The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, Ed. Norman Wirzba, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
I don't know much about farming, especially about the business of farming. I like to piddle around in the yard, and we raised some good lettuce this year, but I won't pretend that I join this discussion as a very knowledgeable participant. I'd like to be corrected by those of you who know more.
But there is a certain logic to the agrarian position.
Think about it. Read this description of industrial corn-based agriculture by Gene Logsdon in his essay "All Flesh is Grass".
[The typical farmer] goes to the fields in spring with enormously expensive machines to plow or disk or chisel the soil into a seedbed and/or to spray it with herbicides to kill the weeds. . . . He sows expensive bioengineered seed frantically between spring showers with huge, expensive planters and applies expensive fertilizers that are made with natural gas or hauled from mines hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. Then more spraying. More praying too that rains do come now that the crop is up, but not too much or too little, which would again rule out the high yields he needs to make a profit. . . . At harvest time, into the fields he goes again with huge, enormously expensive harvesters, praying for good weather . . . . The grain goes from harvester into expensive semi-trucks and is hauled to elevators or to on-farm storage, where it must be binned, dried (with natural gas), then watched so that grain-destroying insects don't infest it, all at high cost. Then the grain must be loaded and moved again, by rail or truck or barge, at a great consumption of fuel and other transportation costs, to very expensive animal factories where it is ground into meal in very expensive mills and fed to animals that are kept healthy in their crowded quarters by costly . . . hormones and antibiotics. The manure, sometimes in quantities as large as the sewage outputs of large cities, must be somehow handled, stored, and finally hauled out and applied on soil or gotten rid of some other way . . . . Then much of the meat, milk, and eggs must be shipped back to where the grain came from.
Compare that with Logsdon's grass farming method, in which (after establishing good pasture), the spring work consists of turning the animals out to graze. Weather, weeds, and other pests rarely pose a problem because the pasture is perennial and diverse. The animals feed themselves, remain healthier, take care of their own waste, all for a much lower cost. And apparently, the meat can be just as tasty as the grain fed variety.
Which system is more secure from terrorism and the fluctuations of the petroleum market? Put this way, doesn't agrarianism make more sense?
Or consider it from an international perspective, in an article by Vandana Shiva called "Globalization and the War against Farmers and the Land".
Productivity in traditional farming practices has always been high if it is remembered that very little external inputs are required. While the Green Revolution [industrial agriculture in the 3rd World] has been projected as having increased productivity in the absolute sense, when its expensive resource utilization is taken into account, it has been found to be counterproductive and resource inefficient.
So, while industrial methods -- large scale monoculture, hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertilizers and big machines -- may increase the yield of a particular crop (corn, wheat, rice), when you take into account all those other inputs, it's actually not very productive at all. In other words, the claim that we could not survive without our high tech, fossil-fuel-powered agricultural system may be simply untrue. Small may be preferable not only for aesthetic reasons but for economic reasons as well.
This logic leads Wes Jackson to project a future where the most valuable skill may again be soil husbandry. "Soil will still be a nonrenewable resource like oil," he writes in "The Agrarian Mind: Mere Nostalgia or Practical Necessity?" "Without natural gas as the feedstock for the Haber-Bosch process, which turns atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, agricultural production will decline if there is no natural substitute."
This collection is fairly wide-ranging, although uneven. Some of the essays sparkle, especially Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry. It is Berry, as usual, that takes the discussion from the practical to the moral. "The industrial economy thus is inherently violent," he writes in "The Agrarian Standard". "It impoverishes one place in order to be extravagant in another. . . . [It believes that] abundance comes from the violation of limits by personal mobility, extractive machinery, long-distance transport, and scientific or technological breakthroughs. If we use up the good possibilities in this place, we will import goods from some other place, or we will go to some other place." (26, 30)
For Berry, the agrarian hope is the idea of limits and the idea of return. There are limits: only so much land, water, food, and so on. And so we must be stewards of all we are given to use. We must give back "propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care, and a proper regard for the unborn." In place of this notion, he goes on, most of us "take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return. Our economy's most voluminous product is waste---valuable materials irrecoverably misplaced, or randomly discharged as poisons." (27)
This, in my opinion, is the agrarian critique at its most trenchant. If there is anything I can take away from this reader (or for that matter from Serve God, Save the Planet) is this idea of stewardship, caring for the resources placed in our hands, whether they be monetary, natural, creative, intellectual, and so on. What am I doing to take care of what I've been given to use? It's a question worth asking on a daily basis.
Now, I've been given a daughter, and caring for her right now means ending this entry. So I will, hoping to come back to some of these thoughts at a later time.
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