Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The Agrarian Standard by Wendell Berry

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Agrarian Standard by Wendell Berry
  • Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:03:02 -0600


"In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States
that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off now than they
were then. Our soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We
continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We
continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The
large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now
global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was
useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and
patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose
of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace
“food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.” "

The Agrarian Standard by Wendell Berry
Published in the Summer 2002 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/115/

The Unsettling of America was published twenty-five years ago; it is still in
print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted to be glad of
this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book, and I still do, then I
should be anything but glad. The book would have had a far happier fate if it
could have been disproved or made obsolete years ago.

It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the abuses
of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become worse over the last
twenty-five years. In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in
the United States that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off
now than they were then. Our soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably
high. We continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons.
We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort.
The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now
global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was
useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and
patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose
of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace
“food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One keeps
writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one
wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for
in twenty-five years. My life as an agrarian writer has certainly involved me
in such confusions, but I have never doubted for a minute the importance of
the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy
people in a healthy land.

We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in which we are
so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to
defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill,
self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable
art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean
farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by
industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.

I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines
the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly
opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite
ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.

THE WAY OF INDUSTRIALISM is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a
machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing ourselves or
making war; it is an explanation of the world and of life. Because
industrialism cannot understand living things except as machines, and can
grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and
forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it.

Industrialism prescribes an economy that is placeless and displacing. It does
not distinguish one place from another. It applies its methods and
technologies indiscriminately in the American East and the American West, in
the United States and in India. It thus continues the economy of colonialism.
The shift of colonial power from European monarchy to global corporation is
perhaps the dominant theme of modern history. All along, it has been the same
story of the gathering of an exploitive economic power into the hands of a
few people who are alien to the places and the people they exploit. Such an
economy is bound to destroy locally adapted agrarian economies everywhere it
goes, simply because it is too ignorant not to do so. And it has succeeded
precisely to the extent that it has been able to inculcate the same ignorance
in workers and consumers.

To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism,
the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not
imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The
people of “the cutting edge” in science, business, education, and politics
have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that
make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of
their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has
always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been
destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of
the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under
industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms
fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.

The industrial contempt for anything small, rural, or natural translates into
contempt for uncentralized economic systems, any sort of local
self-sufficiency in food or other necessities. The industrial “solution” for
such systems is to increase the scale of work and trade. It brings Big Ideas,
Big Money, and Big Technology into small rural communities, economies, and
ecosystems—the brought-in industry and the experts being invariably alien to
and contemptuous of the places to which they are brought in. There is never
any question of propriety, of adapting the thought or the purpose or the
technology to the place.

The result is that problems correctable on a small scale are replaced by
large-scale problems for which there are no large-scale corrections.
Meanwhile, the large-scale enterprise has reduced or destroyed the
possibility of small-scale corrections. This exactly describes our present
agriculture. Forcing all agricultural localities to conform to economic
conditions imposed from afar by a few large corporations has caused problems
of the largest possible scale, such as soil loss, genetic impoverishment, and
groundwater pollution, which are correctable only by an agriculture of
locally adapted, solar-powered, diversified small farms—a correction that,
after a half century of industrial agriculture, will be difficult to achieve.

The industrial economy thus is inherently violent. It impoverishes one place
in order to be extravagant in another, true to its colonialist ambition. A
part of the “externalized” cost of this is war after war.

INDUSTRIALISM BEGINS WITH technological invention. But agrarianism begins
with givens: land, plants, animals, weather, hunger, and the birthright
knowledge of agriculture. Industrialists are always ready to ignore, sell, or
destroy the past in order to gain the entirely unprecedented wealth, comfort,
and happiness supposedly to be found in the future. Agrarian farmers know
that their very identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully,
use responsibly, and hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and
cultural, from the past.

I said a while ago that to agrarianism farming is the proper use and care of
an immeasurable gift. The shortest way to understand this, I suppose, is the
religious way. Among the commonplaces of the Bible, for example, are the
admonitions that the world was made and approved by God, that it belongs to
Him, and that its good things come to us from Him as gifts. Beyond those
ideas is the idea that the whole Creation exists only by participating in the
life of God, sharing in His being, breathing His breath. “The world,” Gerard
Manley Hopkins said, “is charged with the grandeur of God.” Some such
thoughts would have been familiar to most people during most of human
history. They seem strange to us, and what has estranged us from them is our
economy. The industrial economy could not have been derived from such
thoughts any more than it could have been derived from the golden rule.

If we believed that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in
sanctity, then we would have a different economy. It would still be an
economy of use, necessarily, but it would be an economy also of return. The
economy would have to accommodate the need to be worthy of the gifts we
receive and use, and this would involve a return of propitiation, praise,
gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care, and a proper regard for the
unborn. What is most conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and
industrial culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate
themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence.
Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give
nothing in return.

To perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in sanctity is
to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis. Our life of need and
work forces us inescapably to use in time things belonging to eternity, and
to assign finite values to things already recognized as infinitely valuable.
This is a fearful predicament. It calls for prudence, humility, good work,
propriety of scale. It calls for the complex responsibilities of caretaking
and giving-back that we mean by “stewardship.” To all of this the idea of the
immeasurable value of the resource is central.

WE CAN GET TO the same idea by a way a little more economic and practical,
and this is by following through our literature the ancient theme of the
small farmer or husbandman who leads an abundant life on a scrap of land
often described as cast-off or poor. This figure makes his first literary
appearance, so far as I know, in Virgil’s Fourth Georgic:

I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages or white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.

