Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  Because of the necessity of purchasing sires from time to time, the continuity of the locally adapted flock must reside in the female lineages. Studying and preserving the most long-lived, thrifty, and productive ewe families are paramount. But this need not be laborious, for your farm will be selecting along with you. You pick the individuals that look good. This always implies that they have done well; and sooner or later you will know the look of “your kind,” the kind that is apt to do well on your place.Your farm, however, will pick the ones that last. Even if you do not select at all, or if you select wrongly, a ewe that is not fitted to your farm will not contribute as many breeding animals to your flock as will a ewe that is fitted to your farm.

  It is generally acknowledged that a shepherd should know what he or she is doing. It is not so generally understood that the flock should know what it is doing—that is, how to live, thrive, and reproduce successfully on its home farm. But this knowledge, bred into the flock, is critical; it means meat from grass, at the lowest cost.

  NOTE

  1 We did so the next year, and have continued to do so, except in times of deep or crusted snow. We winter our ewes on a hillside that is ungrazed from early August until about Christmas.

  Energy in Agriculture

  (1979)

  I HAVE JUST BEEN rereading Donald Hall’s lovely memoir, String Too Short to Be Saved. It is about the summers of his boyhood that the author spent on his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. There are many good things in this book, but one of the best is its description of the life and economy of an old-time New England small farm.

  The farm of Kate and Wesley Wells, as their grandson knew it, was already a relic. It was what would now be called a “marginal farm” in mountainous country, in an agricultural community that had been dying since the Civil War. The farm produced food for the household and made a cash income from a small hand-milked herd of Holsteins and a flock of sheep. It furnished trees for firewood and maple syrup. The Wellses sent their daughters to school by the sale of timber from a woodlot. The farm and its household were “poor” by our present standards, taking in very little money—but spending very little too, and that is the most important thing about it. Its principle was thrift. Its needs were kept within the limits of its resources.

  This farm was ordered according to an old agrarian pattern which made it far more independent than modern farms built upon the pattern of industrial capitalism. And its energy economy was as independent as its money economy. The working energy of this farm came mainly from its people and from one horse.

  Mr. Hall’s memories inform us, more powerfully than any argument, that the life of Wesley and Kate Wells was a life worth living, decent though not easy; not adventurous or affluent, either—or not in our sense—but sociable, neighborly, and humane. They were intelligent, morally competent, upright, kind to people and animals, full of generous memories and good humor. From all that their grandson says of them, it is clear that his acquaintance with them and their place was profoundly enabling to his mind and his feelings.

  One cannot read this book—or I, anyhow, cannot—without asking how that sort of life escaped us, how it depreciated as a possibility so that we were able to give it up in order, as we thought, to “improve” ourselves. Mr. Hall makes it plain that farms like his grandparents’ did not die out in New England necessarily because of bad farming, or because they did not provide a viable way of life. They died for want of people with the motivation, the skill, the character, and the culture to keep them alive. They died, in other words, by a change in cultural value. Though it survived fairly intact until the middle of this century, Mr. Hall remembers that his grandparents’ farm was surrounded by people and farms that had dwindled away because the human succession had been broken. It was no longer a place to come to, but a place to leave.

  At the time Mr. Hall writes about, something was gaining speed in our country that I think will seem more and more strange as time goes on. This was a curious set of assumptions, both personal and public, about “progress.” If you could get into a profession, it was assumed, then of course you must not be a farmer; if you could move to the city, then you must not stay in the country; if you could farm more profitably in the corn belt than on the mountainsides of New England, then the mountainsides of New England must not be farmed. For years this set of assumptions was rarely spoken and more rarely questioned, and yet it has been one of the most powerful social forces at work in this country in modern times.

  But these assumptions could not accomplish much on their own. What gave them power, and made them able finally to dominate and reshape our society, was the growth of technology for the production and use of fossil fuel energy. This energy could be made available to empower such unprecedented social change because it was “cheap.” But we were able to consider it “cheap” only by a kind of moral simplicity: the assumption that we had a “right” to as much of it as we could use. This was a “right” made solely by might. Because fossil fuels, however abundant they once were, were nevertheless limited in quantity and not renewable, they obviously did not “belong” to one generation more than another. We ignored the claims of posterity simply because we could, the living being stronger than the unborn, and so worked the “miracle” of industrial progress by the theft of energy from (among others) our children.

  That is the real foundation of our progress and our affluence. The reason that we are a rich nation is not that we have earned so much wealth—you cannot, by any honest means, earn or deserve so much. The reason is simply that we have learned, and become willing, to market and use up in our own time the birthright and livelihood of posterity.

