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In Defense Of The Family Farm

by Wendell Berry

>From Wendell Berry (1986)

With industrialization has come a general depreciation of work. As the price
of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is now so
depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore. We can say
without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States
is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations,
and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true
in the executive sites as on the assembly lines. One works, not because the
work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves
to do it, but only to be able to quit-a condition that a saner time would
regard as infernal, a condemnation. This is explained, of course, by the
dullness of the work, by the loss of responsibility for, or credit for, or
knowledge of the thing made. What can be the status of the working small
farmer in a nation whose motto is a sigh of relief: "Thank God it's Friday"?

.By the dismemberment of work, by the degradation of our minds as workers,
we are denied our highest calling, for, as Gill says, "every man is called
to give love to the work of the hands. Every man is called to be an artist."
The small family farm is one of the last places-they are getting rarer every
day-where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be
an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of
the last places where the maker-and some farmers still do talk about "making
the crops"-is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This
certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical
or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this
giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer,
and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the
means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of
the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the
spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.

The family farm is failing because it belongs to an order of values and a
kind of life that are failing. We can only find it wonderful, when we put
our minds to it, that many people now seem willing to mount an emergency
effort to "save the family farm" who have not yet thought to save the family
or the community, the neighborhood schools or the small local businesses,
the domestic arts of the household and homestead, or cultural and moral
tradition-all of which are also failing, and on all of which the survival of
the family farm depends.

The family farm is failing because the pattern it belongs to is failing, and
the principal reason for this failure is the universal adoption, by our
people and our leaders alike, of industrial values, which are based on three
assumptions:

1. That value equals price-that the value of the farm, for example, is
whatever it would bring on sale, because both a place and its price are
"assets." There is no essential difference between farming and selling a
farm.

2. That all relations are mechanical. That a farm, for example, can be used
like a factory, because there is no essential difference between a farm and
a factory.

3. That the sufficient and definitive human motive is competitiveness-that a
community, for example, can be treated like a resource or a market, because
there is no difference between a community and a resource or a market.

Marty Strange has written of his belief "that commercial agriculture can
survive within pluralistic American society, as we know it, if the farm is
rebuilt on some of the values with which it is popularly associated:
conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community. To sustain
itself, commercial agriculture will have to reorganize its social and
economic structure as well as its technological base and production methods
in a way that reinforces these values." I agree. Those are the values that
offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And I would
point out that the transformation that Marty is proposing cannot be
accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if
it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their
neighbors will have to do it.

I have in mind. the one example known to me of an American community of
small family farmers who have not only survived but thrived during some very
difficult years: I mean the Amish. I do not recommend, of course, that all
farmers should become Amish, nor do I want to suggest that the Amish are
perfect people or that their way of life is perfect. What I want to
recommend are some Amish principles:

1. They have preserved their families and communities.
2. They have maintained the practices of neighborhood.
3. They have maintained the domestic arts of kitchen and garden, household
and homestead.
4. They have limited their use of technology so as not to displace or
alienate available human labor or available free sources of power (the sun,
wind, water, and so on.)
5. They have limited their farms to a scale that is compatible both with the
practice of neighborhood and with the optimum use of low-power technology.
6. By the practices and limits already mentioned, they have limited their
costs.
7. They have educated their children to live at home and serve their
communities.
8. They esteem farming as both a practical art and a spiritual discipline.

These principles define a world to be lived in by human beings, not a world
to be exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.
~
See also Gene's A Farm Is A Large Garden (or A Garden Is A Small Farm) and
Jeff's The Smaller The Farm, The Better The Food
~~
Copyright © 2009 by Wendell Berry from Home Economics: Fourteen Essays.
Reprinted by permission from Counterpoint. OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com