One reason that an organization cannot properly enact our relationship to the world is that an organization cannot define that relationship except in general terms, and no matter how general may be a person’s attitude toward the world, his impact upon it must become specific and tangible at some point. Sooner or later in his behalf — whether he approves or understands or not —a strip-miner’s bulldozer tears into a mountainside, a stand of trees is clear-cut, a gully washes through a cornfield.
(...)
This collaboration of household and farm was never, in America, sufficiently thrifty or sufficiently careful of soil fertility. It is tempting to suppose that, given certain critical historical and cultural differences, they might have developed sufficient thrift and care. As it happened, however, the development went in the opposite direction. The collaborators purified their roles — the household became simply a house or residence, purely consumptive in its function; the farm ceased to be a place to live and a way of life and became a unit of production — and their once collaborative relationship became competitive. Between them the merchant, who had been only a supplier of raw materials, began to usurp the previous functions of both household and farm, becoming increasingly both a processor and producer. And so an enterprise that once had some susceptibility to qualitative standards — standards of personal taste and preference at one end and of good husbandry at the other — has come more and more under the influence of standards that are merely economic or quantitative. The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.
Social fashion, delusion, and propaganda have combined to persuade the public that our agriculture is for the best of reasons the envy of the Modern World. American citizens are now ready to believe without question that it is entirely good, a grand accomplishment, that each American farmer now “feeds himself and 56 others.” They are willing to hear that “96 percent of America’s manpower is freed from food production” — without asking what it may have been “freed” for, or how many as a consequence have been “freed” from employment of any kind. The “climate of opinion” is now such that a recent assistant secretary of agriculture could condemn the principle of crop rotation without even an acknowledgment of the probable costs in soil depletion and erosion, and former Secretary of Agriculture Butz could say with approval that in 1974 “only 4 percent of all U.S. farms . . . produced almost 50 percent of all farm goods,” without acknowledging the human — and, indeed, the agricultural — penalties.
What these men were praising — what such men have been praising for so long that the praise can be uttered without thought — is a disaster that is both agricultural and cultural: the generalization of the relationship between people and land. That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality. This “accomplishment” is not primarily the work of farmers — who have been, by and large, its victims — but of a collaboration of corporations, university specialists, and government agencies. It is therefore an agricultural development not motivated by agricultural aims or disciplines, but by the ambitions of merchants, industrialists, bureaucrats, and academic careerists. We should not be surprised to find that its effect on both the farmland and the farm people has been ruinous. It has divided all land into two kinds — that which permits the use of large equipment and that which does not. And it has divided all farmers into two kinds — those who have sufficient “business sense” and managerial ability to handle the large acreages necessary to finance large machines and those who do not.
Those lands that are too steep or stony or small-featured to be farmed with big equipment are increasingly not farmed at all, but are abandoned to weeds and bushes, often with the gullies of previous bad use unrepaired. That these lands can often be made highly productive with kindly use is simply of no interest; we now have neither the small technology nor the small economics nor the available work force necessary to make use of them. What might be the importance of these “marginal” lands, and of an agricultural technology and economy appropriate to them, in light of population growth is a question that the agriculture experts apparently would be embarrassed to consider, so entranced are they by the glamor of bigness.
As for the farm families who cannot “get bigger” and therefore have to “get out,” they are apparently written off as a reasonable, quite ordinary, and altogether bearable expense. Former Secretary Butz could praise the business acumen of the new big-time American farmer (“In all likelihood he knows as much about financing and business accountability as his banker”), evidently without wondering what may be the agricultural import or effect of such knowledge, or if somewhere there might not be an excellent farmer who is not more acute, in a business way, than his banker. But this is the catch in our almost religious dependence on experts: Mr. Butz is a farm expert, and a farm expert is by definition not a farmer; he has changed sides. I have at hand fifteen speeches by Mr. Butz and his assistant secretaries, all of which praise the productivity — that is, the business success — of the American farmer, and none of which mentions any problem of land maintenance or any problem of the small farmer.
A sampling of quotations from one of these speeches — one made by former Assistant Secretary Richard E. Bell — will give the gist and the manner of official agricultural thinking:
“ . . . true agripower . . . generates agridollars through agricultural exports.”
“True agripower is the capacity of less than 5 percent of America’s population to feed itself and the remaining 95 percent with enough food left over to meet market demands of other nations and still provide food assistance for poor people throughout the world.”
“Agripower should not be a political tool. Feeding people . . . is too serious a matter to be left to political manipulation.”
“Once again growth in U.S. farm productivity . . . is on the rise. . . . We no longer have the acreage limitations which for so many years served to restrict grain and cotton production. . . .”
“. . . the real measure [of agricultural strength] is productivity, combined with processing and marketing efficiency.”
“Years ago, farm operations were highly diversified, but today, farmers are concentrating on fewer and much larger crop or livestock enterprises. Now, many one- or two-enterprise farms exist where there were formerly three to five enterprises.
