Failing Our Farmers
by Wendell Berry
I belong to a small agricultural community in Henry County, Kentucky. My wife and I have a son and a daughter, both of whom are farmers. Like all farmers, they are struggling hard and worrying a lot. And I have 5 grandchildren. If they should wish to do so, I hope they will be able to farm in Henry County, where our family has lived and farmed for 200 years.
...For the past 35 years I have been concerned with the issues of farming and rural decline. Some of my concern has had to do with my failure to understand this nation' farm policy. I'm not referring to any one administration's farm program, but to farm policy as demonstrated by the past 40-50 years of accelerating damage.
We have lost farmers in staggering numbers (estimated to be 1000 farms per day), mainly because of economic adversity. For generations we have given nothing to farm-raised children but reasons to leave home. Our farm communities have disintegrated everywhere. Ninety percent of our cropland is losing topsoil to erosion faster than the replacement rate. Our failed small farms have been replaced by chemical-dependent monocrop cultures and animal factories, which have become major sources of pollution. Our dependence on immigrant labor and imported food is increasing. Our farm policy, like our energy policy, is simply to use up all we have.
A policy that destroys farmers and farmland cannot be acceptable in agricultural terms. It also directly contradicts our goal of national defense. A country that is heedlessly destroying its capacity to feed itself cannot be defended.
And a destructive agricultural economy is profoundly undemocratic. Thomas Jefferson thought that the "small landholders" were "the most precious part of a state." He thought governments should give priority to their survival. But increasingly, since WWII, our government's manifest policy has been to get rid of them. And the Democratic Party, the party of Jefferson, traditionally friend to the farmers, has become just as complicit in this policy as the other party.
In the 1950's Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft said to the farmers, "Get big or get out." Twenty years later, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Buzz was telling them, "Adapt or die."
...I am proudly an American Democrat. I am also a believer in the gospel of neighborly love. And I don't think that "Get big or get out," and "Adapt or die," are appropriate Government Policy.
I cannot see why a healthful, dependable, ecologically sound farm and farmer-conserving agricultural economy is not a primary goal of this country. I know that I am not alone, and that farmers are not alone in wishing to see such a policy. A rapidly increasing number of urban consumers also wish to see it.
Any politicians who now think that only farmers care about farming or have an interest in it are wrong. They will have to think again.