Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Renewing Husbandry, by Wendell Berry

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/160/

The time of mechanization in agriculture is fast coming to an end. But can 
we recover what's been lost?


Orion magazine (September / October 2005)

I REMEMBER WELL A SUMMER MORNING in about 1950 when my father sent a hired 
man with a McCormick High Gear Number 9 mowing machine and a team of mules 
to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall A. That memory is a 
landmark in my mind and my history. I had been born into the way of farming

represented by the mule team, and I loved it. I knew irresistibly that the 
mules were good ones. They were stepping along beautifully at a rate of 
speed in fact only a little slower than mine. But now I saw them suddenly 
from the vantage point of the tractor, and I remember how fiercely I 
resented their slowness. I saw them as "in my way".

This is not an exceptional or a remarkably dramatic bit of history. I
recite 
it to confirm that the industrialization of agriculture is a part of my 
familiar experience. I don't have the privilege of looking at it as an 
outsider.

We were mowing that morning, the teamster with his mules and I with the 
tractor, in the field behind the barn on my father's home place, where he 
and before him his father had been born, and where his father had died in 
February of 1946. The old way of farming was intact in my grandfather's
mind 
until the day he died at eighty-two. He had worked mules all his life, 
understood them thoroughly, and loved the good ones passionately. He knew 
tractors only from a distance, he had seen only a few of them, and he 
rejected them out of hand because he thought, correctly, that they
compacted 
the soil.

Even so, four years after his death his grandson's sudden resentment of the

"slow" mule team foretold what history would bear out: the tractor would 
stay and the mules would go. Year after year, agriculture would be adapted 
more and more to the technology and the processes of industry and to the 
rule of industrial economics. This transformation occurred with astonishing

speed because, by the measures it set for itself, it was wonderfully 
successful. It "saved labor", it conferred the prestige of modernity, and
it 
was highly productive.

During the fourteen years after 1950 I was much away from home, though I 
never entirely departed from farming or at least from thoughts of farming, 
and my affection for my homeland remained strong. In 1964 my family and I 
returned to Kentucky and settled on a hillside farm in my native community,

where we have continued to live. Perhaps because I was a returned traveler 
intending to stay, I now saw the place more clearly than before. I saw it 
critically, too, for it was evident at once that the human life of the 
place, the life of the farms and the farming community, was in decline. The

old self-sufficient way of farming was passing away. The economic
prosperity 
that had visited the farmers briefly during World War II and for a few
years 
afterward had ended. The little towns that once had been social and
economic 
centers, thronged with country people on Saturdays and Saturday nights,
were 
losing out to the bigger towns and the cities. The rural neighborhoods,
once 
held together by common memories, common work, and the sharing of help, had

begun to dissolve. There were no longer local markets for chickens or eggs 
or cream. The spring lamb industry, once a staple of the region, was gone. 
The tractors and other mechanical devices certainly were saving the labor
of 
the farmers and farmhands who had moved away, but those who had stayed were

working harder and longer than ever.

THE EFFECTS OF THE PROCESS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION have become so apparent, so

numerous, so favorable to the agribusiness corporations, and so unfavorable

to everything else, that by now the questions troubling me and a few others

in the 1960s and 1970s are being asked everywhere. It has become 
increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local community, and 
that the economy of the local community affects the way we farm; that the 
way we farm affects the health and integrity of the local ecosystem, and 
that the farm is intricately dependent, even economically, upon the health 
of the local ecosystem. We can no longer pretend that agriculture is a sort

of economic machine with interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, 
determined by "market forces" and independent of everything else. We are
not 
farming in a specialist capsule or a professionalist department; we are 
farming in the world, in a webwork of dependences and influences probably 
more intricate than we will ever understand. It has become clear, in short,

that we have been running our fundamental economic enterprise by the wrong 
rules. We were wrong to assume that agriculture could be adequately defined

by reductionist science and determinist economics.

It is no longer possible to deny that context exists and is an issue. If
you 
can keep the context narrow enough (and the accounting period short
enough), 
then the industrial criteria of labor saving and high productivity seem to 
work well. But the old rules of ecological coherence and of community life 
have remained in effect. The costs of ignoring them have accumulated, until

now the boundaries of our reductive and mechanical explanations have 
collapsed. Their collapse reveals, plainly enough for all to see, the 
ecological and social damages they were meant to conceal. It will seem 
paradoxical to some that the national and global corporate economies have 
narrowed the context for thinking about agriculture, but it is merely the 
truth. Those large economies, in their understanding and in their 
accounting, have excluded any concern for the land and the people. Now, in 
the midst of so much unnecessary human and ecological destruction, we are 
facing the necessity of a new start in agriculture.

