The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
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Growers Co-operative Association, not this time as the brightest public occurrence in the history of my home countryside, but in terms of the suitability of its economic strategy to farming everywhere.
Here I must acknowledge that this organization and, more important, its economic principles have had the allegiance and the service of members of my family for three generations. Beginning in the winter of 1941, when the “Burley Association” renewed its work under the New Deal, my father, John M. Berry, Sr., served as vice president for sixteen and as president for eighteen years, retiring in 1975 but serving as an advisor until a few years before his death in 1991. My brother, John M. Berry, Jr., served as president from 1987 to 1993. My daughter, Mary Berry, started the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, in 2011 for the purpose mainly of remembering, advocating, and applying the Association’s proven economic strategy and its purpose of assuring a decent livelihood for small farmers. My son serves on the Berry Center board.
Under this program, support prices for the various grades of tobacco were set according to a formula for assuring a fair return on the cost of production. Production was controlled by allotting to each farm, according to its history of production, at first an acreage, and later a poundage, that would be eligible for price supports under the program. The total of the allotments for each year was determined by the supply, worldwide, that was available for manufacture. The rule was that the supply on hand should be sufficient for 2.4 years. If the supply was less than the predicted demand for 2.4 years, allotments would be increased; if more, allotments would be reduced. I don’t know why the factor was set at 2.4. Its significance, however, is that production was limited according to an established measure of expected demand.
To buy a crop or a portion of a crop protected by the program, a purchaser had to bid a penny a pound above the support price. The government’s assistance to the program consisted of a loan, made annually “against the crop,” which permitted the program to purchase, store, and resell the portion of any year’s crop that did not earn the extra penny a pound—which, thanks to the loan, would be purchased by the Association and the grower paid at the warehouse. The cost to the government was only administrative until, in response to protests, this cost was charged to the farmers, and the program then operated on the basis of “no net cost” to the government. This program succeeded remarkably well in doing what it was designed to do, and a part of its success is that it still provides a pattern for the thought and hope of those who are working for the survival of land and people.
The tobacco program is an example of a necessary service that government can provide to people who cannot provide it to themselves. The point most needing to be made now is that parity of pricing under the tobacco program was in no sense a subsidy. It did not involve a grant of money, a government giveaway, or a public charity. The concept of parity was used, by intention, to prevent government subsidation. Its purpose was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government. My father defended parity as an appropriate incentive: “It accords with our way of life, and it gives real and tangible meaning to the philosophy of ‘equal opportunity.’” He thought of “direct subsidy payments” as virtually opposite to parity and an “abominable form of regimentation.”
The tobacco program in all of its versions was finally defeated and destroyed in 2004 by the political free marketers who had always opposed it, and who had resented it in proportion to its success. During the six decades of its life, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association helped keep farm families on their farms and gainfully employed in Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. One measure of its success was the decrease of farm tenancy among the growers from 33 percent in 1940 to 9 percent in 1970. During those years some of the population of tenant farmers undoubtedly died, and some left farming, but most of them ceased to be tenant farmers by becoming owners of farms. This was a defining event in the lives of a considerable number of worthy people whom I knew. The farmer-members of the Association overwhelmingly renewed their support in referendum after referendum.
The Burley Association was thus truly a commons and a common good, based not only upon correct political and economic principles, but also upon the common history and culture, and thus upon the understanding consent of its sharers. So complete was the understanding of the members that in 1955, because of an oversupply of tobacco in storage, they voted for a 25 percent reduction of their allotments. On April 8, 2016, my neighbor Thomas Grissom, by far the best historian of the Association, wrote in a personal letter to me:
After years of research, I have concluded that the most distinctive characteristic of the Kentucky [Burley] Tobacco Program is its design and application of an industrial agriculture commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.
I think that Tom’s perception is exactly right and that he found the right and necessary terms to describe it.
Burley tobacco, despite the dire health problems that it was found to cause and the consequent disfavor, was very much an agrarian crop. It was characteristically and mainly the product of small family farms, produced mainly by family labor and exchanges of work among neighbors. It was for a long time the staple crop in a highly diversified way of farming on landscapes that typically required considerate and affectionate care. As long as the market paid highly for high quality (which it finally ceased to do), the production of burley tobacco demanded, and from its many highly competent producers it received, both conscientious land husbandry and a fine artistry.
Industrialism and agrarianism are almost exactly opposite and opposed. Industrialism regards mechanical or technical functions as ideal. It rates its accomplishments by quantitative measures. Though it values the prestige of public charity, it is motivated necessarily by the antisocial traits that assure success in competition. Agrarianism, by contrast, arises from the primal wish for a home land or home place—the wish, in the terms of our tradition, for the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land, however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of. Agrarianism grants its highest practical value to the good husbandry of the land. It is motivated, to an extent effective and significant, by neighborliness, family loyalty, and devotion to the coherence and longevity of communities.
As long as it has a sufficiency of “natural resources” and remains free of imposed political or economic restraint, an industrial economy will dominate and destroy an agrarian economy—no matter that the agrarian economy is indispensable for a continuing supply of resources. This defines precisely the need for the “design and application of an industrial agricultural commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.” For a while the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association—never mind the deserved infamy of tobacco—did preserve a sort of balance between the interests of industrialism and agrarianism, which prevented their inherent difference and opposition from becoming absolute, and thus absolutely destructive of the agrarian society. This balance was fair enough to the industry and it permitted the growers to prosper. The program worked in fact to the best interest of both economies.
From the perspective of this balance during the decades when it worked as it should have, it is possible to see that a step too far toward industrialism was probably taken by the Burley Association itself when, in 1971, it permitted the “lease and transfer” of production quotas away from the farms to which they had been assigned. This change, made under pressure from industrializing members, permitted the accumulation of allotments finally into very large acreages dependent upon more extensive technology and migrant labor. The program then was obliged to “balance” a reduced agrarianism against an increased industrialism.
With the demise of the program in 2004, the region’s indigenous agrarianism could survive only as a history, a memory, and a set of vital principles that someday may be revived and reincarnated in reaction against the damages of industrialism.
For the past six decades, except for such a remnant of the New Deal, the government has done nothing for farmers except to quiet them down by subsidizing uncontrolled production, which really is worse than nothing. But this “policy,” in the minds of the dominant politicians, signified that they were “doing something for agriculture” and so relieved them of thinking or knowing about agriculture’s actual requirements. For example, the