  And so it is too simple to say that the “marginal” farms of New England were abandoned because of progress or because they were no longer productive or desirable as living places. They were given up for one very “practical” reason: They did not lend themselves readily to exploitation by fossil fuel technology. Their decline began with the rise of steam power and the industrial economy after the Civil War; the coming of industrial agriculture after World War II finished them off. Industrial agriculture needs large holdings and large level fields. As the scale of technology grows, the small farms with small or steep fields are pushed farther and farther toward the economic margins and are finally abandoned. And so industrial agriculture sticks itself deeper and deeper into a curious paradox: The larger its technology grows in order “to feed the world,” the more potentially productive “marginal” land it either ruins or causes to be abandoned. If the sweeping landscapes of Nebraska now have to be reshaped by computer and bulldozer to allow the more efficient operation of big farm machines, then thousands of acres of the smaller-featured hill country of the eastern states must obviously be considered “unfarmable.” Or so the industrialists of agriculture have ruled.

  And so energy is not just fuel. It is a powerful social and cultural influence. The kind and quantity of the energy we use determine the kind and quality of the life we live. Our conversion to fossil fuel energy subjected society to a sort of technological determinism, shifting population and values according to the new patterns and values of industrialization. Rural wealth and materials and rural people were caught within the gravitational field of the industrial economy and flowed to the cities, from which comparatively little flowed back in return. And so the human life of farmsteads and rural communities dwindled everywhere, and in some places perished.

  IF THE SHIFT to fossil fuel energy radically changed the life and the values of farm communities, it should be no surprise that it also radically changed our understanding of agriculture. Some figures from an article by Professor Mark D. Shaw help to show the nature of this change. The “food system,” according to Professor Shaw, now uses 16.5 percent of all energy used in the United States. This 16.5 percent is used in the following ways:On-farm production 3.0%

  Manufacturing 4.9%

  Wholesale marketing 0.5%


  Retail marketing 0.8%

  Food preparation (in home) 4.4%

  Food preparation (commercial) 2.9%

  Apologists for industrial agriculture frequently stop with that first figure—showing that agriculture uses only a small amount of energy, relatively speaking, and that people hunting a cause of the “energy crisis” should therefore point their fingers elsewhere. The other figures, amounting to 13.5 percent of national energy consumption, are more interesting, for they suggest the way the food system has been expanded to make room for industrial enterprise. Between farm and home, producer and consumer, we have interposed manufacturers, a complex marketing structure, and food preparation. I am not sure how this last category differs from “manufacturing.” And I would like to know what percentage of the energy budget goes for transportation, and whether or not Professor Shaw figured in the miles that people now drive to shop. The gist is nevertheless plain enough: The industrial economy grows and thrives by lengthening and complicating the essential connection between producer and consumer. In a local food economy, dealing in fresh produce to be prepared in the home (thus eliminating transporters, manufacturers, packagers, preparers, etc.), the energy budget would be substantially lower, and we might have both cheaper food and higher earnings on the farm.

  But Professor Shaw provides another set of figures that is even more telling. These have to do with the “sources of energy for Pennsylvania agriculture” (I don’t think the significance would vary much from one state to another):Nuclear 1%

  Coal 5%

  Natural gas 27%

  Petroleum 67%

  And so we see that, though our agriculture may use relatively little fossil fuel energy, it is almost totally dependent on what it does use. It uses fossil fuel energy almost exclusively and uses it in competition with other users. And the sources of this energy are not renewable.

  This critical dependence on nonrenewable energy sources is the direct result of the industrialization of agriculture. Before industrialization, agriculture depended almost exclusively on solar energy. Solar energy not only grew the plants, as it still does, but also provided the productive power of farms in the form of the work of humans and animals. This energy is derived and made available biologically, and it is recyclable. It is inexhaustible in the topsoil so long as good husbandry keeps the life cycle intact.

  This old sun-based agriculture was fundamentally alien to the industrial economy; industrial corporations could make relatively little profit from it. In order to make agriculture fully exploitable by industry it was necessary (in Barry Commoner’s terms) to weaken “the farm’s link to the sun” and to make the farmland a “colony” of the industrial corporations. The farmers had to be persuaded to give up the free energy of the sun in order to pay dearly for the machine-derived energy of the fossil fuels.

  Thus we have another example of a system artificially expanded for profit. The farm’s originally organic, coherent, independent production system was expanded into a complex dependence on remote sources and on manufactured supplies.

  What happened, from a cultural point of view, was that machines were substituted for farmers, and energy took the place of skill. As farmers became more and more dependent on fossil fuel energy, a radical change occurred in their minds. Once focused on biology, the life and health of living things, their thinking now began to focus on technology and economics. Credit, for example, became as pressing an issue as the weather, for farmers had begun to climb the one-way ladder of survival by debt. Bigger machines required more land, and more land required yet bigger machines, which required yet more land, and on and on—the survivors climbing to precarious and often temporary success by way of machines and mortgages and the ruin of their neighbors. And so the farm became a “factory,” where speed, “efficiency,” and profitability were the main standards of performance. These standards, of course, are industrial, not agricultural.