THE TRACTOR'S ARRIVAL HAD SIGNALED, among other things, agriculture's shift

from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total 
dependence on costly fossil fuel. But in 1950, like most people at that 
time, I was years away from the first inkling of the limits of the supply
of 
cheap fuel.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this
in 
itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both 
suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of
that 
world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of 
labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me 
years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world

limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

Mechanical farming makes it easy to think mechanically about the land and 
its creatures. It makes it easy to think mechanically even about oneself, 
and the tirelessness of tractors brought a new depth of weariness into
human 
experience, at a cost to health and family life that has not been fully 
accounted.

Once one's farm and one's thoughts have been sufficiently mechanized, 
industrial agriculture's focus on production, as opposed to maintenance or 
stewardship, becomes merely logical. And here the trouble completes itself.

The almost exclusive emphasis on production permits the way of working to
be 
determined not by the nature and character of the farm in its ecosystem and

in its human community, but rather by the national or the global economy
and 
the available or affordable technology. The farm and all concerns not 
immediately associated with production have in effect disappeared from 
sight. The farmer too in effect has vanished. He is no longer working as an

independent and loyal agent of his place, his family, and his community,
but 
instead as the agent of an economy that is fundamentally adverse to him and

to all that he ought to stand for.

THE WORD "HUSBANDRY" IS THE NAME of a connection. In its original sense, it

is the name of the work of a domestic man, a man who has accepted a bondage

to the household. To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make

last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the

land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because
of 
the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times,

one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human

husbandry of the nondomestic creatures, in recognition of the dependence of

our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name

of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our

places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the 
living network that sustains us.

Most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures appear
to 
be the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. The

attempt to remake agriculture as a science and an industry has excluded
from 
it the age-old husbandry which was central and essential to it.

This effort had its initial and probably its most radical success in 
separating farming from the economy of subsistence. Through World War II, 
farm life in my region (and, I think, nearly everywhere) rested solidly
upon 
the garden, dairy, poultry flock, and meat animals that fed the farm's 
family. Especially in hard times farm families, and their farms, survived
by 
means of their subsistence economy. The industrial program, on the
contrary, 
suggested that it was "uneconomic" for a farm family to produce its own 
food; the effort and the land would be better applied to commercial 
production. The result is utterly strange in human experience: farm
families 
that buy everything they eat at the store.

An intention to replace husbandry with science was made explicit in the 
renaming of disciplines in the colleges of agriculture. "Soil husbandry" 
became "soil science", and "animal husbandry" became "animal science". This

change is worth lingering over because of what it tells us about our 
susceptibility to poppycock. Purporting to increase the sophistication of 
the humble art of farming, this change in fact brutally oversimplifies it.

"Soil science", as practiced by soil scientists, and even more as it has 
been handed down to farmers, has tended to treat the soil as a lifeless 
matrix in which "soil chemistry" takes place and "nutrients" are "made 
available". And this, in turn, has made farming increasingly shallow - 
literally so - in its understanding of the soil. The modern farm is 
understood as a surface on which various mechanical operations are 
performed, and to which various chemicals are applied. The undersurface 
reality of organisms and roots is mostly ignored.

"Soil husbandry" is a different kind of study, involving a different kind
of 
mind. Soil husbandry leads, in the words of Sir Albert Howard, to 
understanding "health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great
subject". 
We apply the word "health" only to living creatures, and to soil husbandry
a 
healthy soil is a wilderness, mostly unstudied and unknown, but teemingly 
alive. The soil is at once a living community of creatures and their 
habitat. The farm's husband, its family, its crops and animals, all are 
members of the soil community; all belong to the character and identity of 
the place. To rate the farm family merely as "labor" and its domestic
plants 
and animals merely as "production" is thus an oversimplification, both 
radical and destructive.

"Science" is too simple a word to name the complex of relationships and 
connections that compose a healthy farm - a farm that is a full membership 
of the soil community. The husbandry of mere humans, of course, cannot be 
complex enough either. But husbandry always has understood that what is 
husbanded is ultimately a mystery. A farmer, as one of his farmer 
correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 
'Mysteries of God'". The mothering instinct of animals, for example, is a 
mystery that husbandry must use and trust mostly without understanding. The

husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs 
inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and
so 
the husbanding mind is both careful and humble. Husbandry originates 
precautionary sayings like "Don't put all your eggs into one basket" and 
"Don't count your chickens before they hatch". It does not boast of 
technological feats that will "feed the world".

