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Farming &
the
Global Economy
By Wendell Berry
WE
HAVE BEEN repeatedly warned that we cannot know where we wish to go
if we do not know where we have been. And so let us start by
remembering a little history.
As late as World War II, our
farms were predominantly solar powered. That is, the work was
accomplished principally by human beings and horses and mules. These
creatures were empowered by solar energy, which was collected, for
the most part, on the farms where they worked and so was pretty
cheaply available to the farmer.
However, American farms had
not become as selfsufficient in fertility as they should have been-or
many of them had not. They were still drawing, without sufficient
repayment, against an account of natural fertility accumulated over
thousands of years beneath the native forest trees and prairie
grasses.
The agriculture we had at the time of World War II
was nevertheless often pretty good, and it was promising. In many
parts of our country we had begun to have established agricultural
communities, each with its own local knowledge, memory, and
tradition. Some of our farming practices had become well adapted to
local conditions. The best traditional practices of the Midwest, for
example, are still used by the Amish with considerable success in
terms of both economy and ecology.
Now that the issue of
sustainability has arisen so urgently, and in fact so transformingly,
we can see that the correct agricultural agenda following World War
II would have been to continue and refine the already established
connection between our farms and the sun and to correct, where
necessary, the fertility deficit. There can be no question, now, that
that is what we should have done.
It was, notoriously, not
what we did. Instead, the adopted agenda called for a shift from the
cheap, clean, and, for all practical purposes, limitless energy of
the sun to the expensive, filthy, and limited energy of the fossil
fuels. It called for the massive use of chemical fertilizers to
offset the destruction of topsoil and the depletion of natural
fertility. It called also for the displacement of nearly the entire
farming population and the replacement of their labor and good
farming practices by machines and toxic chemicals. This agenda has
succeeded in its aims, but to the benefit of no one and nothing
except the corporations that have supplied the necessary machines,
fuels, and chemicals-and the corporations that have bought cheap and
sold high the products that, as a result of this agenda, have been
increasingly expensive for farmers to produce.
The farmers
have not benefited-not, at least, as a class-for as a result of this
agenda they have become one of the smallest and most threatened of
all our minorities. Many farmers, sad to say, have subscribed to this
agenda and its economic assumptions, believing that they would not be
its victims. But millions, in fact, have been its victims-not farmers
alone but also their supporters and dependents in our rural
communities.
The people who benefit from this state of
affairs have been at pains to convince us that the agricultural
practices and policies that have almost annihilated the farming
population have greatly benefited the population of food consumers.
But more and more consumers are now becoming aware that our supposed
abundance of cheap and healthful food is to a considerable extent
illusory. They are beginning to see that the social, ecological, and
even the economic costs of such "cheap food" are, in fact,
great. They are beginning to see that a system of food production
that is dependent on massive applications of drugs and chemicals
cannot, by definition, produce "pure food." And they are
beginning to see that a kind of agriculture that involves
unprecedented erosion and depletion of soil, unprecedented waste of
water, and unprecedented destruction of the farm population cannot by
any accommodation of sense or fantasy be called "sustainable."
From the point of view, then, of the farmer, the ecologist,
and the consumer, the need to reform our ways of farming is now both
obvious and imperative. We need to adapt our farming much more
sensitively to the nature of the places where the farming is done. We
need to make our farming practices and our food economy subject to
standards set not by the industrial system but by the health of
ecosystems and of human communities.
The immediate difficulty
in even thinking about agricultural reform is that we are rapidly
running out of farmers. The tragedy of this decline is not just in
its numbers; it is also in the fact that these farming people,
assuming we will ever recognize our need to replace them, cannot be
replaced anything like as quickly or easily as they have been
dispensed with. Contrary to popular assumption, good farmers are not
in any simple way part of the "labor force." Good farmers,
like good musicians, must be raised to the trade.
