In Henry County, Kentucky, where the foothills of Appalachia slope to the plains of the midwest, on a small farm of fields and woods, Wendell Berry is quietly fomenting revolution. One of his tools is a plow, which he pulls behind a team of draft horses much as his father and grandfather did, measuring against the lay of the land which plots to cultivate and which to leave wild, husbanding the precious topsoil. The other is a pen, for his more public occupation (which he might claim is less important than his farming) consists of writing well-reasoned, immaculately crafted essays about the importance of what he does with his plow.
That changed after World War II, when commercial fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanized equipment became widely available. Farmers took advantage of them to plant greater quantities of cash crops generally destined for more distant urban markets. They began buying more goods than before, and using less of the cheap or free resources available to them. They bought fuel for tractors instead of using horses, which could be fed grass. They raised only one or several cash crops, instead of most of their own food, so they needed more products from the supermarket. Human laborers were replaced by machines. And so on.
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The result, as we’ve read in recent years, was that millions of family farms went broke, unable to pay back the loans taken out to buy equipment or fertilizer. Their land was bought up by agribusiness corporations–with their efficiencies of scale, they can produce large quantities of cash crops more cheaply than small operators. And the farm families, along with much of the population of the small towns that supported them, moved to urban areas and became data-entry clerks and fast-food counter help. The people who have stayed on the farms and in the small towns have had to travel greater and greater distances to buy needed goods and services.
Fortunately there are some good signs out on the land. There’s a growing interest in organic produce. And many farmers are beginning to realize that uninhibited chemical use is bad for their own health and the health of the land.
Berry is angry that our nation routinely accepts the destructiveness of industrial agriculture. “The national economy has prescribed ways of use but not ways of care,” writes Berry. “The destruction of the human community, the local economy, and the natural health of such a place is now looked upon not as a ‘trade-off,’ a possibly regrettable ‘price of progress,’ but as a good, virtually a national goal.” Those young people still raised in rural communities move away; the goods raised on farms are shipped elsewhere (and the profits go to distant executives); and now the very soil is washing away. It’s bitterly ironic that a country that espoused Jeffersonian ideals of agrarianism at its founding should now endorse such a brutal colonialism.
Which doesn’t seem to leave much room for city dwellers–but Berry does offer some (admittedly small-scale) tips for us. He suggests buying organic produce, from sources as local as possible. We should avoid unnecessary packaging. And the food we do buy we should cook up with love, putting the same care into it that a good farmer puts into his fields.
Even if healthy, sustainable communities exist, it may mean little if Americans don’t want to live in them. Can a nation raised on Sinclair Lewis ever love small-town life? It’s hard to see how we can overcome our deep prejudice that city life is somehow more exciting and fulfilling than rural life. How many of us imagine that our vision of the future of America will come from a farmer?
