Uphill Battle

In the last 50 years, the federal government, universities, agribusiness and farmers have colluded to drive most small farmers out of business and destroy or impoverish much of rural America at the taxpayer’s expense. Not only do some of the largest farmers in the nation get hundreds of thousands of dollars for not producing anything but, last year alone, the federal government doled out $22 billion in emergency payments to conventional farmers, whose methods are failing and will continue to fail.

The state of American agriculture is worse now than it was in 1980, when critics such as Wes Jackson, Marty Strange and Wendell Berry began drawing public attention to the fact that corporate-sponsored agriculture was destructive and misguided. Since 1996, the so-called Freedom to Farm Act passed by the Republican Congress and signed into law by President Clinton has actually accelerated the demise of the family farm and the consolidation of corporate farming. And why don’t we ignore for now the introduction into the American diet of pesticides and herbicide residues, antibiotics, fungicides, hormones and genetically modified foods?

The farmers have sought one higher-tech solution after another--more chemicals, vast confinement complexes for slaughter animals, bigger tractors and combines. Though the corporations may have taken them by surprise in the ‘50s, it is the farmers who have made informed choices to wreck their own land since the ‘80s.

It is therefore tempting to wonder whether Island Press and Eric T. Freyfogle, University of Illinois professor and editor of “The New Agrarianism,” realize that the jig is up. It doesn’t matter anymore what the moral, practical, philosophical and spiritual arguments in favor of sustainable agriculture are. They have no backers and they carry no weight, and “The New Agrarianism” is reminiscent of attempts by Englishmen in the 18th century to reintroduce Latin as the language of high literary culture.

But it is a charming and seductive book that leads you to believe it possible to change the course of modern farming, that agrarianism is still possible today. It is an ideal in which the farmer is a do-it-yourselfer: someone who grafts apple trees, saves open-pollinated seed from one year to the next and extends the life of farm equipment by repairing it. Someone who owns his land, does not borrow on it and does not go to the bank to get money to plant his crop. Someone who profits not the corporation or the international bank. The “new agrarians”--new only in the sense that they advocate in our era the practice of age-old principles of land stewardship and personal moderation--point the way to this ideal.

As Freyfogle points out in his introduction, our understanding of agrarianism has been tainted by its association with the American South and slavery. Before the Civil War, writers and commentators carried on a complex conversation about how to live, how to farm, how to worship, how to work, how to run a household and whether to stay in one place. The war simplified the argument: The industrial North, powered by machines, coal and immigrants, defeated the agrarian South, and Southern ideas and Southern institutions were immediately suspect. The former Confederacy was a land of exhausted farming prospects, poor fields, poorer shanties, backward towns, run-down remnants of plantations. Vigorous proponents of agrarianism, such as the Quakers and the Mormons, who modeled non-slave-oriented ways of building agricultural communities, lost their voices.

More than 100 years later, when American farming came under renewed scrutiny, there wasn’t much of a tradition to draw upon, and there was no common language about farming. The first public voice of agrarianism in our time was Berry, Kentucky farmer, novelist and philosopher. Berry explicitly owes many of his ideas to Allen Tate and his circle of Southern thinkers of the 1930s. From the beginning, he has been anti-capitalist, anti-global, anti-modern, anti-technological and cranky.

Berry contributes two selections to “The New Agrarianism,” and they are vintage. One, the short story “The Boundary,” is dismissible for its sentimental didacticism, but the other, the essay “The Whole Horse,” is a straightforward explanation of the first principles of agrarianism. “The agrarian mind,” he writes, “begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God.” But these good things bear a cost. It is not that we wish to enjoy and nurture the land around us, it is, according to Berry, that “nature [is] the final judge, lawgiver, and pattern-maker of and for the human use of the earth.”

Though he occasionally claims that he doesn’t simply want to return to the old ways for the sake of returning to the old ways, his writings have always carried an air of old-fashioned and repressive patriarchy. Berry has been quick to judge the mistakes of others, even allies. He viewed the old slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” with contempt as a wrong and even destructive idea. He made the whole enterprise seem so fraught with the potential for sin that some abandoned it, finding the easier path of cheap food and distant consequences more attractive. Where agrarianism needed an enthusiast, it found a stern patriarch.

Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., is a true radical. He is attempting to undo farming’s original sin--basing the human diet on the harvest of the seeds of annual crops (mostly corn, wheat, rice and soybeans). He would like to substitute the seeds of perennial plants such as the Illinois bundleflower (a legume) and eastern gama grass (a grain) for soybeans and wheat, solving several of farming’s age-old problems: maintaining a mat of rooted soil cover from year to year that would control soil erosion, mitigate the effects of flood and drought, reduce or eliminate the need for irrigation and for the repeated machining of fields (which makes profligate use of fossil fuels). It would also eliminate the need for chemicals needed to prevent the decimation of mono-crops by parasites, pests and diseases. In formulating his solution, Jackson has asked the most basic question: What would it be like to eat something besides what I am used to? And, to a surprising extent, he and his associates at the Land Institute have answered it.

Writer Scott Russell Sanders’ piece about Jackson and the Land Institute (“Learning From the Prairie”) is a pleasant introduction to and update on the research taking place in Kansas, but it is not detailed enough to do justice either to Jackson’s ideas or his extremely large personality.

