An Outlook on Farming in America in 2019

Image Credit

I read a good book by Wendell Berry called "The Unsettling of America."  I think it is one of those books that you keep in your personal library to go back and read again.  I recently read an article from the NEW YORKER - Wendell Berry that had some interesting quotes.  I pulled out a few excerpts that I'll post below.  The bolded part is the question asked by the author of The New Yorker and Wendell Berry's answers are below it.  Below that, in bolded green, I wrote down my thoughts as this article was so timely.:

What’s your outlook on farming in America?
Between 1940 and 2012, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by four million. The absence of so many farmers and their families is seen as progress by the liberals and conservatives who have been in charge of the economy since about 1952. Meanwhile, the farmland and the few surviving farmers are being ruined both by destructive ways of production and by overproduction. The millions who are gone have been replaced by bigger and bigger machines, and by toxic chemicals. If we should decide to replace the chemicals and some of the machinery with humans, as for health or survival we need to do, that would be very difficult and it would take a long time.

Very sad about the dramatic decrease in U.S. farms in 72 years!  I was just talking to my Dad about the sentiments brought up in Wendell Berry's answer just last week.  The farmers that are left are in stretched very thin.  They are farming more land, with fewer employees and more expensive equipment.  They have very little time to be a true husbandman or steward of the land.  They plant and they harvest.  They don't have much time for being a caretaker for the soil.  Landlords are left with an absentee farmer on their land.  The farmers are trying everything they can do to make ends meet.  There is lots of stress as the stakes are much higher in farming these days. 

Why would it be so difficult?
Because there is no farmer pool from which farmers can be recruited ready-made. Once, we could more or less expect good farmers to be the parents of good farmers. That kind of succession was hardly a public concern. When farmers are taught, starting in childhood, by parents and grandparents and neighbors, their education comes “naturally,” and at little cost to the land. A good farmer is one who brings competent knowledge, work wisdom, and a locally adapted agrarian culture to a particular farm that has been lovingly studied and learned over a number of years. We are not talking here about “job training” but rather about the lifelong education of an artist, the wisdom that come from unceasing attention and practice. A young-adult non-farmer can learn to farm from reading, apprenticeship to a farmer, advice from neighbors, trial and error—but that is more awkward, is personally risky, and it may be costly to the land.

Here's where the rubber meets the road.  When I graduated from college, I remember my Dad telling me that my investment was the suit on my back and the briefcase in my hand.  My investment was next to nothing.  Every two weeks a paycheck was deposited in my bank account.  My Return on Investment was ridiculously high compared to his.  He didn't need to tell me, but his investment was much higher.  He had land and very expensive equipment (tractors, combines, trucks) - not to mention the upkeep and maintenance on both.  He had employees that depended on him.  He had capital improvements.  He had a production loan to cover the costs of seed, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides.  He had to pay the crop duster.  Back breaking labor was necessary to bring your crop in.  You were at the whims of the weather, the government, crop disaster, etc.   Then after harvest, the price you got for your commodity was always in doubt.  Prices could fall beneath the cost of production.  These seemingly insurmountable barriers to becoming a farmer make it very risky for a young person to farm. 

It seems counterintuitive for agriculture to keep moving in the present direction.
The solution is not simple in the approved, modern way. It’s not deterministic, which is what people really want. They want it to be decided by fate, or technology, or genetics, or something. To bring it back to politics, I was an Adlai Stevenson man when I was eighteen. I loved his eloquence. I couldn’t tell you now what he thought of farming. But when Eisenhower came in, his Secretary of Agriculture was Ezra Taft Benson, who said to the farmers, “Get big or get out,” a heartless and a foolish thing to say. My argument is that this ended official thought about agriculture. We were not to worry about it anymore. If farmers go to town that’s just more laborers for the labor pool, just more consumers of industrial food.

Oh, our agricultural research universities like LSU, funded by check-off dollars has greatly increased yields over time, but unfortunately the price of inputs has increased at a greater rate.  Farmers, if they are lucky, make just enough to 'give it one more year to see if it will get better.'  The "Get big or Get Out" quote by Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, was perhaps a true statement, but to me, it marked the beginning of the end of the rich farming heritage of our nation's past.  Technology.  Productivity.  Innovation. All good, but the ability to grow more with less labor changed the fabric of rural America.  Young people left the farm and moved or commuted to the cities for employment.  Main Street USA crumbled and soon boarded up storefronts replaced bustling small towns.  We changed from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers.