  The old solar agriculture, moreover, was time oriented. Timeliness was its virtue. One took pride in having the knowledge to do things at the right time. Industrial agriculture is space oriented. Its virtue is speed. One takes pride in being first. The right time, by contrast, could be late as well as early; the proof of the work was in its quality.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT point I have to make is that once agriculture shifted its dependence from solar, biologically derived energy to machine-derived fossil fuel energy, it committed itself, as a matter of course, to several kinds of waste:1. The waste of solar energy, not just as motive power, but even as growing power. As landholdings become larger and the number of farmers smaller, more and more fields must go without cover crops, which means that for many days in the fall and early spring the sunlight on these fields is not captured in green leaves and so made useful to the soil and to people. It goes to waste.

  2. The waste of human energy and ability. Industrial agriculture replaces people with machines; the ability of millions of people to become skillful and to do work therefore comes to nothing. We now have millions on some kind of government support, grown useless and helpless, while our country becomes unhealthy and ugly for want of human work and care. And we have additional millions not on welfare who have grown almost equally useless and helpless for want of health. How much potentially useful energy do we now have stored in human belly fat? And what is it costing us, not only in medical bills, but in money spent on diets, drugs, and exercise machines?

  3. The waste of animal energy. I mean not just the abandonment of live horsepower, but the waste involved in confinement-feeding. Why use fossil fuel energy to bring food to grazing animals that are admirably designed to go get it themselves?

  4. The waste of soil and soil health. Because the number of farmers has now grown so small in proportion to the number of acres that must be farmed, it has been necessary to resort to all sorts of mechanical shortcuts. But shortcuts never have resulted in good work, and there is no reason to believe that they ever will. When a farmer must cover an enormous acreage within the strict limits of the seasons of planting and harvest, speed necessarily becomes the first consideration. And so the machinery, not the land, becomes the focus of attention and the standard of the work. Consequently, the fields get larger so as to require less turning, waterways are plowed out, and one sees less and less terracing and contour or strip plowing. And, as I mentioned above, less and less land is sowed in a cover crop; when such large acreages must be harvested, there is no time for a fall seeding. The result is catastrophic soil erosion even in such “flat” states as Iowa.

  A problem related to soil waste is that of soil compaction. Part of the reason for this is that industrial agriculture reduces the humus in the soil, which becomes more cohesive and less porous as a result. Another reason is the use of heavier equipment, which becomes necessary, in the first place, because of soil compaction. But the main reason, I think, is again that we don’t have enough farmers to farm the land properly. The industrial farmer has so much land that he cannot afford to wait for “the right time” to work his fields. As long as the ground will support his equipment, he plows and harrows; the time is right for the work whenever the work is mechanically possible. It is commonplace now, wherever I have traveled in farm country, to see fields cut to pieces by deep wheel tracks.

  The final irony is that we are abusing our land in this way partly in order to correct our “balance of payments”—that is, in order to buy foreign petroleum. In the language of some “agribusiness” experts we are using “agridollars” to offset the drain of “petrodollars.” We are, in effect, exporting our topsoil in order to keep our tractors running.

  There is no question that you can cover a lot of ground with the big machines now on the market. A lot of people seem entranced by the power and speed of those machines, which the manufacturers love to refer to as “monsters” and “acre eaters.” But the result is not farming; it is a process closely akin to mining. In what is left of the country communities, in earshot of the monster acre eaters of the “agribusinessmen,
” a lot of old farmers must be turning over in their graves.

  Conservationist and Agrarian

  (2002)

  I AM A CONSERVATIONIST and a farmer, a wilderness advocate and an agrarian. I am in favor of the world’s wildness, not only because I like it, but also because I think it is necessary to the world’s life and to our own. For the same reason, I want to preserve the natural health and integrity of the world’s economic landscapes, which is to say that I want the world’s farmers, ranchers, and foresters to live in stable, locally adapted, resource-preserving communities, and I want them to thrive.

  One thing that this means is that I have spent my life on two losing sides. As long as I have been conscious, the great causes of agrarianism and conservation, despite local victories, have suffered an accumulation of losses, some of them probably irreparable—while the third side, that of the land-exploiting corporations, has appeared to grow ever richer. I say “appeared” because I think their wealth is illusory. Their capitalism is based, finally, not on the resources of nature, which it is recklessly destroying, but on fantasy. Not long ago I heard an economist say, “If the consumer ever stops living beyond his means, we’ll have a recession.” And so the two sides of nature and the rural communities are being defeated by a third side that will eventually be found to have defeated itself.