[A-List] Renewing Husbandry

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The time of mechanization in agriculture is fast coming to an end. But
can we recover what's been lost?

by Wendell Berry

Orion magazine (September / October 2005)


I REMEMBER WELL A SUMMER MORNING in about 1950 when my father sent a
hired man with a McCormick High Gear Number 9 mowing machine and a team
of mules to the field I was mowing with our nearly new Farmall A. That
memory is a landmark in my mind and my history. I had been born into the
way of farming represented by the mule team, and I loved it. I knew
irresistibly that the mules were good ones. They were stepping along
beautifully at a rate of speed in fact only a little slower than mine.
But now I saw them suddenly from the vantage point of the tractor, and I
remember how fiercely I resented their slowness. I saw them as "in my way".

This is not an exceptional or a remarkably dramatic bit of history. I
recite it to confirm that the industrialization of agriculture is a part
of my familiar experience. I don't have the privilege of looking at it
as an outsider.

We were mowing that morning, the teamster with his mules and I with the
tractor, in the field behind the barn on my father's home place, where
he and before him his father had been born, and where his father had
died in February of 1946. The old way of farming was intact in my
grandfather's mind until the day he died at eighty-two. He had worked
mules all his life, understood them thoroughly, and loved the good ones
passionately. He knew tractors only from a distance, he had seen only a
few of them, and he rejected them out of hand because he thought,
correctly, that they compacted the soil.

Even so, four years after his death his grandson's sudden resentment of
the "slow" mule team foretold what history would bear out: the tractor
would stay and the mules would go. Year after year, agriculture would be
adapted more and more to the technology and the processes of industry
and to the rule of industrial economics. This transformation occurred
with astonishing speed because, by the measures it set for itself, it
was wonderfully successful. It "saved labor", it conferred the prestige
of modernity, and it was highly productive.

During the fourteen years after 1950 I was much away from home, though I
never entirely departed from farming or at least from thoughts of
farming, and my affection for my homeland remained strong. In 1964 my
family and I returned to Kentucky and settled on a hillside farm in my
native community, where we have continued to live. Perhaps because I was
a returned traveler intending to stay, I now saw the place more clearly
than before. I saw it critically, too, for it was evident at once that
the human life of the place, the life of the farms and the farming
community, was in decline. The old self-sufficient way of farming was
passing away. The economic prosperity that had visited the farmers
briefly during World War II and for a few years afterward had ended. The
little towns that once had been social and economic centers, thronged
with country people on Saturdays and Saturday nights, were losing out to
the bigger towns and the cities. The rural neighborhoods, once held
together by common memories, common work, and the sharing of help, had
begun to dissolve. There were no longer local markets for chickens or
eggs or cream. The spring lamb industry, once a staple of the region,
was gone. The tractors and other mechanical devices certainly were
saving the labor of the farmers and farmhands who had moved away, but
those who had stayed were working harder and longer than ever.

THE EFFECTS OF THE PROCESS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION have become so apparent,
so numerous, so favorable to the agribusiness corporations, and so
unfavorable to everything else, that by now the questions troubling me
and a few others in the 1960s and 1970s are being asked everywhere. It
has become increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local
community, and that the economy of the local community affects the way
we farm; that the way we farm affects the health and integrity of the
local ecosystem, and that the farm is intricately dependent, even
economically, upon the health of the local ecosystem. We can no longer
pretend that agriculture is a sort of economic machine with
interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, determined by "market
forces" and independent of everything else. We are not farming in a
specialist capsule or a professionalist department; we are farming in
the world, in a webwork of dependences and influences probably more
intricate than we will ever understand. It has become clear, in short,
that we have been running our fundamental economic enterprise by the
wrong rules. We were wrong to assume that agriculture could be
adequately defined by reductionist science and determinist economics.

It is no longer possible to deny that context exists and is an issue. If
you can keep the context narrow enough (and the accounting period short
enough), then the industrial criteria of labor saving and high
productivity seem to work well. But the old rules of ecological
coherence and of community life have remained in effect. The costs of
ignoring them have accumulated, until now the boundaries of our
reductive and mechanical explanations have collapsed. Their collapse
reveals, plainly enough for all to see, the ecological and social
damages they were meant to conceal. It will seem paradoxical to some
that the national and global corporate economies have narrowed the
context for thinking about agriculture, but it is merely the truth.
Those large economies, in their understanding and in their accounting,
have excluded any concern for the land and the people. Now, in the midst
of so much unnecessary human and ecological destruction, we are facing
the necessity of a new start in agriculture.

