustain the small farmers is the combination of production control and
price supports as exemplified by the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association
as it was reorganized in my region under the New Deal in 1941. I
dislike recommending my own writing, but that organization and its work
are explained pretty fully in “The Art of Loading Brush.”
The conservative politicians and their friends in the Farm Bureau hated
that program because it protected the small farmers, and they finally
killed it. In its absence, our troubles have multiplied.
Recently, for example, 100 family dairy farms have been put out of business
in this region, two of them in my county, because Walmart is building
its own milk-bottling plant in Indiana. And so 100 self-employed,
self-supporting, self-respecting farm families are being severely
damaged or destroyed in order to increase the wealth of a family
already far too rich. I am unsure what the farmers themselves have
concluded, but I can conclude only what I already knew: They have no
friends among the conservatives and libertarians. And if the Democrats
and the liberals were to capture the government, those small farmers
would find no friends among them, as they now are.
Both
of the political sides, so far as I am concerned, have to accept
responsibility for the emergence of Donald Trump, the autonomous man,
the self-made man, economically “free” and sexually liberated,
responsible only to himself, starting from scratch and inventing his own
way of doing things. To get outside the trajectory that produced Trump,
we will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to
think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly
love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example
proves, and as proved by present failure.
Olmstead:
Our trade war with China has highlighted American farmers’ reliance on
the global market. Do you believe this reliance is a necessary risk in
today’s globalized economy? How can these farmers safeguard their own
self-sufficiency and well-being?
Berry:
I have been arguing for a long time, and I still argue, that an economy
worthy of the name should begin with proper care of its sources in the
natural world and in the local cultures of land use. Beyond that it
should be based upon the principle of a reasonable self-sufficiency,
from the household to the local community and on through the categories
of political organization.
Such
an economy, within the variables of weather and human capability, would
be formed within certain prescribed limits. To the extent that it would
be limited and formed or formal, we might assume that it would be
stable. Because such an economy has never been tried, we should not
think of it with too much confidence. But there is certainly nothing
limited or stable in our present casting about the “globe” for supplies
and demands. This, like our present society, is disorderly if not
chaotic.
The
so-called global economy, because it is predicated on the exhaustion of
natural sources and of the land-use economies, is far from a sure
thing. An interesting question, then, is whether we might intentionally
reform our economies upon the principle of self-sufficiency or be forced
to do so by the failure of the global economy. Farmers by themselves
can’t protect themselves in a “free market” economy whether it is
national or global. At present they have only the very limited
self-protection of supporting their own lives so far as possible from
their own land — that is, by producing their own food and fuel, and by
harvesting energy from their own sunlight.
Olmstead:
An Iowa farmer recently told me that industrial agriculture is
inevitable — the natural fruit of technological progress and
globalization. The farmer reminded me of others I have talked to who,
when asked about farming practices that are industrialized and
isolating, reply by saying “We must feed the world.”
Berry:
If you can persuade farmers that their hardships are “inevitable,” then
you have got them very securely trapped and they can be safely
forgotten by their political representatives and exploited by
agribusiness corporations. Inevitability and objectivity, like pessimism
and optimism, are the names of programs offering freedom from choice
and responsibility. If “technological progress” is the same as
technological determinism, then there are no remedies.
It
can pretty well be demonstrated, however, that technological progress
is the result of choices that have been made all the way from the
inventors and manufacturers of technologies to the people who buy and
use and pay for them. The important questions all have to do with the
standards by which these choices are made. If the standards were
different, different choices would be made.
And
in fact we have plenty of evidence that choices can be made that
evidently were not made by your Iowa farmer. That the alternative
choices often have to be made against powerful social pressures does not
mean that they cannot be made or that they are not valid choices. The
finally inescapable standards by which agricultural choices must be made
are the ecological health of the farm and the economic health of the
farmer.
The problem
of feeding the world should be addressed, first of all, by calculating
the waste — from farmland and topsoil to thrown-away food — in the
world’s “food systems.” Perhaps somebody has done this. If so, that is
the place to start. The people, fairly numerous and highly credentialed,
who argue that only industrial agriculture as we now have it can feed
the world are arguing in fact that we can feed the world only by an
agriculture that destroys both farmland and farmers. There is a point,
obviously, beyond which this kind of agriculture will not be able to
feed much of anybody.
Olmstead:
As farmers grow older, we seem unable to attract or keep young people
on the land. For some, this is because of the cost of procuring land and
starting a farm. But I have also talked to farmers who were told they
were “too smart” to farm by high school counselors and mentors. These
admonitions align with a larger cultural prejudice against manual labor
and blue-collar work. Considering the challenge to farming’s future
which this represents, how can we foster and renew a passion for
farming?
Berry:
That smart people are “too smart” to farm is one of the set of clichés
by which industrial agriculture has maintained itself. Another is that
farming is “drudgery” or “mind-numbing work.” Another is that ex-farmers
have been “liberated” from their hard, narrow, and depressing lives.
These
clichés are sustained by the “larger cultural prejudice against manual
labor,” which you mention. But there also are active prejudices against
farmers, country people, the country, small-town people and small towns.
This at least begins the description of a large cultural problem.
Because of such prejudices, and also because of economic adversity,
farmers encourage their children to leave farming. Their departing
children, so few of them as they now are, amount to an invaluable
cultural and economic resource, to which our present economy attaches no
value at all.
What
can we do about this? First, those of us who care must keep trying to
bring about improvements, which we can do, and are doing, locally —
where, in any event, the improvements will have to be made. Second, we
have got to be patient. That this is a cultural problem means that it
can’t be simply or quickly solved. What you speak of as a “passion for
farming” can grow only from an understanding of the intelligence and the
learning involved in the right kind of farming, and we should add an
understanding of the better cultures of husbandry and of the traditional
agrarian values. These things we must try to keep alive, not because of
their “potential value” but because they are now and forever right.
Gracy Olmstead is an Idaho native living and writing outside Washington.
