Wendell Berry - The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

Copyright 1981 by Wendell Berry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 973-1-58243-484-1

Cover design by Dave Bullen

Printed in the United States of America

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for Gene Logsdon

My previous book on agriculture, The Unsettling of America , sought to comprehend the causes and consequences of industrial agriculture within the bounds of a single argument: that agriculture is an integral part of the structure, both biological and cultural, that sustains human life, and that you cannot disturb one part of that structure without disturbing all of it; that, in short, though there may be specialized causes, there are no specialized effects. The Gift of Good Land , by contrast, is a collection of essays written separately for magazine publication. Though it is for that reason more random in form than the earlier book, it both confirms and somewhat improves upon it by presenting a greater number and diversity of exemplary practices.

In the course of the writing of both books, I have seen enough good farmers and good farms, and a sufficient variety of both, to convince me beyond doubt that an ecologically and culturally responsible agriculture is possible. Such an agriculture is now being practiced, productively and profitably, by a scattering of farmers all over the country. But there remain, I believe, two immediate obstacles to its success.

First, the discipline of farming has a low public standing. A farmer is popularly perceived as a hick, without the dignity, knowledge, or social respectability of a businessman or a member of a profession. The term agribusinessman is used partly as a euphemism for farmer, and, not surprisingly, many farmers aspire to be agribusinessmen. There is virtually no public appreciation of the complex disciplines necessary to good farming. Good farming is lumped in with bad farming as a low form of drudgery, not esteemed as the high accomplishment that it necessarily must be. This contempt is as readily found among the businessmen, journalists, academics, and experts who serve agriculture as anywhere else. Efforts to romanticize farmers only show the other face of the same contempt. It is the rule, I think, that we often romanticize what we have first despised.

The second obstacle is largely a result of the first. After a half century of industrial agriculture, farmers of any kind have become a tiny minority, and good farmers rare. To farm our land in the best way, to conserve it and keep it permanently productive, we need many more farmers than we have. Given the best of conditions, it would take a long time to get them. The best way to get farmers is to raise them on farms, but the seed stock has been drastically depleted. And for those who wish to come into farming from the outside, there are critical educational problems and few teachers. But conditions for going into farming now are discouraging if not prohibitive even for young people who know how to farm. At speculators prices, land can hardly be made to pay for itself by farming. On top of that, the young farmer must pay usury to lenders, and buy equipment and supplies at costs rising much faster than the value of farm produce. It is a farmer-killing and a land-killing economy. Because the price of land is so disproportionate to the price of anything that can be grown on it, working farmers who own their land are worth more dead than alive. That is a joke now among farmers, and it is true.

Is there, in reality, such a possibility as economy of scale or growth economy? This question now presses heavily upon every enterprise of our livelihood. But upon agriculture, so near to the interests of culture and of life itself, it presses with the greatest weight. And it is from agriculture that we receive the most immediate answer: only if we are willing to sacrifice everything but money value, and count that sacrifice as no loss.

In agriculture, the economy of scale or growth directly destroys land, people, neighborhoods, and communities. (The same is true of industrial and urban developmentthough because the commotion is greater, the consequences may be less obvious.) And so good agriculture is virtually synonymous with small-scale agriculturethat is, with what is conventionally called the small farm. The meaning of small will vary, of course, from place to place and from farmer to farmer. What I mean by it has much to do with propriety of size and scale. The small farm is defended in this book because smallness tends to be a prerequisite of diversity, and diversity, in turn, a prerequisite of thrift and care in the use of the world. In general, I believe, small farms tend to be diverse in economy, which is to say complex in structure; whereas the larger the farm, the more likely it is to specialize in one or two crops, to have no animals, and to depend on chemicals, purchased supplies, and credit. In agriculture, as in nature and culture, the more complex the system or structure (within the obvious biological and human limits), the more sound and durable it is likely to be. The present industrial system of agriculture is failing because it is too simple to provide even rudimentary methods of soil conservation, or to be capable of the restraints necessary for the survival of rural neighborhoods, and because it fosters a mentality too simple to notice these deficiencies.

There are, to be sure, urgent political and cultural arguments for the preservation of the small farm, and I hope that I have not overlooked or slighted them. But perhaps it is most necessary, now, to insist upon its practical justification: the overwhelming likelihood that its survival is indispensable to a sound, durable agriculture and a dependable food supply.

The practicality of the small farm may lie in the inherent human tendency to cherish what one has little of. I believe that land wasters always own or control more land than they can or will pay attention to. Some people, of course, will not cherish or pay attention to any land at all. But with land as with anything else, those who have a lot will tend to think that a little waste is affordable. When land is held in appropriately small parcels, on the other hand, a little waste tends to be noticed, regretted, and corrected, because it is felt that a little loss cannot be afforded. And that is the correct perception: it cannot be afforded.

Soil conservation, Henry Besuden wrote nearly forty years ago, involves the heart of the man managing the land. If he loves his soil he will save it. There are fewer hearts involved now than there were then, and more soil is being lost. Wes Jackson, writing in 1981, is forced by consideration of the increased loss to the same perception; the cause of waste is alienation from the land: Where there is alienation, stewardship has no chance.

There is no want of evidencesome is given in this book; more is availablethat the small farm, if properly ordered, equipped, and managed, is highly productive, kind to the land, and economically workable. This being so, we may ask why it has so few advocates in the colleges of agriculture, in government agricultural agencies, and in agricultural journalism.

The reason, I think, is a general one, and is to be found both in what we call our economy, and, because an economy is a cultural artifact, in our culture. For complex reasons, our culture allows economy to mean only money economy. It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive.