To make the economies of the land and of land use something like sustainable, we would have to begin with attention to the difference between the industrial economy of inert materials and monetary abstractions and an authentic land economy that must include the kindly husbanding of living creatures. This is the critical issue.
If farming is no more than an industry to be unendingly transformed by technologies, then farmers can be replaced by engineers, and engineers finally by robots, in the progress toward our evident goal of human uselessness. If, on the contrary, because of the uniqueness and fragility of each one of the world’s myriad of small places, the land economies must involve a creaturely affection and care, then we must look back three or four generations and think again.
From its beginning, industrialism has depended on its own, and on most people’s, willingness to ignore everything that does not serve the cheapest possible production of merchandise and, therefore, the highest possible profit. And so to look back and think again, we must acknowledge real needs that have continued through the years to be unacknowledged: the need to see and respect the inescapable dependence even of our present economy, as of our lives, upon nature and the natural world; and upon the need, just as important, to see and respect our inescapable dependence upon the economies—of farming, ranching, forestry, fishing, and mining—by which the goods of nature are made serviceable to human good.
To think well of such enterprises, and of the possibility of combining them in a diverse and coherent local economy, is to think of the need for sustaining all of the necessary occupations. Because a local, a placed, economy would be built in sequence from the ground up, from primary production to manufacturing to marketing, a variety of occupations would be necessary. Because all would be necessary, all would be equally necessary. Because of the need to keep them all adequately staffed, it would be ruinous to prefer one above another by price, custom, or social prejudice. There must be a sustained economic parity among them.
The land-using occupations, then, are of primary importance, but they are also the most vulnerable. We must notice, to begin with, that almost nobody in the supposedly “higher” occupational and social strata has ever recognized the estimable care, intelligence, knowledge, and artistry required to use the land without degrading or destroying it. Farmers may be the last minority that even liberals freely stereotype and insult. If farmers live and work in an economic squeeze between inflated purchases and depressed sales, if their earnings are severely depressed by surplus production, if they are priced out of the land market, it is assumed that they deserve no better. Their success is their ability to produce too much, which amounts to a kind of failure.
Almost nobody in the supposedly “higher” occupational and social strata has ever recognized the estimable care, intelligence, knowledge, and artistry required to use the land without degrading or destroying it.
Surplus production is a risk native to commercial agriculture. This is because farmers individually and collectively do not know, and cannot learn ahead of time, the extent either of public need or of market demand. Either because the market is good and they are encouraged, or because the market is bad and they are desperate, farmers tend to produce as much as they can. This has only to be allowed by a political indifference prescribed by the evangels of the “free market.” Farm subsidies without production controls further encourage overproduction. In times of high costs and low prices, such subsidies are paid ultimately, and quickly, to the corporations.
The traditional home economies of subsistence, while they lasted, gave farmers some hope of surviving their hard times. This was true especially when the chief energy source was the sun, and the dependence on purchased supplies was minimal. As farming became less and less subsistent and more and more commercial, it was exposed ever more nakedly to the vagaries and the predation of an economy fundamentally alien to it. When farming is large in scale, is highly specialized, and all supplies are purchased, the farmer’s exposure to “the economy” is total.
When agricultural production is not controlled by a marketing cooperative such as the tobacco program once was in my part of the country, the market becomes, from the standpoint of the farmers, a sort of limitless commons, of which the inevitable tragedy is inherent in its limitlessness. In the absence of any imposed limit that they collectively agree to and abide by, all producers may have as large a share of the market as they want or can take. Only in this sense is the market, to them, “free.”
The agricultural tragedy of the market is in part political. And how was the by now entirely dominant political position on the agricultural free market defined? In the middle of the twentieth century, “think tanks” containing corporate and academic experts laid down the decree that there were too many farmers. They decreed further that the excess should be removed as rapidly as possible, and that the instrument of this removal should be the free market, all price supports and production controls being eliminated.
The assumption evidently was that the removed farmers would be replaced by industrial technologies, recommended by the land grant universities and supplied by the corporations. This would institute an evolutionary process that would unerringly eliminate “the least efficient producers.” Only the fittest would survive.
In short, by granting a limitless permission and scope to the free market and technological progress—assumed to work invariably for the best—politicians, by doing nothing, could rid themselves of any concern for farmers or farmland. Against this heartless determinism, it is useful to remember that it was the aim of the program for burley tobacco here to include and help every farmer, even the smallest, who wanted to grow the crop. The difference was in the minds of the people whose work during four decades had at last shaped an effective program. Those people, unlike the experts of the mid-century think tanks, were thoughtful of the needs of farming and farmers as opposed to the needs of the corporate free market, known as “the economy.” The doctrine of “too many farmers” has never been revoked. No limit to the attrition has been proposed.
