Re: [A-List] Renewing Husbandry

[Michael Hudson <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Entire national economies also have joined an international ³division of
labor² leading them to specialize away from feeding themselves. One result
is that they have become dependent on foreign grain and other food suppliers
­ headed by the United States, whose export mainstays are grain, soybeans
and other basic food crops.
            As I described in Super Imperialism, the trade pattern of Third
World food-deficit economies is to export the products of plantation
monocultures ­ a legacy of their colonial land grants that divided economies
between latifundia and microfundia. World Bank coercion has led them to
untax plantations and stifle domestic family farming ­ and to permit
ownership of plantations to pass into foreign hands. The oversupply of
plantation products holds down their export prices, while food dependency
raises U.S. food-export prices. Hence, the terms of trade deteriorate for
food-deficit countries.
            This makes them go even deeper into foreign debt, and hence to
become even more dependent on the World Bank¹s ³partnership in
backwardness.²
            Now that corn is being turned into gasohol, food export prices
are soaring, forcing food-deficit countries even further into debt
dependency.
    Michael Hudson


On 1/7/08 7:09 PM, "Bill Totten" <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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,
> Massachusetts 01230   413-528-4422 / Toll Free 888-909-6568 /
> 
> http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/160/
> 
> 
> http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
> http://www.ashisuto.co.jp
> 
>