Tricia and I moved to the country and as I look out of my front window, I see a field that was once in soybean production, but is now being surveyed and staked out for a new subdivision.  This is going on all over our country as fertile fields are being covered with concrete and starter homes.  In terms of agriculture, where do we go from here?  I don't know.  The shrinking pool of farmers in our country are still very productive.  They literally feed the world.  For those with a love of the land and farming, but an inability to commercially farm for whatever reason, there is still an opportunity to enjoy to pastoral life by having a homestead farm and raising a few animals and crops for your family on small acreage.  You won't feed the world, but you can feed your family, and that's a good thing! 

A Little Essay with a Big Message

I stumbled across a wonderful essay by my favorite agrarian author, Wendell Berry.  You can read it in its entirety HERE.  The 14 page essay was from A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural and was reprinted in the Whole Earth Catalog back in 1969.  It is still very timely today.  I highly recommend clicking the link above and reading the entire thing.  Wendell Berry eloquently speaks about some weighty issues. 

Something to Crow About

The essay goes against the grain in that most people want to do something BIG.  We are always told to dream BIG, have BIG plans, brainstorm BIG ideas, and accomplish BIG things.  In fact, success is many times defined by BIG changes or impacts.  Although we are faced with some mighty big challenges, some which we don’t even know how to begin solving, Wendell Berry exhorts the reader to ‘think little’, understanding that taking small steps right where you are builds momentum, encourages others, and creates change.  Even small changes accumulate quickly and yield BIG results.

I’m going to post a few excerpts from Mr. Berry’s essay below without comment.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did: 

“What we are up against in this country, in any attempt to invoke private responsibility, is that we have nearly destroyed private life. Our people have given up their independence in return for the cheap seductions and the shoddy merchandise of so-called "affluence." We have delegated all our vital functions and responsibilities to salesmen and agents and bureaus and experts of all sorts. We cannot feed or clothe ourselves, or entertain ourselves, or communicate with each other, or be charitable or neighborly or loving, or even respect ourselves, without recourse to a merchant or a corporation or a public-service organization or an agency of the government or a style-setter or an expert.”

 “In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

“For an index of our loss of contact with the earth we need only look at the condition of the American farmer - who must in our society, as in every society, enact man's dependence on the land, and his responsibility to it. In an age of unparalleled affluence and leisure, the American farmer is harder pressed and harder worked than ever before; his margin of profit is small, his hours are long; his outlays for land and equipment and the expenses of maintenance and operation are growing rapidly greater; he cannot compete with industry for labor; he is being forced more and more to depend on the use of destructive chemicals and on the wasteful methods of haste and anxiety. As a class, farmers are one of the despised minorities. So far as I can see, farming is considered marginal or incidental to the economy of the country, and farmers, when they are thought of at all, are thought of as hicks and yokels, whose lives do not fit into the modem scene. The average American farmer is now an old man whose sons have moved away to the cities. His knowledge, and his intimate connection with the land, are about to be lost. The small independent farmer is going the way of the small independent craftsmen and storekeepers. He is being forced off the land into the cities, his place taken by absentee owners, corporations, and machines. Some would justify all this in the name of efficiency.”

“As I see it, it is an enormous social and economic and cultural blunder. For the small farmers who lived on their farms cared about their land. And given their established connection to their land - which was often hereditary and traditional as well as economic - they could have been encouraged to care for it more competently than they have so far. The corporations and machines that replace them will never be bound to the land by the sense of birthright and continuity, or by the love that enforces care. They will be bound by the rule of efficiency, which takes thought only of the volume of the year's produce, and takes no thought of the slow increment of the life of the land, not measurable in pounds or dollars, which will assure the livelihood and the health of the coming generations.”

“For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. I have come to believe that a better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little. That implies the necessary change of thinking and feeling, and suggests the necessary work. Thinking Big has led us to the two biggest and cheapest political dodges of our time: plan-making and lawmaking. The lotus-eaters of this era are in Washington, D.C., Thinking Big. Somebody comes up with a problem, and somebody in the government comes up with a plan or a law. The result, mostly, has been the persistence of the problem, and the enlargement and enrichment of the government.”

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people.”

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends.”