As evidence of the persistence of this doctrine, here is a passage from a letter of October 3, 2016, from John Logan Brent, judge executive of Henry County, Kentucky:
I have taken a couple of afternoons to work on the accounting for farming cattle under the current terms. Enclosed you will find that product based upon a real example, which is our 100 acre farm . . . and its approximately 25 cow herd . . . The good news is that for a young man wishing to earn a middle, to slightly below middle class annual salary of $45,000 farming cattle full-time, he only has to have $3,281,000 in capital to get started. If he can find 780 acres to rent, he only has to have $551,000 for used cows and equipment. I say this is the good news, because the reality is that this was based on a weaned calf price of $850 from June of this year. According to today’s sales reports, that same calf is now $650 at best.
That alone, forgetting other adverse agricultural markets, would be an excellent recipe for the elimination of farmers.
The related problems of low prices and overproduction were solved for about sixty years, in my part of the country, in the only way they could be solved: by a combination of price supports and production controls. This was the purpose and the work of the tobacco program, as a part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. I want now to look closely at the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. Here I must acknowledge that this program and its economic principles have had the allegiance and the service of members of my family for ninety or so years.
Under this program, support prices for the various grades of tobacco were set according to a formula for assuring a fair return on the cost of production, which was to give them economic “parity” with their urban counterparts. Production was controlled by allotting to each farm, according to its history of production, at first an acreage, and later a poundage, that would be eligible for price supports under the program. The combined sum of the allotments for each year was determined by the supply of tobacco, worldwide, that was available for manufacture.
To buy a crop or a portion of a crop protected by the program, a purchaser had to bid a penny a pound above the support price. The government’s assistance to the program consisted of a loan, made annually “against the crop,” which permitted the program to purchase, store, and resell the portion of any year’s crop that did not earn the extra penny a pound which, thanks to the loan, would be purchased by the association and the grower paid at the warehouse. The cost to the government was only administrative until, in response to protests, this cost was charged to the farmers, and the program then operated on the basis of “no net cost” to the government.
The point most needing to be made is that parity of pricing under the tobacco program was in no sense a subsidy. It did not involve a grant of money, a government giveaway, or a public charity. Its purpose was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government. My father defended parity as an appropriate incentive: “It accords with our way of life, and it gives real and tangible meaning to the philosophy of ‘equal opportunity.’ ” He thought of “direct subsidy payments” as virtually opposite to parity and an “abominable form of regimentation.”
During the six decades of its life, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association helped to keep farm families on their farms and gainfully employed in Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. One measure of its success was the decrease of farm tenancy among the growers from 33 percent in 1940 to 9 percent in 1970.
Some of the population of tenant farmers undoubtedly died and some left farming during those years, but most of them ceased to be tenant farmers by becoming owners of farms. The members of the association overwhelmingly renewed their support in referendum after referendum.
The Burley association was thus truly a commons and a common good, based not only upon correct political and economic principles, but also upon the common history and culture, and thus upon the understanding consent of its sharers. So complete was the understanding of the members that in 1955, because of an oversupply of tobacco in storage, they voted for a 25 percent reduction of their allotments.
On April 8, 2016, my neighbor Thomas Grissom, by far the best historian of the association, wrote in a personal letter to me: “After years of research, I have concluded that the most distinctive characteristic of the Kentucky [Burley] Tobacco Program is its design and application of an industrial agriculture commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.” I think that Tom’s perception is exactly right and that he found the right and necessary terms to describe it.
Burley tobacco, despite the dire health problems that it was found to cause and the consequent disfavor, was very much an agrarian crop. It was characteristically and mainly the product of small family farms, produced mainly by family labor and exchanges of work among neighbors. It was for a long time the staple crop in a highly diversified way of farming on landscapes that typically required considerate and affectionate care.
As long as the market paid highly for high quality (which it finally ceased to do), the production of burley tobacco demanded, and from its many highly competent producers it received, both conscientious land husbandry and a fine artistry.
Industrialism and agrarianism are almost exactly opposite and opposed. Industrialism regards mechanical or technical functions as ideal. It rates its accomplishments by quantitative measures. Though it values the prestige of public charity, it is motivated necessarily by the antisocial traits that assure success in competition.
Agrarianism, by contrast, arises from the primal wish for a home land or home place—the wish, in the terms of our tradition, for the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of. Agrarianism grants its highest practical value to the good husbandry of the land. It is motivated, to an extent effective and significant, by neighborliness, family loyalty, and devotion to the coherence and longevity of communities.
As long as it has a sufficiency of “natural resources” and remains free of any imposed restraint, an industrial economy, by its inevitable failure to restrain itself, will dominate and destroy an agrarian economy. This defines the need, to quote Tom Grissom again, for the “design and application of an industrial agricultural commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.”
For a while, the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association did preserve a sort of balance between the interests of industrialism and agrarianism, which prevented their inherent difference and opposition from becoming absolute, and thus absolutely destructive of the agrarian society. This balance was fair enough to the industry and it permitted the growers to prosper. The program worked in fact to the best interest of both economies.