THE TRACTOR'S ARRIVAL HAD SIGNALED, among other things, agriculture's
shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a
total dependence on costly fossil fuel. But in 1950, like most people at
that time, I was years away from the first inkling of the limits of the
supply of cheap fuel.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and
this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of
limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I
learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I
entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil
fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to
learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but
indispensable.

Mechanical farming makes it easy to think mechanically about the land
and its creatures. It makes it easy to think mechanically even about
oneself, and the tirelessness of tractors brought a new depth of
weariness into human experience, at a cost to health and family life
that has not been fully accounted.

Once one's farm and one's thoughts have been sufficiently mechanized,
industrial agriculture's focus on production, as opposed to maintenance
or stewardship, becomes merely logical. And here the trouble completes
itself. The almost exclusive emphasis on production permits the way of
working to be determined not by the nature and character of the farm in
its ecosystem and in its human community, but rather by the national or
the global economy and the available or affordable technology. The farm
and all concerns not immediately associated with production have in
effect disappeared from sight. The farmer too in effect has vanished. He
is no longer working as an independent and loyal agent of his place, his
family, and his community, but instead as the agent of an economy that
is fundamentally adverse to him and to all that he ought to stand for.

THE WORD "HUSBANDRY" IS THE NAME of a connection. In its original sense,
it is the name of the work of a domestic man, a man who has accepted a
bondage to the household. To husband is to use with care, to keep, to
save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a
husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and
animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the
household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some
people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the
nondomestic creatures, in recognition of the dependence of our
households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name
of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to
our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands
in the living network that sustains us.

Most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures
appear to be the result of an attempt to make the land produce without
husbandry. The attempt to remake agriculture as a science and an
industry has excluded from it the age-old husbandry which was central
and essential to it.

This effort had its initial and probably its most radical success in
separating farming from the economy of subsistence. Through World War
II, farm life in my region (and, I think, nearly everywhere) rested
solidly upon the garden, dairy, poultry flock, and meat animals that fed
the farm's family. Especially in hard times farm families, and their
farms, survived by means of their subsistence economy. The industrial
program, on the contrary, suggested that it was "uneconomic" for a farm
family to produce its own food; the effort and the land would be better
applied to commercial production. The result is utterly strange in human
experience: farm families that buy everything they eat at the store.

An intention to replace husbandry with science was made explicit in the
renaming of disciplines in the colleges of agriculture. "Soil husbandry"
became "soil science", and "animal husbandry" became "animal science".
This change is worth lingering over because of what it tells us about
our susceptibility to poppycock. Purporting to increase the
sophistication of the humble art of farming, this change in fact
brutally oversimplifies it.

"Soil science", as practiced by soil scientists, and even more as it has
been handed down to farmers, has tended to treat the soil as a lifeless
matrix in which "soil chemistry" takes place and "nutrients" are "made
available". And this, in turn, has made farming increasingly shallow -
literally so - in its understanding of the soil. The modern farm is
understood as a surface on which various mechanical operations are
performed, and to which various chemicals are applied. The undersurface
reality of organisms and roots is mostly ignored.

"Soil husbandry" is a different kind of study, involving a different
kind of mind. Soil husbandry leads, in the words of Sir Albert Howard,
to understanding "health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great
subject". We apply the word "health" only to living creatures, and to
soil husbandry a healthy soil is a wilderness, mostly unstudied and
unknown, but teemingly alive. The soil is at once a living community of
creatures and their habitat. The farm's husband, its family, its crops
and animals, all are members of the soil community; all belong to the
character and identity of the place. To rate the farm family merely as
"labor" and its domestic plants and animals merely as "production" is
thus an oversimplification, both radical and destructive.

"Science" is too simple a word to name the complex of relationships and
connections that compose a healthy farm - a farm that is a full
membership of the soil community. The husbandry of mere humans, of
course, cannot be complex enough either. But husbandry always has
understood that what is husbanded is ultimately a mystery. A farmer, as
one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is
"a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God'". The mothering instinct of
animals, for example, is a mystery that husbandry must use and trust
mostly without understanding. The husband, unlike the "manager" or the
would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and
the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both
careful and humble. Husbandry originates precautionary sayings like
"Don't put all your eggs into one basket" and "Don't count your chickens
before they hatch". It does not boast of technological feats that will
"feed the world".