The Land Institute is one of a handful of fragments that make up the agrarian movement; perhaps the longest-lived fragment--and the one that stands as a permanent model of what agriculture can be--is the farming lifestyle of the Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and a few other states. According to the introduction to a piece by David Kline, an Amish farmer in northern Ohio, the Amish community, which had 4,000 members in 1900, now numbers 130,000; through certain farming practices, such as the use of draft horses and crop rotation, as well as certain social practices, such as inheritance of the farm by the youngest son rather than the eldest (the older sons learn practical trades), the Amish have managed to sustain their communities and their livelihoods while all around them “English” farmers were booming (once in a while) and busting (most of the time).

Kline is as elegantly conversant writing about the land as he is living within his neighborhood. His essay on taking a walk with his daughter--where they go, the birds and plants they see--is an example of something rare in modern literature, a real and matter-of-fact connection to one’s natural surroundings. Kline addresses another basic question of farming: Is it possible to enjoy such hard work? When asked to write about the advantages and disadvantages of small-scale farming, he can’t think of any disadvantages. The work is unrelenting but so various and engaging that it doesn’t seem like work. In short, he is not the sort of farmer who would spend his government check on an RV and flee to Florida. He is too interested in his land to want to leave it.

One of my favorite writers, Donald Worster, addresses the philosophical underpinnings of the modern attitude toward land. Other writers have noticed that Western civilization is unusual for having desanctified the Earth and exploited its plants, animals, topsoil and sacred locales. Some have located this desanctification in Judeo-Christian tradition or medieval notions of hierarchy. A professor at the University of Kansas, Worster makes a case that two 17th century philosophers, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, were the first to propose the idea that living things could be taken apart and studied mechanically without the loss of any essential quality and that these materialist ideas fueled those of our current philosophical god, Adam Smith, an urban man who, according to Worster, seems not to have noticed or cared about the “severe ecological problems caused by over-grazing, deforestation, and soil depletion” that were all around him in his native Scotland.

Worster’s argument is convincing and is a smart starting point for discussion about the “free market” as fashion rather than as truth. We have seen in our time that the application of free-market principles, especially the idea that nature has no value, has been so devastating all over the world as to constitute a crime against the soil, the oceans and the atmosphere and that Smith’s ignorance of the countryside has been compounded by his followers into a stupidity so counterintuitive that it would qualify as subhuman if animals didn’t routinely show more sensitivity to and knowledge of their surroundings than the average professor of economics.

Another worthy fragment of the much dispersed agrarian movement is Weston, Mass., a town outside Boston that has effectively slowed suburban sprawl, spiraling land prices, destruction of farmland and loss of community feeling. In his essay, Brian Donohue makes a case for the idea of the commons, land that is of value to a whole community, commonly held (though not commonly owned) through the institution of easements, regulated against certain kinds of pollution or exploitation and designed to keep out certain kinds of residential development. The great lie about the idea of the commons, perpetrated by personal property absolutists, is that no one takes care of common land. In fact, according to Donohue, it is more true that no one takes care of privately owned land, if ownership is for the purpose of extracting and exporting its wealth. Look around. Every town in American is burdened with places where the owners took what they wanted--ore, lumber, oil, topsoil, crops--and absconded, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.

But if agrarianism is such a great idea, and in fact these agrarians, for the most part, have been expressing these ideas for a long time to invisible effect, how is it that they have gone wrong? What could they have done better? Perhaps proponents of the agrarian ideal were simply unable to gussy up the basic requirements sufficiently to attract a following (where they have at least partially succeeded is gourmet food). The ideal is the small diversified farm within the small diversified community within the small diversified ecosystem.

Neighbors know and help one another; families meet most of their own needs and sell only the surplus; pests and parasites can’t take hold because there isn’t very much of any one species in any one location, and inputs like fertilizer are supplied to one part of the system by another, resulting in the limited use of petroleum products.

Everyone on the farm or in the community must perform several types of work, and the meshing of diverse requirements supplies mental stimulation (as opposed to the stultifying dullness of the tamed landscape described in William Kittredge’s “Owning It All”). It is hard to tell which feature of this picture Americans find less appealing--the requirement for a flexible and complex mental life or the requirement of a modest material existence--but this ideal seems to have completely failed to capture the national imagination. But who’s to blame? When have humans, given a choice, turned away from abundance and luxury? Perhaps agrarians have simply misread human nature, relying on wiser better natures we don’t have.

In 1954, Walter Goldschmidt studied two comparable towns in the Central Valley, Arvin and Dinuba. One was surrounded by small farms, the other by large farms. The aggregate income enjoyed by the towns was about the same, as were their populations. But Dinuba, the town of small farms, had a middle class, a public life and plenty of commerce. In Arvin, the income went mostly to large landowners, who exported it; most of the other residents lived on welfare.

Some might argue that Arvin was an image of what America has become. American farming is supported mostly through subsidies. We pay for the rich and the poor alike. We pay for the depopulation of the countryside and the deterioration of the soil and high petroleum use; we pay for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and we pay for our own diet to get worse.

Are there signs of hope? The weight and momentum of modern farming and the indifference of urban America would argue that there are none. High oil prices may precipitate a constructive crisis; famine, though disastrous, might do the same. Clearly those in charge are not going to think any new thoughts any time soon, and for those who would like to, “The New Agrarianism” is as good a place to start as any.