Bringing It to the Table. Wendell Berry
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of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as “fuel”; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its “efficiency,” which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One’s country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a “motherland,” but rather priced according to its “productivity” of “raw materials” and “natural resources” —valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster Fuller asserted that “the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology”—the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, “can only be expressed mathematically.”
In view of this revolution of language, which is in effect the uprooting of the human mind, it is not surprising to realize that farming too has been made to serve under the yoke of this extremely reductive metaphor. Farming, according to most of the most powerful people now concerned with it, is no longer a way of life, no longer husbandry or even agriculture; it is an industry known as “agribusiness,” which looks upon a farm as a “factory,” and upon farmers, plants, animals, and the land itself as interchangeable parts or “units of production.”
This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very “efficiently” according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to “feed” the rest. So long as we keep the focus narrowed to the “food factory” itself, we have to be impressed: It is elaborately organized; it is technologically sophisticated; it is, by its own definition of the term, marvelously “efficient.”
Only when we widen the focus do we see that this “factory” is in fact a failure. Within itself it has the order of a machine, but, like other enterprises of the industrial vision, it is part of a rapidly widening and deepening disorder. It will be sufficient here to list some of the serious problems that have a demonstrable connection with industrial agriculture: (1) soil erosion, (2) soil compaction, (3) soil and water pollution, (4) pests and diseases resulting from monoculture and ecological deterioration, (5) depopulation of rural communities, and (6) decivilization of the cities.
The most obvious falsehood of “agribusiness” accounting has to do with the alleged “efficiency” of “agribusiness” technology. This is, in the first place, an efficiency calculated in the productivity of workers, not of acres. In the second place the productivity per “man-hour,” as given out by “agribusiness” apologists, is dangerously—and, one must assume, intentionally—misleading. For the 4 percent of our population that is left on the farm does not, by any stretch of imagination, feed the rest. That 4 percent is only a small part, and the worst-paid part, of a food production network that includes purchasers, wholesalers, retailers, processors, packagers, transporters, and the manufacturers and salesmen of machines, building materials, feeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, medicines, and fuel. All these producers are at once in competition with each other and dependent on each other, and all are dependent on the petroleum industry.
As for the farmers themselves, they have long ago lost control of their destiny. They are no longer “independent farmers,” subscribing to that ancient and perhaps indispensable ideal, but are agents of their creditors and of the market. They are “units of production” who, or which, must perform “efficiently”—regardless of what they get out of it either as investors or as human beings.
In the larger accounting, then, industrial agriculture is a failure on its way to being a catastrophe. Why is it a failure? There are, I think, two inescapable reasons.
The first is that the industrial vision is perhaps inherently an oversimplifying vision, which proceeds on the assumption that consequence is always singular; industrialists invariably assume that they are solving for X—X being production. In order to solve for X, industrial agriculturists have to reduce any agricultural problem to a problem in mechanics—as, for example, modern confinement-feeding techniques became possible only when animals could be considered as machines.
What this vision excludes, as a matter of course, are biology on the one hand, and human culture on the other. Once vision is enlarged to include these considerations, we see readily that—as wisdom has always counseled us—consequences are invariably multiple, self-multiplying, long-lasting, and unforeseeable in something like geometric proportion to the size or power of the cause. Taking our bearings from traditional wisdom and from the insights of the ecologists—which, so far as I can see, confirm traditional wisdom—we realize that in a country the size of the United States, and economically uniform, the smallest possible agricultural “unit of production” is very large indeed. It consists of all the farmland, plus all the farmers, plus all the farming communities, plus all the knowledge and the technical means of agriculture, plus all the available species of domestic plants and animals, plus the natural systems and cycles that surround farming and support it, plus the knowledge, taste, judgment, kitchen skills, etc. of all the people who buy food. A proper solution to an agricultural problem must preserve and promote the good health of this “unit.” Nothing less will do.
The second reason for the failure of industrial agriculture is its wastefulness. In natural or biological systems, waste does not occur. And it is easy to produce examples of nonindustrial human cultures in which waste was or is virtually unknown. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains within the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are as necessary—are, one may almost say, as lively—as life; and so nothing is wasted. There is really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction.
But waste—so far, at least—has always been intrinsic to industrial production. There have always been unusable “by-products.” Because industrial cycles are never complete—because there is no return—there are two characteristic results of industrial enterprise: exhaustion and contamination. The energy industry, for instance, is not a cycle, but only a short arc between an empty hole and poisoned air. And farming, which is inherently cyclic, capable of regenerating and reproducing itself indefinitely, becomes similarly destructive and self-exhausting when transformed into an industry. Agricultural pollution is a serious and growing problem. And industrial agriculture is forced by its very character to treat the soil itself as a “raw material,” which it proceeds to “use up.” It has been estimated, for instance, that at the present rate of cropland erosion Iowa’s soil will be exhausted by the year 2050. I have seen no attempt to calculate the human cost of such farming—by attrition, displacement, social disruption, etc.—I assume because it is incalculable.
This failure of industrial agriculture is not more obvious, or more noticed, because many of its worst social and economic consequences have collected in the cities, and are erroneously called “urban problems.” Also, because the farm population is now so small, most people know nothing of farming, and cannot recognize agricultural problems when they see them.
But if industrial agriculture is a failure, then how does it continue to produce such an enormous volume of food? One reason is that most countries where industrial agriculture is practiced have soils that were originally good, possessing great natural reserves of fertility. (Industrial agriculture is much more quickly destructive in places where the fertility reserves of the soil are not great—as in the Amazon basin.) Another reason is that, as natural fertility has declined, we have so far been able to subsidize food production by large applications of chemical fertilizer. These have effectively disguised the loss of natural fertility, but it is important to emphasize that they are a disguise. They delay some of the consequences of failure, but cannot prevent them. Chemical fertilizers are required in vast amounts, they are increasingly expensive, and most of them come from sources that are not renewable. Industrial agriculture is now absolutely dependent on them, and this dependence is one of its fundamental weaknesses.
Another weakness of industrial agriculture is its absolute dependence on an enormous and intricate—hence fragile—economic