The severe
reduction of our farming population may signify nothing to our
national government, but the members of country communities feel the
significance of it-and the threat of it-every day. Eventually urban
consumers will feel these things, too. Every day farmers feel the
oppression of their long-standing problems: overproduction, low
prices, and high costs. Farmers sell on a market that because of
overproduction is characteristically depressed, and they buy their
supplies on a market that is characteristically inflated-which is
necessarily a recipe for failure, because farmers do not control
either market. If they will not control production and if they will
not reduce their dependence on purchased supplies, then they will
keep on failing.
The survival of farmers, then, requires two
complementary efforts. The first is entirely up to the farmers, who
must learn-or learn again-to farm in ways that minimize their
dependence on industrial supplies. They must diversify, using both
plants and animals. They must produce, on their farms, as much of the
required fertility and energy as they can. So far as they can, they
must replace purchased goods and services with natural health and
diversity and with their own intelligence. To increase production by
increasing costs, as farmers have been doing for the last half
century, is not only unintelligent; it is crazy. If farmers do not
wish to cooperate any longer in their own destruction, then they will
have to reduce their dependence on those global economic forces that
intend and approve and profit from the destruction of farmers, and
they will have to increase their dependence on local nature and local
intelligence.
The second effort involves cooperation between
local farmers and local consumers. If farmers hope to exercise any
control over their markets, in a time when a global economy and
global transportation make it possible for the products of any region
to be undersold by the products of any other region, then they will
have to look to local markets. The long-broken connections between
towns and cities and their surrounding landscapes will have to be
restored. There is much promise and much hope in such a restoration.
But farmers must understand that this requires an economics of
cooperation rather than competition. They must understand also that
such an economy sooner or later will require some rational means of
production control.
If communities of farmers and consumers
wish to promote a sustainable, safe, reasonably inexpensive supply of
good food, then they must see that the best, the safest, and most
dependable source of food for a city is not the global economy, with
its extreme vulnerabilities and extravagant transportation costs, but
its own surrounding countryside. It is, in every way, in the best
interest of urban consumers to be surrounded by productive land, well
farmed and well maintained by thriving farm families in thriving farm
communities .
If a safe, sustainable local food economy
appeals to some of us as a goal that we would like to work for, then
we must be careful to recognize not only the great power of the
interests arrayed against us but also our own weakness. The hope for
such a food economy as we desire is represented by no political party
and is spoken for by no national public officials of any consequence.
Our national political leaders do not know what we are talking about,
and they are without the local affections and allegiances that would
permit them to learn what we are talking about.
But we should
also understand that our predicament is not without precedent; it is
approximately the same as that of the proponents of American
independence at the time of the Stamp Act-and with one difference in
our favor: in order to do the work that we must do, we do not need a
national organization. What we must do is simple: we must shorten the
distance that our food is transported so that we are eating more and
more from local supplies, more and more to the benefit of local
farmers, and more and more to the satisfaction of local consumers.
This can be done by cooperation among small organizations:
conservation groups, churches, neighborhood associations, consumer
co-ops, local merchants, local independent banks, and organizations
of small farmers. It also can be done by cooperation between
individual producers and consumers. We should not be discouraged to
find that local food economies can grow only gradually; it is better
that they should grow gradually. But as they grow they will bring
about a significant return of power, wealth, and health to the
people.
One thing at least should be obvious to us all: the
whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food.
Some people somewhere are going to have to grow the food. And
wherever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two
questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you
preserve the people who use the land?
The farther the food is
transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions
correctly. The correct answers will not come as the inevitable
by-products of the aims, policies, and procedures of international
trade, free or unfree. They cannot be legislated or imposed by
international or national or state agencies. They can only be
supplied locally, by skilled and highly motivated local farmers
meeting as directly as possible the needs of informed local
consumers.
Wendell Berry is the author of thirty two books of
fiction, poetry. and essays, including Sabbaths;
Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community; and
What Are People For?
He has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for
thirty years. A former professor of English at the University of
Kentucky, he has received numerous awards for his work, including
most recently the T S. Eliot Award, The Aiken Taylor Award for
Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and The
Chnstian Century's Award for Excellence in
Poetry.