Husbandry, which is not replaceable by science, nevertheless uses
science, and corrects it too. It is the more comprehensive discipline.
To reduce husbandry to science, in practice, is to transform
agricultural "wastes" into pollutants, and to subtract perennials and
grazing animals from the rotation of crops. Without husbandry, the
agriculture of science and industry has served too well the purpose of
the industrial economy in reducing the number of landowners and the
self-employed. It has transformed the United States from a country of
many owners to a country of many employees.

Without husbandry, "soil science" too easily ignores the community of
creatures that live in and from, that make and are made by, the soil.
Similarly, "animal science" without husbandry forgets, almost as a
requirement, the sympathy by which we recognize ourselves as fellow
creatures of the animals. It forgets that animals are so called because
we once believed them to be endowed with souls. Animal science has led
us away from that belief or any such belief in the sanctity of animals.
It has led us instead to the animal factory which, like the
concentration camp, is a vision of Hell. Animal husbandry, on the
contrary, comes from and again leads to the psalmist's vision of good
grass, good water, and the husbandry of God.

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with
ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an
elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is
sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work.
Contexts become wrong by being too small - "too small, that is, to
contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local
ecosystem or the local community" - and this is crucial. "Out of
context", as Wes Jackson has said, "the best minds do the worst damage".

OUR RECENT FOCUS UPON PRODUCTIVITY, genetic and technological
uniformity, and global trade - all supported by supposedly limitless
supplies of fuel, water, and soil - has obscured the necessity for local
adaptation. But our circumstances are changing rapidly now, and this
requirement will be forced upon us again by terrorism and other kinds of
political violence, by chemical pollution, by increasing energy costs,
by depleted soils, aquifers, and streams, and by the spread of exotic
weeds, pests, and diseases. We are going to have to return to the old
questions about local nature, local carrying capacities, and local
needs. And we are going to have to resume the breeding of plants and
animals to fit the region and the farm.

The same obsessions and extravagances that have caused us to ignore the
issue of local adaptation have caused us to ignore the issue of form.
These two issues are so closely related that it is difficult to talk
about one without talking about the other. During the half century and
more of our neglect of local adaptation, we have subjected our farms to
a radical oversimplification of form. The diversified and reasonably
self-sufficient farms of my region and of many other regions have been
conglomerated into larger farms with larger fields, increasingly
specialized, and subjected increasingly to the strict, unnatural
linearity of the production line.

But the first requirement of a form is that it must be comprehensive; it
must not leave out something that essentially belongs within it. The
form of the farm must answer to the farmer's feeling for the place, its
creatures, and its work. It is a never-ending effort of fitting together
many diverse things. It must incorporate the lifecycle and the fertility
cycles of animals. It must bring crops and livestock into balance and
mutual support. It must be a pattern on the ground and in the mind. It
must be at once ecological, agricultural, economic, familial, and
neighborly.

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are
now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from
the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and
of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think
of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale,
expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore
local conditions and local needs. The problem of renewing husbandry, and
the need to promote a general awareness of everybody's agricultural
responsibilities, thus becomes urgent.

How can we restore a competent husbandry to the minds of the world's
producers and consumers? This effort is already in progress on many
farms and in many urban consumer groups scattered across our country and
the world. But we must recognize too that this effort needs an
authorizing focus and force that would grant it a new legitimacy,
intellectual rigor, scientific respectability, and responsible teaching.
There are many reasons to hope that this might be supplied by our
colleges of agriculture.

The effort of husbandry is partly scientific but it is entirely
cultural; and a cultural initiative can exist only by becoming personal.
It will become increasingly clear, I believe, that agricultural
scientists will need to work as indwelling members of agricultural
communities or of consumer communities. It is not irrational to propose
that a significant number of these scientists should be farmers, and so
subject their scientific work, and that of their colleagues, to the
influence of a farmer's practical circumstances. Along with the rest of
us, they will need to accept all the imperatives of husbandry as the
context of their work. We cannot keep things from falling apart in our
society if they do not cohere in our minds and in our lives.

_____

This article has been abridged for the web.

Wendell Berry's poems, essays, and works of fiction have won him
numerous honors and a wide following. His latest collection of poems is
titled Given (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005). His essay in this issue is drawn
from The Way of Ignorance, to be published by Shoemaker & Hoard in
November 2005 and used here by permission. He lives and farms in his
native Kentucky. For more information about Wendell Berry, his articles,
and his books see http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/54/

The Orion Society, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington,
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