Bringing It to the Table

by Berry, Wendell

  Another weakness of industrial agriculture is its absolute dependence on an enormous and intricate—hence fragile—economic and industrial organization. Industrial food production can be gravely impaired or stopped by any number of causes, none of which need be agricultural: a trucker’s strike, an oil shortage, a credit shortage, a manufacturing “error” such as the PBB catastrophe in Michigan.

  A third weakness is the absolute dependence of most of the population on industrial agriculture—and the lack of any “backup system.” We have an unprecedentedly large urban population that has no land to grow food on, no knowledge of how to grow it, and less and less knowledge of what to do with it after it is grown. That this population can continue to eat through shortage, strike, embargo, riot, depression, war—or any of the other large-scale afflictions that societies have always been heir to and that industrial societies are uniquely vulnerable to—is not a certainty or even a faith; it is a superstition.

  As an example of the unexamined confusions and contradictions that underlie industrial agriculture, consider Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland’s recent remarks on the state of agriculture in China: “From the manpower-production point of view, they’re terribly inefficient—700 million people doing the most pedestrian kind of things. But in production per acre, they’re enormously successful. They get nine times as many calories per acre as we do in the United States.”

  This comment is remarkable for its failure to acknowledge any possible connection between China’s large agricultural work force and its high per-acre productivity. In many parts of China, according to one recent observer, the agriculture is still much closer to what we call gardening than to what we call farming. Because their farming is done on comparatively small plots, using a lot of hand labor, Chinese farmers have at their disposal such high-production techniques as intercropping and close rotations, which with us are available only to home gardeners. Many Chinese fields have maintained the productivity of gardens for thousands of years, and this is directly attributable to the great numbers of the farming population. Each acre can be intensively used and cared for, maintained for centuries at maximum fertility and yield, because there are enough knowledgeable people to do the necessary handwork.

  It is naive to assume, as Mr. Bergland implicitly does, that such an agriculture can be improved by “modernization”—that is, by the introduction of industrial standards, methods, and technology. How can this agriculture be industrialized without destroying its intensive methods, and thus reducing its productivity per acre? How can the so-called pedestrian tasks be taken over by machines without displacing people, increasing unemployment, degrading the quality of land maintenance, increasing slums and other urban blights? How, in other words, can this revolution fail to cause in China the same disorders that it has already caused in the United States? I do not mean to imply that these questions can be answered simply. My point is that before we participate in the industrialization of Chinese agriculture we ought to ask and answer these questions.

  Finally, the Secretary’s statement is remarkable for its revealing use of the word “pedestrian.” This is a usage strictly in keeping with the industrial revolution of our language. The farther industrialization has gone with us, and the more it has influenced our values and behavior, the more contemptuous and belittling has the adjective “pedestrian” become. If you want to know how highly anything “pedestrian” is regarded, try walking along the edge of a busy highway; you will see that you are regarded mainly as an obstruction to the progress of greater power and velocity. The less power and velocity a thing has, the more “pedestrian” it is. A plow with one bottom is, as a matter of course, more “pedestrian” than a plow with eight bottoms; the quality of use is not recognized as an issue. The hand laborers are thus to be eliminated from China’s fields for the same reason that we now build housing developments without sidewalks: The pedestrian, not being allowed for, is not allowed. By the use of this term, the Secretary ignores the issue of the quality of work on the one hand, and on the other hand the issue of social values and aims. Is field work necessarily improved when done with machines instead of people? And is a worker necessarily improved by being replaced by a machine? Does a worker invariably work better, more ably, with more interest and satisfaction, when his power is mechanically magnified? And is a worker better off working at a “pedestrian” farm task or unemployed in an urban ghetto? In which instance is his country better off?

  I have belabored Secretary Bergland’s statement at such length not because it is so odd, but because it is so characteristic of the dominant American approach to agriculture. He is using—unconsciously, I suspect—the language of agricultural industrialism, which fails to solve agricultural problems correctly because it cannot understand or define them as agricultural problems.

  I WILL NOW try to define an approach to agriculture that is agricultural, that will lead to proper solutions, and that will, in consequence, safeguard and promote the health of the great unit of food production, which includes us all and all of our country. In order to do this I will deal with four problems, which seem to me inherent in the discipline of farming, and which are practical in the sense that their ultimate solutions cannot occur in public places—in organizations, in markets, or in policies—but only on farms. These are the problems of scale, of balance, of diversity, of quality. That these problems cannot be separated, and that no one of them can be solved without solving the others, testifies to their authenticity.

  1. The Problem of Scale. The identification of scale as a “problem” implies that things can be too big as well as too small, and I believe that this is so. Technology can grow to a size that is first undemocratic and then inhuman. It can grow beyond the control of individual human beings—and so, perhaps, beyond the control of human institutions. How large can a machine be before it ceases to serve people and begins to subjugate them?