For the past six decades, except for such a remnant of the New Deal, the government has done nothing for farmers except to quiet them down by subsidizing uncontrolled production, which really is worse than nothing. But this “policy,” in the minds of the dominant politicians, signified that they were “doing something for agriculture” and so relieved them of thinking or knowing about agriculture’s actual requirements. The means of actual thought about the use and care of the land had been intentionally discounted and forgotten by people such as themselves.
But the people who decided in the middle of the twentieth century that there were too many farmers had in fact no agricultural knowledge or competence upon which to base such a judgment. They and their successors certainly had not the competence to assume any responsibility for, or in any way to mitigate, the totalitarian displacement of about twenty million farmers.
Farming is a major enactment of the connection between the human economy and the natural world. In the industrial age, farming also enacts the connection, far more complicated and perilous than industrialists admit, between industrial technologies and living creatures.
Some science certainly needs to be involved, also more and better accounting. But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.
Good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.
If we should want to revive or begin, in a public way, the thinking about agriculture that has actually taken place in some cultures, that is still taking place in some small organizations and on some farms, what would we have to do? We would have to begin, I think, by giving the most careful attention to issues of carrying capacity, scale, and form—to issues of production, of course, but also, and just as necessarily, to issues of maintenance or conservation.
The indispensable issue of conservation would apply, not just to the farm’s agricultural “resources,” but also to the ecosystem that includes the farm and to the waterways that drain it.
It is obvious that this effort of thinking has to confront everywhere the limits both of nature and of human nature, limits imposed by the ecosphere and ecosystems, limits of human intelligence, human cultures, and the capacities of human persons. Such thought is authenticated by its compatibility with limits, its willingness to accept limits and to limit itself.
This will not be easy in a time overridden by fantasies of limitlessness, such as that of limitless economic growth. A market limitlessly usable by sellers and limitlessly exploitable by buyers is merely normal in such a time. And limitlessness is the common denominator of both of the dominant political sides, both of which tend to refer to limitlessness as “freedom.”
We have the liberal freedom of unrestrained personal behavior, and the conservative freedom of unrestrained economic behavior. Opposition to the industrial economy’s ravaging of the landscapes of farming and forestry now comes from a small and scattered alliance of agrarians, not from liberals or conservatives.
Conservatives and liberals disagree passionately about climate change, for example, while mutually assenting to the waste and pollution that are its causes. And neither the conservatives who esteem the fossil fuels nor the liberals who deplore them have advocated rationing their use, either to make them last or to reduce their harm.
For these people the old ideals of enough and plenty have been overruled by the ideals of all you want and all you can get. They cannot imagine that for farmers a limitless market share, like a limitless appetite, can lead only to the related diseases of too much and too little.
The good care of land and people depends primarily upon arts, ways of making and doing. One cannot be, above all, a good neighbor without such ways. And the arts, all of them, are limited. Apart from limits they cannot exist. The making of any good work of art depends, first, upon limits of purpose and attention, and then upon limits specific to the kind of art and its means.
It is a formidable paradox that in order to achieve the sort of limitlessness of the living world that we have begun to call “sustainability,” strict limits must be observed. Enduring structures of household and family life, or the life of a community or the life of a country, cannot be formed except within limits. Within limits, we can think of rightness of scale. When the scale is right, we can imagine completeness of form.
The first limit to be encountered in making a farm—or a regional or national economy—is carrying capacity: How much can we ask of this land, this field or this pasture or this woodland, without diminishing the land’s response? And then we come to other limits, each one addressing directly our imagination, sympathy, affection, forbearance, knowledge, and skill.
And now I must call to mind Aldo Leopold who, unlike most conservationists since John Muir, thought beyond wilderness conservation to conservation of the country’s economic landscapes of farming and forestry. His conception of humanity’s relation to the natural world was eminently practical. He knew that land-destruction is easy, for it requires only ignorance and violence. But the obligation to restore the land and conserve it requires humanity in its highest, completest sense.
Aldo Leopold thought carefully about farming and forestry because he knew that far more land would be put to those uses than ever could be safeguarded in wilderness preserves. In an essay of 1945, “The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” he laid side-by-side “two opposing philosophies of farm life”: “The farm is a food-factory, and the criterion of its success is salable products.” And: “The farm is a place to live.” Of the two he chose emphatically the second because as a work of art it was the most complete, made formally whole by “a harmonious balance” among a diversity of interests. On such a farm every part is both limited and enabled by the others.
This harmonious balance cannot be prefabricated. It can be realized only uniquely within the boundary of any given farm, according to the natures and demands of its indwelling plants and animals, and according to the abilities, needs, and wishes of its resident human family. Wherever this is fully accomplished, it is a grand masterpiece to behold.
Wendell Berry is a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer who lives in Kentucky. This essay is excerpted from his collection The Art of Loading Brush, forthcoming from Counterpoint.
