Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food Read online

  There is one more justification, among many, that I want to talk about—namely, that the small farm of a good farmer, like the small shop of a good craftsman or craftswoman, gives work a quality and a dignity that it is dangerous, both to the worker and the nation, for human work to go without. If using ten workers to make one pin results in the production of many more pins than the ten workers could produce individually, that is undeniably an improvement in production, and perhaps uniformity is a virtue in pins. But, in the process, ten workers have been demeaned; they have been denied the economic use of their minds; their work has become thoughtless and skill-less. Robert Heilbroner says that such “division of labor reduces the activity of labor to dismembered gestures.”2

  Eric Gill sees in this industrial dismemberment of labor a crucial distinction between making and doing, and he describes “the degradation of the mind” that is the result of the shift from making to doing.3 This degradation of the mind cannot, of course, be without consequences. One obvious consequence is the degradation of products. When workers’ minds are degraded by loss of responsibility for what is being made, they cannot use judgment; they have no use for their critical faculties; they have no occasions for the exercise of workmanship, of workmanly pride. And the consumer is degraded by loss of the opportunity for qualitative choice. This is why we must now buy our clothes and immediately resew the buttons; it is why our expensive purchases quickly become junk.

  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 suites 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”?

  But there is an even more important consequence: 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 his hands. Every man is called to be an artist.”4 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, then, is good, and to show that it is good is easy. Those who have done most to destroy it have, I think, found no evil in it. But, if a good thing is failing among us, pretty much without being argued against and pretty much without professed enemies, then we must ask why it should fail. I have spent years trying to answer this question, and, while I am sure of some answers, I am also sure that the complete answer will be hard to come by because the complete answer has to do with who and what we are as a people; the fault lies in our identity and therefore will be hard for us to see.

  However, we must try to see, and the best place to begin may be with the fact that the family farm is not the only good thing that is failing among us. 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 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 a 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.

  The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage.

  Such a mind is indifferent to the connections, which are necessarily both practical and cultural, between people and land; which is to say that it is indifferent to the fundamental economy and economics of human life. Our economy is increasingly abstract, increasingly a thing of paper, unable either to describe or to serve the real economy that determines whether or not people will eat and be clothed and sheltered. And it is this increasingly false or fantastical economy that is invoked as a standard of national health and happiness by our political leaders.

  That this so-called economy can be used as a universal standard can only mean that it is itself without standards. Industrial economists cannot measure the economy by the health of nature, for they regard nature as simply a source of “raw materials.” They cannot measure it by the health of people, for they regard people as “labor” (that is, as tools or machine parts) or as “consumers.” They can measure the health of the economy only in sums of money.

  Here we come to the heart of the matter—the absolute divorce that the industrial economy has achieved between itself and all ideals and standards outside itself. It does this, of course, by arrogating to itself the status of primary reality. Once that is established, all its ties to principles of morality, religion, or government necessarily fall slack.

  But a culture disintegrates when its economy disconnects from its government, morality, and religion. If we are dismembered in our economic life, how can we be members in our communal and spiritual life? We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit’s-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and a democratic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk.

  That this is true was acknowledged by William Safire in a recent column, in which he declared that our economy is driven by greed and that greed, therefore, should no longer count as one of the seven deadly sins. “Greed,” he said, “is finally being recognized as a virtue . . . the best engine of betterment known to man.” It is, moreover, an agricultural virtue: “The cure for world hunger is the driving force of Greed.” Such statements would be possible only to someone who sees the industrial economy as the ultimate reality. Mr. Safire attempts a disclaimer, perhaps to maintain his status as a conservative: “I hold no brief for Anger, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Pride or Sloth.”5
But this is not a cat that can be let only partly out of the bag. In fact, all seven of the deadly sins are “driving forces” of this economy, as its advertisements and commercials plainly show.

  As a nation, then, we are not very religious and not very democratic, and that is why we have been destroying the family farm for the last forty years—along with other small local economic enterprises of all kinds. We have been willing for millions of people to be condemned to failure and dispossession by the workings of an economy utterly indifferent to any claims they may have had either as children of God or as citizens of a democracy. “That’s the way a dynamic economy works,” we have said. We have said, “Get big or get out.” We have said, “Adapt or die.” And we have washed our hands of them.

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD of drastic attrition on the farm, we supposedly have been “subsidizing agriculture,” but, as Wes Jackson has pointed out,6 this is a misstatement. What we have actually been doing is using the farmers to launder money for the agribusiness corporations, which have controlled both their supplies and their markets, while the farmers have overproduced and been at the mercy of the markets. The result has been that the farmers have failed by the millions, and the agribusiness corporations have prospered—or they prospered until the present farm depression, when some of them have finally realized that, after all, they are dependent on their customers, the farmers.

  Throughout this same desperate time, the colleges of agriculture, the experiment stations, and the extension services have been working under their old mandate to promote “a sound and prosperous agriculture and rural life,” to “aid in maintaining an equitable balance between agriculture and other segments of the economy,” to contribute “to the establishment and maintenance of a permanent and effective agricultural industry,” and to help “the development and improvement of the rural home and rural life.”7

  That the land-grant system has failed this commission is, by now, obvious. I am aware that there are many individual professors, scientists, and extension workers whose lives have been dedicated to the fulfillment of this commission and whose work has genuinely served the rural home and rural life. But, in general, it can no longer be denied that the system as a whole has failed. One hundred and twenty-four years after the Morrill Act, ninety-nine years after the Hatch Act, seventy-two years after the Smith-Lever Act, the “industrial classes” are not liberally educated, agriculture and rural life are not sound or prosperous or permanent, and there is no equitable balance between agriculture and other segments of the economy. Anybody’s statistics on the reduction of the farm population, on the decay of rural communities, on soil erosion, soil and water pollution, water shortages, and farm bankruptcies tell indisputably a story of failure.

