On July 1, 1974 Wendell Berry spoke at the "Agriculture for a Small Planet" symposium in Spokane, which was one of a series of environmental conferences hosted as part of Expo 74. Wendell's speech that day, and his subsequent letter to members of the symposium staff, inspired the Tilth movement* in the Pacific Northwest. This is an edited extract.
The Culture of Agriculture
In my boyhood, Henry County, Kentucky was not just a rural county, as it still is. It was almost entirely a farming county. The farms were generally small. They were farmed by families who lived not only upon them, but within and from them. These families grew gardens. They produced their own meat, milk and eggs. They were highly diversified. The main money crop was tobacco. But the farmers also grew corn, wheat, barley, and oats; sorghum and hay for forage. Cattle, hogs and sheep were all characteristically raised in association on the same farms. There were small dairies, the milking more often than not done by hand. Those were the farm products that might have been considered major. But there were also minor products, and one of the most important characteristics of that old economy was the existence of markets for those minor products.
In those days a farm family could easily market its surplus of cream, eggs, old hens, and frying chickens. The major motive power for field work was still furnished by horses and mules. There was still a prevalent pride in workmanship, and thrift was still a social ideal. The pride of most people was in their homes, and their homes looked like it.
This was by no means a perfect society. Its people had often been violent and wasteful in their use of the land and of each other. Its present ills had already taken root in it. But I have spoken of its agricultural economy of a generation ago to suggest that there were also good qualities indigenous to it that might have been cultivated and built upon.
That they were not cultivated and built upon-that they were repudiated as the stuff of a hopelessly outmoded, unscientific way of life-is a tragic error on the part of the people themselves; and it is the work of monstrous ignorance and irresponsibility on the part of the experts and politicians who have prescribed, encouraged and applauded the disintegration of such farming communities all over the country into our allegedly miraculous "modern American agriculture."
In the decades since World War II the farms of Henry County have become increasingly mechanized. Though they are still comparatively diversified, they are less diversified than they used to be. The holdings are larger, the owners are fewer. The land is falling more and more into the hands of speculators and professional people from the cities who-in spite of all the scientific agricultural miracles-still have much more money than farmers. There are not nearly enough people on the farms to maintain them properly, and they are for the most part visibly deteriorating. The number of part-time farmers and ex-farmers increases every year. Our harvests depend more and more upon the labor of old men and little boys. The farm people live less and less upon their own produce, more and more from the grocery stores. The best of them are more worried about money and more overworked than ever before. Among the people as a whole, the focus of interest has largely shifted from the household to the automobile; the ideals of workmanship and thrift have been replaced by the goals of leisure, comfort and entertainment-for, as my friend, Maurice Telleen says, "this nation has created the world's first broad-based hedonism."
And nowhere that I know is there a market for a hen or a bucket of cream or a few dozen eggs. Those markets were done away with in the name of sanitation-but to the enormous enrichment of the large producers. Future historians will no doubt remark upon the inevitable association, with us, between sanitation and filthy lucre. It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
In all of this few people whose testimony would have mattered have seen the connection between "modernization" of agricultural techniques and the disintegration of the culture and the communities of farming. What we have called agricultural progress has, in fact, involved the forcible displacement of millions of people.
I remember, during the fifties, the outrage with which certain of our leaders spoke of the forced removal of the populations of villages in communist countries. I also remember that at that same time, in Washington, the word on farming was "Get big or get out"-a policy that is still in effect. The only difference here is in the method: the force used by the communists was military; with us it has been economic, a "free" market in which the freest were the richest. The attitudes were equally cruel, and I believe that in the long run the results will be equally damaging-not just to the concerns and values of the human spirit, but to the practical possibilities of survival.
And so those who could not get big got out-not just in my community but in farm communities all over the country. But bigness is a most amorphous and unstable category. As a social or economic goal it is totalitarian; it establishes an inevitable tendency toward the tyrannical one that will be the biggest of all. Many who got big to stay in are now being driven out by those who are still bigger. The aim of bigness implies not one social or cultural aim that is not noxious. Its influence on us may already have been disastrous, and we have not yet seen the worst.
And this community-killing agriculture, with its monomania of bigness, is not primarily the work of farmers, though it has burgeoned upon their weaknesses. It is the work of the institutions of agriculture: the experts and the agri-businessmen, who have promoted so-called efficiency at the expense of community, and quantity at the expense of quality...
Along with the rest of society, the established agriculture has shifted its emphasis-even its interest-from quality to quantity. And along with the rest of society it has failed to see that, in the long run, quantity is inseparable from quality. To pursue quantity alone is to destroy those disciplines in the producers that are the only assurance of quantity. The preserver of abundance is excellence.
What are the results of such thinking? The results are the drastic decline in farm population and political strength; the growth of a vast, uprooted, dependent and unhappy urban population. (Our rural and urban problems have largely caused each other.) The result is an unimaginable waste of land, of energy, of fertility, of human beings. The result is that the life of the land, which in its native processes is infinite, has been made totally dependent upon the finite, scarce and expensive products of industry. The result is the disuse of so-called marginal lands, potentially productive, but dependent upon intensive human care and long-term familiarity and affection. The result is the virtual destruction of the farm culture without which farming, in any but the exploitive and extractive sense, is impossible.
My point is that food is a cultural, not a technological, product. A culture is not a collection of relics and ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its destruction invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, and aspiration. It would reveal the human necessities and the human limits. It would clarify our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It would assure that the necessary restraints be observed, that the necessary work be done, and that it be done well. A healthy farm culture can only be based upon familiarity; it can only grow among a people soundly established upon the land; it would nourish and protect a human intelligence of the land that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden that possibility, we will lose it altogether. And then we will not only invoke calamity-we will deserve it.
Several years ago I argued with a friend of mine that we might make money by going ahead and marketing some inferior lambs. My friend thought for a minute, and then he said, "I'm in the business of producing good lambs, and I'm not going to sell any other kind." He also said that he kept the weeds out of his crops for the same reason as he washed his face. Surely no one would question that the human race has survived by that attitude. It still survives by that attitude, though now it can hardly be said to know it, much less acknowledge it.
But this attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not even come from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared-a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.
*Over the decades Tilth has grown into a lively network of local organizations. One thing that makes Tilth unique is its equal emphasis on both rural and urban agriculture. Taken as a whole, its chapters have created models of organic and sustainable practices-research, certification, composting, gardening, farmers markets, biodiversity, education-which have given Tilth a national and international reputation
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