Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  A factory farm locks the farmer in at the bottom of a corporate hierarchy. In return for the assumption of great economic and other risks, the farmer is permitted to participate minimally in the industry’s earnings. In return, moreover, for the security of a contract with the corporation, the farmer gives up the farm’s diversity and versatility, reducing it to a specialist operation with one use.

  According to one company’s projections, a farmer would buy into the broiler business at a cost of $624,275. That would be for four houses that would produce 506,000 birds per year. Under the company’s terms, this investment would produce a yearly net income of $23,762. That would be an annual return on investment of 3.8 percent.

  I don’t know what percentage of annual return this company’s share-holders expect to realize from their investment. I do know that if it is not substantially better than the farmer’s percentage, they would be well advised to sell out and invest elsewhere.

  The factory farm, rather than serving the farm family and the local community, is an economic siphon, sucking value out of the local landscape and the local community into distant bank accounts.

  To entice them to buy Kentuckians’ work and products so cheaply, our state government has given the animal confinement corporations some $200 million in state and federal tax “incentives.” In gratitude for these gifts, these corporations now wish to be relieved of any mandated public liability or responsibility for their activities here.

  I don’t know that the arrogance and impudence of this have been equaled by any other industry. For not only have these people demonstrated, by their contempt for laws and regulations here and elsewhere, their intention to be bad neighbors; they come repeatedly before our elected representatives to ask for special exemptions. But in that very request they acknowledge the great risks and dangers that are involved in their way of doing business. Why should the innocent, why should people with a good conscience, want to be exempt from liability?

  It is clear that the advocates of factory farming are not advocates of farming. They do not speak for farmers.

  What they support is state-sponsored colonialism—government of, by, and for the corporations.

  III. SUSTAINABILITY

  THE WORD “SUSTAINABLE” is well on its way to becoming a label, like the word “organic.” And so I want to propose a definition of “sustainable agriculture.” This phrase, I suggest, refers to a way of farming that can be continued indefinitely because it conforms to the terms imposed upon it by the nature of places and the nature of people.

  Our present agriculture, in general, is not ecologically sustainable now, and it is a long way from becoming so. It is too toxic. It is too dependent on fossil fuels. It is too wasteful of soil, of soil fertility, and of water. It is destructive of the health of the natural systems that surround and support our economic life. And it is destructive of genetic diversity, both domestic and wild.

  So far, these problems have not received enough attention from the news media or politicians, but the day is coming when they will. A great many people who know about agriculture are worrying about these problems already. It seems likely that the public, increasingly conscious of the issues of personal and ecological health, will sooner or later force the political leadership to pay attention. And a lot of farmers and grassroots farm organizations are now taking seriously the problem of ecological sustainability.

  But there is a related issue that is even more neglected, one that has been largely obscured, even for people aware of the requirement of ecological sustainability, by the vogue of the so-called free market and the global economy. I am talking about the issue of the economic sustainability of farms and farmers, farm families and farm communities.

  It ought to be obvious that in order to have sustainable agriculture, you have got to make sustainable the lives and livelihoods of the people who do the work. The land cannot thrive if the people who are its users and caretakers do not thrive. Ecological sustainability requires a complex local culture as the preserver of the necessary knowledge and skill; and this in turn requires a settled, stable, prosperous local population of farmers and other land users. It ought to be obvious that agriculture cannot be made sustainable by a dwindling population of economically depressed farmers and a growing population of migrant workers.

  Why is our farm population dwindling away? Why are the still-surviving farms so frequently in desperate economic circumstances? Why is the suicide rate among farmers three times that of the country as a whole?

  There is one reason that is paramount: The present agricultural economy, as designed by the agribusiness corporations (and the politicians, bureaucrats, economists, and experts who do their bidding), uses farmers as expendable “resources” in the process of production, the same way it uses the topsoil, the groundwater, and the ecological integrity of farm landscapes.

  From the standpoint of sustainability, either of farmland or farm people, the present agricultural economy is a failure. It is, in fact, a catastrophe. And there is no use in thinking that agriculture can become sustainable by better adapting to the terms imposed by this economy. That is hopeless, because its terms are the wrong terms. The purpose of this economy is rapid, short-term exploitation, not sustainability.

  The story we are in now is exactly the same story we have been in for the last hundred years. It is the story of a fundamental conflict between the interests of farmers and farming and the interests of the agribusiness corporations. It is useless to suppose or pretend that this conflict does not exist, or to hope that you can somehow serve both sides at once. The interests are different, they are in conflict, and you have to get on one side or the other.

