Loss of Farms and a Virtuous Way of Life

Farmers are among the last Americans who still deal on a daily basis with reality. Working with soil, weather, disease, pests, muscle and machinery, the farmer constantly tests the truth of his ideas against the hard contingencies of an unpredictable natural world. It is no secret that family farms in America are an endangered species, as farmers who own and work their land are edged out by giant agribusiness, and as farmland is buried under asphalt to make way for suburban sprawl.

Victor Davis Hanson is richly qualified to speak of farmers and farming. He is a fifth-generation California grape farmer, who also teaches classics at Cal State Fresno. He brings to this book not only his firsthand experience, but also a historical awareness informed by his understanding of the Hellenic experience. Hanson’s previous books include “Warfare and Agriculture in Ancient Greece” and “Who Killed Homer?” (which he coauthored with John Heath). His 1996 “Fields Without Dreams” recounted his own struggles as a farmer. In “The Land Was Everything,” he warns that the demise of the family farm may spell the end of the American republic as we know it.

Taking up a theme sounded more than two centuries ago in Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s classic “Letters From an American Farmer,” Hanson maintains that the farmer has been central to our civilization. Crevecoeur hailed the American farmer as a new kind of man: a worker who was not brutalized and ignorant like the European peasant, a landowner who was not an idle aristocrat. Working one’s own land fosters responsibility and a healthy intolerance for cant (“hogwash,” after all, is surely a term coined by a farmer).

Farmers, Hanson says, make good citizens: They “question authority and yet follow the law; they are suspicious of the faddishly nontraditional, yet remain highly eccentric themselves; they vote and work for civic projects and group cohesion, and yet tend to be happiest when left alone. . . .”

Without the solid virtues of the farmer, Hanson fears, the twin deities of market capitalism and entitlement democracy will transform us into a nation of shallow, insatiable consumers. Hanson also points out that in the debate between wilderness and development, the farmer demonstrates a viable “middle way.” His cultivated fields, vineyards and orchards embody a balance between the natural and the man-made.

With wry and pithy eloquence, Hanson describes the farmer’s battles with the forces of nature, the inequities of the marketplace and the temptations of selling out. Learn why the virus is a more lethal enemy than bug, fungus or weed; why farmers often risk their own health by using pesticides; and how farmland, once paved over, never reverts to farming.

Hanson is nothing if not direct. When he says farmers can be dour, curt and downright rude, he not only means it: He demonstrates it with sardonic cuts at globalist profiteers, urban riffraff and self-righteous left-wingers. But an equally important aspect of his plain-speaking is his refusal to pretend family farming is the panacea that romantic urbanites might think. When it comes to providing cheap food to feed the appetite of an expanding world population, Hanson admits, agribusiness does a more efficient job.

Why, then, value family farms--or at very least, regret their loss? Better food is one reason: Peaches or plums harvested and sold in season are tastier and more nutritious than produce picked green and distributed through mass marketing. But what Hanson considers a far more important reason is not calculated to appeal to the quality-conscious consumer. Agriculture, he insists, serves “a larger purpose beyond the production of food.” It is a way of life that involves self-sacrifice, struggle and stewardship: caring more for the land than for one’s own comfort. Certainly, it is hard to disagree with Hanson that these have become increasingly rare commodities.