A Vulnerable Underbelly Called the American Farm
Early last month the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences organized in 1916, released a handsome 450-page volume entitled “Alternative Agriculture.”
On my scales it weighed in at 2 1/8 pounds; if it was wheat, it would be worth about 15 cents. But the study may well be worth billions in the short run, many times that in the long run and might even be the first significant step toward saving our agricultural landscape.
It is a landmark book also in the sense that it is more radical than many conventional agriculturists appreciate, for it represents a possible turning point away from dependence on the extractive and polluting economy of which agriculture is only a part. The study may lead us from the ravages of the chemical industry, eventually prevent soil erosion and stem the tide of capital flow out of our rural communities.
“Alternative Agriculture” confirms that we can farm without heavy chemical inputs, whether fertilizers or pesticides. It reveals that numerous farmers are already doing just that and cutting their costs besides. The council advocates removing the subsidy for such chemicals. In short, Establishment scientists have finally validated one of the major tenets of the sustainable agriculture movement--a validation 20 years overdue.
The too-long-held and silly notion that chemicals are necessary if we are to keep from starving has been addressed and at last dispensed with. Highly respected scientists can now field the accusations that sustainable agriculture is practiced by hippie farmers or a weird cult. What is more, all the nation’s land-grant institutions will finally have to come forward and begin to answer their critics. Countless extension agents can quit behaving like traveling salesmen for the chemical companies.
But innumerable pitfalls still await American agriculture. We have deeper social questions--questions that have to do with rural community, farm size, justice--and even deeper, pestering ecological questions, such as what to do about soil erosion and the fact that we need gasoline and diesel fuel to run our equipment and natural gas to serve as the feed stock for nitrogen fertilizer.
This push for alternatives in agriculture did not come out of the land-grant universities or the U.S. Department of Agriculture--and certainly not out of the chemical industry or the seed houses. The report acknowledges this fact, that it comes out of “the people,” so to speak, but does not really deal with other, much messier problems.
The sustainable-agriculture movement has platform planks almost like a political party. One deals with chemicals. There is a soil-erosion plank, a fossil-fuel-dependency plank, a family-farm plank and an appropriate-farm-size plank.
Consider farm size. Most proponents of sustainable agriculture have always thought scale as important as the chemical issue or any of the others mentioned. But the report, by being scale-neutral, creates a problem.
There are 11 case studies, featuring 14 farms. The Virginia farm is more than 3,000 acres in an area where the average farm size is 200 acres. The two Coleman brothers who produce natural beef in Colorado own 13,000 acres, lease an additional 13,000 and have grazing permits on 250,000 acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. (And still the wife of one of the brothers has to work as a school nurse to help meet household expenses.)
The report features other large-scale examples. I guess we are supposed to think that if the big boys can give us chemical-free food, so can everyone else. And I suspect the study focused on chemicals first because the urbanite is more worried about the chemical issue than the demise of the family farm or soil erosion.
Consumer worry about hormones in beef or pesticides on fruit is simply an extension of concern about industrial pollution in general. Millions of Americans will send money to a consumer-advocacy organization but would not think of taking out membership in the Soil Conservation Society.
So “Alternative Agriculture,” while a victory, is not enough. Reducing chemical inputs will help, but farmers will still be in trouble 10 years from now if this is as far as we go. What is happening to the farmer, the farm and rural communities represents a faint foreshadow of what is bound to happen incrementally to the rest of the culture--unless the institutional structures and policies that fuel our use-it-up-throw-it-away economy are greatly changed.
This rural crisis is not like some isolated, malfunctioning satellite “out there” away from the cities, orbiting the industrial economy waiting for some simple fix. Rather, our rural areas might more accurately be regarded as the vulnerable underbelly of the culture at large. It would be nice if a simple reduction in fertilizer and pesticide use could fix agriculture. The reality is that rural people are a dispersed minority with no political clout--marginal isolates rapidly becoming like Third World people. And increasingly, the landscapes on which they live take on a Third World appearance.
Think of the nature of power. If rural people were instead a dispersed majority, or a concentrated minority, theirs would be a voice to be reckoned with. But the rural economy is mostly an “exit” economy. Money capital leaves. People capital leaves. Ecological capital leaves in the form of soil or aquifer water. What remains are the alien chemicals: those that stay around to pollute what soils and water and people are left.
We can hope now that chemical application will mostly disappear. But with the report’s validation of large-scale farms, rural schools and rural churches will continue to close. Rural baseball will continue to die out. It is a sorry state all of us face each day out here in the countryside--outbuildings and abandoned houses go unpainted, roofs leak, studs rot, walls lean and when the inevitable storm comes through, one by one, they fall in a heap.
One day, often years after a building has collapsed, a bulldozer operator, hired to push out a hedgerow in order to expand the kingdom of wheat 20 feet farther along a field’s edge, spends a few minutes pushing the fallen building into a tighter pile. After dashing some diesel fuel over these jackstraws of 2-by-4s, -6s and -8s, siding and shingles, nails and hinges, he strikes a match and a portion of a 1920s Oregon forest, sacrificed for the common good, goes up in smoke.
Meanwhile, the dominant culture, mostly well-heeled and wanting chemical-free food, remains content to keep only a few examples of rural life around for nostalgic purposes--a restored Model T, a rusting plow propping up a mailbox.
What we must face is the question of whether the Jeffersonian ideal that brought these farms and farm families and rural communities into existence is mere nostalgia or a practical necessity? This may be the most important national question for the rest of the century; how we deal with these problems across our food-producing landscape will probably set the precedent for how we deal with other problems confronting us.
“Alternative Agriculture” thoroughly documents a small but important component of the rural crisis. Those responsible deserve our gratitude for exposing farmers’ chemical addiction and for helping farmers everywhere to work out cropping arrangements making it possible to “just say no” to the chemical cartels that blight our land. But as we slowly learn, there is more we humans are addicted to than chemicals.