  As a case in point, let us consider the economics of Kentucky’s chicken factories, which some are pleased to look upon as a help to farmers. The Courier-Journal on May 28, 2000, told the story of a McLean County farmer who raises 1.2 million chickens a year. His borrowed investment of $750,000 brings him an annual income of $20,000 to $30,000. This declares itself immediately as a “deal” tailor-made for desperate farmers. Who besides a desperate farmer would see $20,000 or $30,000 as an acceptable annual return on an investment of $750,000 plus a year’s work? In the poultry-processing corporations that sponsor such “farming,” how many CEOs would see that as an acceptable return? The fact is that agriculture cannot be made sustainable in this way. The ecological risks are high, and the economic structure is forbidding. How many children of farmers in such an arrangement will want to farm?

  Some people would like to claim that this sort of “economic development” is “inevitable.” But the only things that seem inevitable about it are the corporate greed that motivates it and the careerism of the academic experts who try to justify it. On May 28, the Courier-Journal quoted an agribusiness apologist at the University of Kentucky’s experiment station in Princeton, Gary Parker, who said in defense of the animal factories: “Agriculture is a high-volume, high-cost, high-risk type business. You have to borrow a tremendous amount of money. You have to generate a tremendous amount of income just to barely make a living.”

  The first problem with Mr. Parker’s justification is that it amounts to a perfect condemnation of this kind of agriculture. In an editorial on June 4, the Courier-Journal quoted Mr. Parker, and then said that such agriculture, though compromising and risky, “can generate great rewards.” The Courier-Journal did not say who would get those “great rewards.” We may be sure, however, that they will not go to the farmers, who, according to Mr. Parker’s confession, are just barely making a living.

  The second problem with Mr. Parker’s statement is that it is not necessarily true. In contrast to the factory farm that realizes a profit of $20,000 or $30,000 on the sale of 1,200,000 chickens, I know a farm family who, last year, as a part of a diversified small farm enterprise, produced 2,000 pastured chickens for a net income of $6,000. This farm enterprise involved no large investment for housing or equipment, no large debt, no contract, and no environmental risk. Th
e chickens were of excellent quality. The customers for them were ordinary citizens, about half of whom were from the local rural community. The demand far exceeds the supply. Most of the proceeds for these chickens went to the family that did the work of producing them. A substantial portion of that money will be spent in the local community. Such a possibility has not been noticed by Mr. Parker or the Courier-Journal because, I suppose, it is not “tremendous” and it serves the interest of farmers, not corporations.

  Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems

  (1978)

  IT MAY TURN out that the most powerful and the most destructive change of modern times has been a change in language: the rise of the image, or metaphor, of the machine. Until the industrial revolution occurred in the minds of most of the people in the so-called developed countries, the dominant images were organic: They had to do with living things; they were biological, pastoral, agricultural, or familial. God was seen as a “shepherd,” the faithful as “the sheep of His pasture.” One’s home country was known as one’s “motherland.” Certain people were said to have the strength of a lion, the grace of a deer, the speed of a falcon, the cunning of a fox, etc. Jesus spoke of himself as a “bridegroom.” People who took good care of the earth were said to practice “husbandry.” The ideal relationships among people were “brotherhood” and “sisterhood.”

  Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as “units” as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are “inputs”; other people’s responses are “feedback.” And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as “fuel”; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its “efficiency,” which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One’s country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a “motherland,” but rather priced according to its “productivity” of “raw materials” and “natural resources” —valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster Fuller asserted that “the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology”—the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, “can only be expressed mathematically.”

  In view of this revolution of language, which is in effect the uprooting of the human mind, it is not surprising to realize that farming too has been made to serve under the yoke of this extremely reductive metaphor. Farming, according to most of the most powerful people now concerned with it, is no longer a way of life, no longer husbandry or even agriculture; it is an industry known as “agribusiness,” which looks upon a farm as a “factory,” and upon farmers, plants, animals, and the land itself as interchangeable parts or “units of production.”

  This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very “efficiently” according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to “feed” the rest. So long as we keep the focus narrowed to the “food factory” itself, we have to be impressed: It is elaborately organized; it is technologically sophisticated; it is, by its own definition of the term, marvelously “efficient.”

  Only when we widen the focus do we see that this “factory” is in fact a failure. Within itself it has the order of a machine, but, like other enterprises of the industrial vision, it is part of a rapidly widening and deepening disorder. It will be sufficient here to list some of the serious problems that have a demonstrable connection with industrial agriculture: (1) soil erosion, (2) soil compaction, (3) soil and water pollution, (4) pests and diseases resulting from monoculture and ecological deterioration, (5) depopulation of rural communities, and (6) decivilization of the cities.