  The size of landholdings is likewise a political fact. In any given region there is a farm size that is democratic, and a farm size that is plutocratic or totalitarian. A great danger to democracy now in the United States is the steep decline in the number of people who own farmland—or landed property of any kind. (According to a just-published report of the General Accounting Office, “Today, it is estimated that less than one-half of all farmland is owned by the operator.”) Earl Butz has suggested that this is made up for by the increased numbers of people who own insurance policies. But the value of insurance policies fluctuates with the value of money, whereas the real value of land never varies; it is always equal to the value of survival, of life. When this value is controlled by a wealthy or powerful minority, then democracy is reduced to mere governmental forms, easy to destroy or ignore.

  Moreover, in any given region there is a limit beyond which a farm outgrows the attention, affection, and care of a single owner.

  The size of fields is also a matter of agricultural concern. Fields can be too big to permit effective rotation of grazing, or to prevent erosion of land in cultivation. In general, the steeper the ground, the smaller should be the fields. On the steep slopes of the Andes, for instance, agriculture has survived for thousands of years. This survival has obviously depended on holding the soil in place, and the Andean peasants have an extensive methodology of erosion control. Of all their means and methods, none is more important than the smallness of their fields—which is permitted by the smallness of their technology, most of the land still being worked by hand or with oxen.

  2. The Problem of Balance. Finding the correct ratio between people and land, so that maintenance always equals production. This is obviously related to the problem of scale. In the correct solution to these problems, such problems as soil erosion and soil compaction will be solved.

  But also each farm and each farmer must establish the proper ratio between plants and animals. This is the foundation of agricultural independence. In this balance of plants and animals the fertility cycle is kept complete, or as nearly complete as possibl
e. Ideally, the farm would provide its own fertility. However, in commercial farming, when so many nutrients are shipped off the farm as food, it is necessary to return them to the farm in the form of composted “urban wastes”—sewage, garbage, etc.

  By studying the problem of balance, one discovers the carrying capacity of a farm—that is, the amount it can produce without diminishing its ability to produce.

  When the problem of balance is solved, a farm’s production becomes more or less constant. The farm will no longer be stocked or cultivated according to fluctuations of the market—which is not agriculture but an imitation, on the farm, of industrial economics.

  3. The Problem of Diversity. This is the only possible agricultural “backup system.” On the farm it means not putting all the eggs in one basket; it means—within the limits of nature, sense, and practicality—having as many kinds, as many species, as possible.

  In terms of our country’s agriculture as a whole, too, it means the diversity of species. But it also means as many different kinds of good agriculture as possible: farms changing in kind, as necessary, from one location to another; but also truck farms and part-time farms near cities, to increase local self-sufficiency and independence; and home gardens everywhere, in the cities as well as in the country.

  4. The Problem of Quality. Quality, as I shall understand it here, is indistinguishable from health—bodily health, coming from good food, but also economic, political, cultural, and spiritual health. All these kinds of health are related. And I hope that my discussion of the other problems has begun to make clear how dependent health is on good work.

  INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE HAS tended to look on the farmer as a “worker”—a sort of obsolete but not yet dispensable machine—acting on the advice of scientists and economists. We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist. It is the good work of good farmers—nothing else—that ensures a sufficiency of food over the long term.

  Ignoring that, industrial economics has encouraged poor work on the farm. I believe that it has done so because poor work can be easily priced. Since poor work lasts only a short time, the money value of its whole life can be readily calculated. Good work, which in fact or influence endures beyond the foresight of economists, can be valued but not priced, because its worth is incalculable. I am talking about the difference, say, between a wire fence and a stone wall, or between any gasoline engine and any good breed of livestock.

  I am more and more convinced that the only guarantee of quality in practice lies in the subsistence principle—that is, in the use of the product by the producer—a principle depreciated virtually out of existence by industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is sometimes offered as one of the benefits of industrial agriculture that farm families now patronize the supermarkets just like city people. On the other hand, it can be well argued that people who use their own products will be as concerned for quality as for quantity, whereas people who produce exclusively for the market will be mainly interested in quantity.

  It will be noticed that production is not on my list of problems. The reason is that if the four problems I have dealt with are properly solved, production will not be a problem. Good production is merely the result of good farming.

  A Defense of the Family Farm

  (1986)

  DEFENDING THE FAMILY farm is like defending the Bill of Rights or the Sermon on the Mount or Shakespeare’s plays. One is amazed at the necessity for defense, and yet one agrees gladly, knowing that the family farm is both eminently defensible and a part of the definition of one’s own humanity. But having agreed to this defense, one remembers uneasily that there has been a public clamor in defense of the family farm throughout all the years of its decline—that, in fact, “the family farm” has become a political catchword, like democracy and Christianity, and much evil has been done in its name.

