Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Renewing Husbandry by Wendell Berry

The time of mechanization in agriculture is fast coming to an end. But can
we recover what's been lost?
Published in the September/October 2005 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/160/

I REMEMBER WELL A SUMMER MORNING in about 1950 when my father sent a hired
man with a McCormick High Gear No. 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 ‘60s and ‘70s 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.