  The most obvious falsehood of “agribusiness” accounting has to do with the alleged “efficiency” of “agribusiness” technology. This is, in the first place, an efficiency calculated in the productivity of workers, not of acres. In the second place the productivity per “man-hour,” as given out by “agribusiness” apologists, is dangerously—and, one must assume, intentionally—misleading. For the 4 percent of our population that is left on the farm does not, by any stretch of imagination, feed the rest. That 4 percent is only a small part, and the worst-paid part, of a food production network that includes purchasers, wholesalers, retailers, processors, packagers, transporters, and the manufacturers and salesmen of machines, building materials, feeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, medicines, and fuel. All these producers are at once in competition with each other and dependent on each other, and all are dependent on the petroleum industry.

  As for the farmers themselves, they have long ago lost control of their destiny. They are no longer “independent farmers,” subscribing to that ancient and perhaps indispensable ideal, but are agents of their creditors and of the market. They are “units of production” who, or which, must perform “efficiently”—regardless of what they get out of it either as investors or as human beings.

  In the larger accounting, then, industrial agriculture is a failure on its way to being a catastrophe. Why is it a failure? There are, I think, two inescapable reasons.

  The first is that the industrial vision is perhaps inherently an oversimplifying vision, which proceeds on the assumption that consequence is always singular; industrialists invariably assume that they are solving for X—X being production. In order to solve for X, industrial agriculturists have to reduce any agricultural problem to a problem in mechanics—as, for example, modern confinement-feeding techniques became possible only when animals could be considered as machines.

  What this vision excludes, as a matter of course, are biology on the one hand, and human culture on the other. Once vision is enlarged to include these considerations, we see readily that—as wisdom has always counseled us—consequences are invariably multiple, self-multiplying, long-lasting, and unforeseeable in something like geometric proportion to the size or power of the cause. Taking our bearings from traditional wisdom and from the insights of the ecologists—which, so far as I can see, confirm traditional wisdom—we realize that in a country the size of the United States, and economically uniform, the smallest possible agricultural “unit of production” is very large indeed. It consists of all the farmland, plus all the farmers, plus all the farming communities, plus all the knowledge and the technical means of agriculture, plus all the available species of domestic plants and animals, plus the natural systems and cycles that surround farming and support it, plus the knowledge, taste, judgment, kitchen skills, etc. of all the people who buy food. A proper solution to an agricultural problem must preserve and promote the good health of this “unit.” Nothing less will do.

  The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems, waste does not occur. And it is easy to produce examples of nonindustrial human cultures in which waste was or is virtually unknown. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains within the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are as necessary—are, one may almost say, as lively—as life; and so nothing is wasted. There is really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction.

  But waste—so far, at least—has always been intrinsic to industrial production. There have always been unusable “by-products.” Because industrial cycles are never complete—because there is no return—there are two characteristic results of industrial enterprise: exhaustion and contamination. The energy industry, for instance, is not a cycle, but only a short arc between an empty hole and po
isoned air. And farming, which is inherently cyclic, capable of regenerating and reproducing itself indefinitely, becomes similarly destructive and self-exhausting when transformed into an industry. Agricultural pollution is a serious and growing problem. And industrial agriculture is forced by its very character to treat the soil itself as a “raw material,” which it proceeds to “use up.” It has been estimated, for instance, that at the present rate of cropland erosion Iowa’s soil will be exhausted by the year 2050. I have seen no attempt to calculate the human cost of such farming—by attrition, displacement, social disruption, etc.—I assume because it is incalculable.

  This failure of industrial agriculture is not more obvious, or more noticed, because many of its worst social and economic consequences have collected in the cities, and are erroneously called “urban problems.” Also, because the farm population is now so small, most people know nothing of farming, and cannot recognize agricultural problems when they see them.

  But if industrial agriculture is a failure, then how does it continue to produce such an enormous volume of food? One reason is that most countries where industrial agriculture is practiced have soils that were originally good, possessing great natural reserves of fertility. (Industrial agriculture is much more quickly destructive in places where the fertility reserves of the soil are not great—as in the Amazon basin.) Another reason is that, as natural fertility has declined, we have so far been able to subsidize food production by large applications of chemical fertilizer. These have effectively disguised the loss of natural fertility, but it is important to emphasize that they are a disguise. They delay some of the consequences of failure, but cannot prevent them. Chemical fertilizers are required in vast amounts, they are increasingly expensive, and most of them come from sources that are not renewable. Industrial agriculture is now absolutely dependent on them, and this dependence is one of its fundamental weaknesses.