Husbandry, which is not replaceable by science, nevertheless uses science, 
and corrects it too. It is the more comprehensive discipline. To reduce 
husbandry to science, in practice, is to transform agricultural "wastes" 
into pollutants, and to subtract perennials and grazing animals from the 
rotation of crops. Without husbandry, the agriculture of science and 
industry has served too well the purpose of the industrial economy in 
reducing the number of landowners and the self-employed. It has transformed

the United States from a country of many owners to a country of many 
employees.

Without husbandry, "soil science" too easily ignores the community of 
creatures that live in and from, that make and are made by, the soil. 
Similarly, "animal science" without husbandry forgets, almost as a 
requirement, the sympathy by which we recognize ourselves as fellow 
creatures of the animals. It forgets that animals are so called because we 
once believed them to be endowed with souls. Animal science has led us away

from that belief or any such belief in the sanctity of animals. It has led 
us instead to the animal factory which, like the concentration camp, is a 
vision of Hell. Animal husbandry, on the contrary, comes from and again 
leads to the psalmist's vision of good grass, good water, and the husbandry

of God.

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties 
and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate 
courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that 
most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become
wrong 
by being too small - "too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the 
farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community" - 
and this is crucial. "Out of context", as Wes Jackson has said, "the best 
minds do the worst damage".

OUR RECENT FOCUS UPON PRODUCTIVITY, genetic and technological uniformity, 
and global trade - all supported by supposedly limitless supplies of fuel, 
water, and soil - has obscured the necessity for local adaptation. But our 
circumstances are changing rapidly now, and this requirement will be forced

upon us again by terrorism and other kinds of political violence, by 
chemical pollution, by increasing energy costs, by depleted soils,
aquifers, 
and streams, and by the spread of exotic weeds, pests, and diseases. We are

going to have to return to the old questions about local nature, local 
carrying capacities, and local needs. And we are going to have to resume
the 
breeding of plants and animals to fit the region and the farm.

The same obsessions and extravagances that have caused us to ignore the 
issue of local adaptation have caused us to ignore the issue of form. These

two issues are so closely related that it is difficult to talk about one 
without talking about the other. During the half century and more of our 
neglect of local adaptation, we have subjected our farms to a radical 
oversimplification of form. The diversified and reasonably self-sufficient 
farms of my region and of many other regions have been conglomerated into 
larger farms with larger fields, increasingly specialized, and subjected 
increasingly to the strict, unnatural linearity of the production line.

But the first requirement of a form is that it must be comprehensive; it 
must not leave out something that essentially belongs within it. The form
of 
the farm must answer to the farmer's feeling for the place, its creatures, 
and its work. It is a never-ending effort of fitting together many diverse 
things. It must incorporate the lifecycle and the fertility cycles of 
animals. It must bring crops and livestock into balance and mutual support.

It must be a pattern on the ground and in the mind. It must be at once 
ecological, agricultural, economic, familial, and neighborly.

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are
now 
obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the 
land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of
which 
they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the 
consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, 
petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions

and local needs. The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote

a general awareness of everybody's agricultural responsibilities, thus 
becomes urgent.

How can we restore a competent husbandry to the minds of the world's 
producers and consumers? This effort is already in progress on many farms 
and in many urban consumer groups scattered across our country and the 
world. But we must recognize too that this effort needs an authorizing
focus 
and force that would grant it a new legitimacy, intellectual rigor, 
scientific respectability, and responsible teaching. There are many reasons

to hope that this might be supplied by our colleges of agriculture.

The effort of husbandry is partly scientific but it is entirely cultural; 
and a cultural initiative can exist only by becoming personal. It will 
become increasingly clear, I believe, that agricultural scientists will
need 
to work as indwelling members of agricultural communities or of consumer 
communities. It is not irrational to propose that a significant number of 
these scientists should be farmers, and so subject their scientific work, 
and that of their colleagues, to the influence of a farmer's practical 
circumstances. Along with the rest of us, they will need to accept all the 
imperatives of husbandry as the context of their work. We cannot keep
things 
from falling apart in our society if they do not cohere in our minds and in

our lives.

_____

This article has been abridged for the web.

Wendell Berry's poems, essays, and works of fiction have won him numerous 
honors and a wide following. His latest collection of poems is titled Given

(Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005). His essay in this issue is drawn from The Way of

Ignorance, to be published by Shoemaker & Hoard in November 2005 and used 
here by permission. He lives and farms in his native Kentucky. For more 
information about Wendell Berry, his articles, and his books see 
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/54/

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