Virgil’s old squatter, I am sure, is a literary outcropping of an agrarian
theme that has been carried from earliest times until now mostly in family or
folk tradition, not in writing, though other such people can be found in
books. Wherever found, they don’t vary by much from Virgil’s prototype. They
don’t have or require a lot of land, and the land they have is often
marginal. They practice subsistence agriculture, which has been much derided
by agricultural economists and other learned people of the industrial age,
and they always associate frugality with abundance.

In my various travels, I have seen a number of small homesteads like that of
Virgil’s old farmer, situated on “land that no one wanted” and yet abundantly
productive of food, pleasure, and other goods. And especially in my younger
days, I was used to hearing farmers of a certain kind say “They may run me
out, but they won’t starve me out” or “I may get shot, but I’m not going to
starve.” Even now, if they cared, I think agricultural economists could find
small farmers who have prospered, not by “getting big,” but by practicing the
ancient rules of thrift and subsistence, by accepting the limits of their
small farms, and by knowing well the value of having a little land.

How do we come at the value of a little land? We do so, following this strand
of agrarian thought, by reference to the value of no land. Agrarians value
land because somewhere back in the history of their consciousness is the
memory of being landless. This memory is implicit, in Virgil’s poem, in the
old farmer’s happy acceptance of “an acre or two of land that no one wanted.”
If you have no land you have nothing: no food, no shelter, no warmth, no
freedom, no life. If we remember this, we know that all economies begin to
lie as soon as they assign a fixed value to land. People who have been
landless know that the land is invaluable; it is worth everything.
Pre-agricultural humans, of course, knew this too. And so, evidently, do the
animals. It is a fearful thing to be without a “territory.” Whatever the
market may say, the worth of the land is what it always was: It is worth what
food, clothing, shelter, and freedom are worth; it is worth what life is
worth. This perception moved the settlers from the Old World into the New.
Most of our American ancestors came here because they knew what it was to be
landless; to be landless was to be threatened by want and also by
enslavement. Coming here, they bore the ancestral memory of serfdom. Under
feudalism, the few who owned the land owned also, by an inescapable political
logic, the people who worked the land.

Thomas Jefferson, who knew all these things, obviously was thinking of them
when he wrote in 1785 that “it is not too soon to provide by every possible
means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The
small landholders are the most precious part of a state. . .” He was saying,
two years before the adoption of our constitution, that a democratic state
and democratic liberties depend upon democratic ownership of the land. He was
already anticipating and fearing the division of our people into settlers,
the people who wanted “a little portion of land” as a home, and, virtually
opposite to those, the consolidators and exploiters of the land and the
land’s wealth, who would not be restrained by what Jefferson called “the
natural affection of the human mind.” He wrote as he did in 1785 because he
feared exactly the political theory that we now have: the idea that
government exists to guarantee the right of the most wealthy to own or
control the land without limit.

In any consideration of agrarianism, this issue of limitation is critical.
Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits. They understand
and agree to the proposition that there is “this much and no more.”
Everything that happens on an agrarian farm is determined or conditioned by
the understanding that there is only so much land, so much water in the
cistern, so much hay in the barn, so much corn in the crib, so much firewood
in the shed, so much food in the cellar or freezer, so much strength in the
back and arms—and no more. This is the understanding that induces thrift,
family coherence, neighborliness, local economies. Within accepted limits,
these become necessities. The agrarian sense of abundance comes from the
experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits.

This is exactly opposite to the industrial idea that abundance comes from the
violation of limits by personal mobility, extractive machinery, long-distance
transport, and scientific or technological breakthroughs. If we use up the
good possibilities in this place, we will import goods from some other place,
or we will go to some other place. If nature releases her wealth too slowly,
we will take it by force. If we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some
compound brain, Monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about
pollinating flowers and making honey.

TO BE LANDLESS IN an industrial society obviously is not at all times to be
jobless and homeless. But the ability of the industrial economy to provide
jobs and homes depends on prosperity, and on a very shaky kind of prosperity
too. It depends on “growth” of the wrong things—on what Edward Abbey called
“the ideology of the cancer cell”—and on greed with purchasing power. In the
absence of growth, greed, and affluence, the dependents of an industrial
economy too easily suffer the consequences of having no land: joblessness,
homelessness, and want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.

I don’t think that being landed necessarily means owning land. It does mean
being connected to a home landscape from which one may live by the
interactions of a local economy and without the routine intervention of
governments, corporations, or charities.

In our time it is useless and probably wrong to suppose that a great many
urban people ought to go out into the countryside and become homesteaders or
farmers. But it is not useless or wrong to suppose that urban people have
agricultural responsibilities that they should try to meet. And in fact this
is happening. The agrarian population among us is growing, and by no means is
it made up merely of some farmers and some country people. It includes urban
gardeners, urban consumers who are buying food from local farmers, consumers
who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness, and the
dependability of the corporate food system—people, in other words, who
understand what it means to be landless.

This article was abridged for the web.

Wendell Berry's many books of poetry and prose include The Unsettling of
America, What Are People For?, and Another Turn of the Crank. He has also
published works including A Place on Earth, Life is a Miracle, and Jayber
Crow. His work from 2002, In the Presence of Fear, is a collection of three
important essays on terrorism and globalization all first published in Orion
publications.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page