  Several careful distinctions are therefore necessary. What I shall mean by the term “family farm” is a farm small enough to be farmed by a family and one that is farmed by a family, perhaps with a small amount of hired help. I shall not mean a farm that is owned by a family and worked by other people. The family farm is both the home and the workplace of the family that owns it.

  By the verb “farm,” I do not mean just the production of marketable crops but also the responsible maintenance of the health and usability of the place while it is in production. A family farm is one that is properly cared for by its family.

  Furthermore, the term “family farm” implies longevity in the connection between family and farm. A family farm is not a farm that a family has bought on speculation and is only occupying and using until it can be profitably sold. Neither, strictly speaking, is it a farm that a family has newly bought, though, depending on the intentions of the family, we may be able to say that such a farm is potentially a family farm. This suggests that we may have to think in terms of ranks or degrees of family farms. A farm that has been in the same family for three generations may rank higher as a family farm than a farm that has been in a family only one generation; it may have a higher degree of familiness or familiarity than the one-generation farm. Such distinctions have a practical usefulness to the understanding of agriculture, and, as I hope to show, there are rewards of longevity that do not accrue only to the family farm.

  I mentioned the possibility that a family farm might use a small amount of hired help. This greatly complicates matters, and I wish it were possible to say, simply, that a family farm is farmed with family labor. But it seems important to allow for the possibility of supplementing family labor with wagework or some form of sharecropping. Not only may family labor become insufficient as a result, say, of age or debility but also an equitable system of wage earning or sharecropping would permit unpropertied families to earn their way to farm ownership. The critical points, in defining “family farm,” are that the amount of nonfamily labor should be small and that it should supplement, not replace, family labor. On a family farm, the family members are workers, not overseers. If a family on a family farm does require supplementary labor, it seems desirable that the hired help should live on the place and work year-round; the idea of a family farm is jeopardized by supposing that the farm family might be simply the guardians or maintainers of crops planted and harvested by seasonal workers. These requirements, of course, imply both small scale and diversity.

  Finally, I think we must allow for the possibility that a family farm might be very small or marginal and that it might not entirely support its family. In such cases, though the economic return might be reduced, the values of the family-owned and family-worked small farm are still available both to the family and to the nation.

  THE IDEA OF the family farm, as I have just defined it, is conformable in every way to the idea of good farming—that is, farming that does not destroy either farmland or farm people. The two ideas may, in fact, be inseparable. If family farming and good farming are as nearly synonymous as I suspect they are, that is because of a law that is well understood, still, by most farmers but that has been ignored in the colleges, offices, and corporations of agriculture for thirty-five or forty years. The law reads something like this: Land that is in human use must be lovingly used; it requires intimate knowledge, attention, and care.

  The practical meaning of this law (to borrow an insight from Wes Jackson1) is that there is a ratio between eyes and acres, between farm size and farm hands, that is correct. We know that this law is unrelenting—that, for example, one of the meanings of our current high rates of soil erosion is that we do not have enough farmers; we have enough farmers to use the land but not enough to use it and protect it at the same time.

  In this law, which is not subject to human repeal, is the justification of the small, family-owned, family-worked farm, for this law gives a preeminent and irrevocable value to familiarity, the family life that alone can properly connect a people to a land. This connection, admittedly, is easy to sentimentalize, and we must be carefu
l not to do so. We all know that small family farms can be abused because we know that sometimes they have been; nevertheless, it is true that familiarity tends to mitigate and to correct abuse. A family that has farmed land through two or three generations will possess not just the land but a remembered history of its own mistakes and of the remedies of those mistakes. It will know not just what it can do, what is technologically possible, but also what it must do and what it must not do; the family will have understood the ways in which it and the farm empower and limit one another. This is the value of longevity in landholding: In the long term, knowledge and affection accumulate, and, in the long term, knowledge and affection pay. They do not just pay the family in goods and money; they also pay the family and the whole country in health and satisfaction.

  But the justifications of the family farm are not merely agricultural; they are political and cultural as well. The question of the survival of the family farm and the farm family is one version of the question of who will own the country, which is, ultimately, the question of who will own the people. Shall the usable property of our country be democratically divided, or not? Shall the power of property be a democratic power, or not? If many people do not own the usable property, then they must submit to the few who do own it. They cannot eat or be sheltered or clothed except in submission. They will find themselves entirely dependent on money; they will find costs always higher, and money always harder to get. To renounce the principle of democratic property, which is the only basis of democratic liberty, in exchange for specious notions of efficiency or the economics of the so-called free market is a tragic folly.