  This failure cannot be understood apart from the complex allegiances between the land-grant system and the aims, ambitions, and values of the agribusiness corporations. The willingness of land-grant professors, scientists, and extension experts to serve as state-paid researchers and traveling salesmen for those corporations has been well documented and is widely known.

  The reasons for this state of affairs, again, are complex. I have already given some of them; I don’t pretend to know them all. But I would like to mention one that I think is probably the most telling: that the offices of the land-grant complex, like the offices of the agricultural bureaucracy, have been looked upon by their aspirants and their occupants as a means not to serve farmers, but to escape farming. Over and over again, one hears the specialists and experts of agriculture introduced as “old farm boys” who have gone on (as is invariably implied) to better things. The reason for this is plain enough: The life of a farmer has characteristically been a fairly hard one, and the life of a college professor or professional expert has characteristically been fairly easy. Farmers—working family farmers—do not have tenure, business hours, free weekends, paid vacations, sabbaticals, and retirement funds; they do not have professional status.

  The direction of the career of agricultural professionals is, typically, not toward farming or toward association with farmers. It is “upward” through the hierarchy of a university, a bureau, or an agribusiness corporation. They do not, like Cincinnatus, leave the plow to serve their people and return to the plow. They leave the plow, simply, for the sake of leaving the plow.

  This means that there has been for several decades a radical disconnection between the land-grant institutions and the farms, and this disconnection has left the land-grant professionals free to give bad advice; indeed, if they can get this advice published in the right place, from the standpoint of their careers it does not matter whether their advice is good or not.

  For example, after years of milk glut, when dairy farmers are everywhere threatened by their surplus production, university experts are still working to increase milk production and still advising farmers to cull their least productive cows—apparently oblivious both of the possible existence of other standards of judgment and of the fact that this culling of the least productive cows is, ultimately, the culling of the smaller farmers.

  Perhaps this could be dismissed as human frailty or inevitable bureaucratic blundering—except that the result is damage, caused by people who probably would not have given such advice if they were themselves in a position to suffer from it. Serious responsibilities are undertaken by public givers of advice, and serious wrong is done when the advice is bad. Surely a kind of monstrosity is involved when tenured professors with protected incomes recommend or even tolerate Darwinian economic policies for farmers, or announce (as one university economist after another has done) that the failure of so-called inefficient farmers is good for agriculture and good for the country. They see no inconsistency, apparently, between their own protectionist economy and the “free market” economy that they recommend to their supposed constituents, to whom the “free market” has proved, time and again, to be fatal. Nor do they see any inconsistency, apparently, between the economy of a university, whose sources, like those of any tax-supported institution, are highly diversified, and the extremely specialized economies that they have recommended to their farmer-constituents. These inconsistencies nevertheless exist, and they explain why, so far, there has been no epidemic of bankruptcies among professors of agricultural economics.

  These, of course, are simply instances of the notorious discrepancy between theory and practice. But this discrepancy need not exist, or it need not be so extreme, in the colleges of agriculture. The answer to the problem is simply that those who profess should practice. Or at least a significant percentage of them should. This is, in fact, the rule in other colleges and departments of the university. A professor of medicine who was no doctor would readily be seen as an oddity; so would a law professor who could not try a case; so would a professor of architecture who could not design a building. What, then, would be so strange about an agriculture professor who would be, and who would be expected to be, a proven farmer?

  BUT IT WOULD be wrong, I think, to imply that the farmers are merely the victims of their predicament and share none of the blame. In fact, they, along with all the rest of us, do share the blame, and their first hope of survival is in understanding that they do.

  Farmers, as much as any other group, have subscribed to the industrial fantasies that I listed earlier: that value equals price, that all relations are mechanical, and that competitiveness is a proper and sufficient motive. Farmers, like the rest of us, have assumed, under the tutelage of people with things to sell, that selfishness and extravagance are merely normal. Like the rest of us, farmers have believed that they might safely live a life prescribed by the advertisers of products, rather than the life required by fundamental human necessities and responsibilities.

  One could argue that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred when most farmers became convinced that it would be better to own a neighbor’s farm than to have a neighbor, and when they became willing, necessarily at the same time, to borrow extravagant amounts of money. T
hey thus violated the two fundamental laws of domestic or community economy: You must be thrifty and you must be generous; or, to put it in a more practical way, you must be (within reason) independent, and you must be neighborly. With that violation, farmers became vulnerable to everything that has intended their ruin.

  An economic program that encourages the unlimited growth of individual holdings not only anticipates but actively proposes the failure of many people. Indeed, as our antimonopoly laws testify, it proposes the failure, ultimately, of all but one. It is a fact, I believe, that many people have now lost their farms and are out of farming who would still be in place had they been willing for their neighbors to survive along with themselves. In light of this, we see that the machines, chemicals, and credit that farmers have been persuaded to use as “labor savers” have, in fact, performed as neighbor replacers. And whereas neighborhood tends to work as a service free to its members, the machines, chemicals, and credit have come at a cost set by people who were not neighbors.

  THAT IS A description of the problem of the family farm, as I see it. It is a dangerous problem, but I do not think it is hopeless. On the contrary, a number of solutions to the problem are implied in my description of it.

  What, then, can be done?

  The most obvious, the most desirable, solution would be to secure that “equitable balance between agriculture and other segments of the economy” that is one of the stated goals of the Hatch Act. To avoid the intricacies of the idea of “parity,” which we inevitably think of here, I will just say that the price of farm products, as they leave the farm, should be on a par with the price of those products that the farmer must buy.