“And with the spread of sophisticated machinery, farm sizes have expanded as their numbers have declined — stretching from an average 195 acres in the 1940s to about 390 in the 1970s.
(...)
“It is evident that U.S. agripower is a major force in the world’s exchange of goods and services. Agripower is, unquestionably, an even greater force than petropower in man’s survival in the future. Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he cannot live without food.”
And that was the official line on agriculture during the Butz years. There is nothing in it that was not representative: the self-congratulation, the confusions of purpose, the complacency, the jargon, the sprains and ruptures of sense, the ignorance or ignoring of consequence, the social and economic prejudices ritualized in progressivist clichés. And nowhere that I have seen was the official line more complicated than this, more aware of costs or inequities or conflicts or problems.
We would do well to examine these statements in more detail, for they are not just the political policies of ex-officials. They represent very well the prevalent assumptions of agricultural bureaucrats, academicians, and businessmen.
“Agripower,” it will be noted, is not measured by the fertility or health of the soil, or the health, wisdom, thrift, or stewardship of the farming community. It is measured by its ability to produce a marketable surplus, which “generates agridollars.” It is to be measured by “productivity, combined with processing and marketing efficiency.” The income from this increased production, we are told, is spent by farmers not for soil maintenance or improvement, water conservation, or erosion control, but for “purchased inputs”: “household appliances, farm equipment, building supplies, and other capital and consumer goods.” I do not mean that we should necessarily begrudge the farmer these purchases; I am only noticing that, to Mr. Bell, the farmer does not prosper to become a better farmer, but to become a bigger spender. The assistant secretary was applying to farming a standard of judgment that is economic, not agricultural. Farming is defined here purely to suit the purposes of a businessman.
Mr. Bell makes the benign assertion that this “agripower” feeds people, including the poor of the world, and is therefore too important to be put to political use. But when this subject is reverted to at the end of the speech, we find that “U.S. agripower” is a major force in world trade, a force intended to offset the “petropower” of other countries. And we have the assurance that, after all, “Less than 5 percent . . . of all grain moving between countries goes for food assistance” to the poor. (And, of course, all of this must be weighed against former Secretary Butz’s avowal that “Food is a weapon.”)*
(...)
The giveaway is in the curiously pleased-sounding statement that “specialization and growth are aided by the ready availability of purchased inputs. . . .” This betrays, for one thing, how far we have abandoned the old ideal that the farm should aim at economic independence; that is, it should be far more productive than consumptive, more a source than a consumer of material goods. This old ideal sought to preserve the farmer on the farm; that was of necessity its first objective. But it also sought to keep the source of food independent of any but agricultural means — an aim that ought to recommend itself, it would seem, to a fairly ordinary intelligence. Its desirability becomes altogether clear when one considers that a farm — given the appropriate technology, the recovery and return of organic wastes to the soil, an economy that is not exploitive, and a sufficient human work force — can achieve a high measure of economic independence.
None of this was clear to the intellectuals of the Department of Agriculture, and no doubt they were thereby saved a good deal of worry. For one of the “purchased inputs,” on the “ready availability” of which our agriculture now absolutely depends, is petroleum — for which we are not only dependent on non-agricultural sources, but on other nations. That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as on the soil — that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat — may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true. And it exposes the hollowness of Mr. Bell’s contention that “Agripower is, unquestionably, an even greater force than petropower in man’s survival in the future. Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he cannot live without food.” The two powers are now clearly the same. That the two are not only interdependent, but competitive as well, suggests more forcibly than Mr. Butz’s words that “Food is a weapon.”
(...)
Thus the estrangement of consumer and producer, their evolution from collaborators in food production to competitors in the food market, involves a process of oversimplification on both sides. The consumer withdraws from the problems of food production, hence becomes ignorant of them and often scornful of them; the producer no longer sees himself as intermediary between people and land — the people’s representative on the land — and becomes interested only in production. The consumer eats worse, and the producer farms worse. And, in their estrangement, waste is institutionalized. Without regret, with less and less interest in the disciplines of thrift and conservation, with, in fact, the assumption that this is the way of the world, our present agriculture wastes topsoil, water, fossil fuel, and human energy — to name only the most noticeable things. Consumers participate “innocently” or ignorantly in all these farm wastes and add to them wastes that are urban or consumptive in nature: mainly all the materials and energy that go into unnecessary processing and packaging, as well as tons of organic matter (highly valuable — and certainly, in the long run, necessary — as fertilizer) that they flush down their drains or throw out as garbage.
What this means for conservationists is that, as consumers, they may be using — and abusing — more land by proxy than they are conserving by the intervention of their organizations. We now have more people using the land (that is, living from it) and fewer thinking about it than ever before. We are eating thoughtlessly, as no other entire society ever has been able to do. We are eating — drawing our lives out of our land — thoughtlessly. If we study carefully the implications of that, we will see that the agricultural crisis is not merely a matter of supply and demand to be remedied by some change of government policy or some technological “breakthrough.” It is a crisis of culture.
WB
(The (Ecological) Crisis as Crisis of Agriculture; The Unsettling of America)
