The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ a variety of occupations would be necessary. Because all occupations would be necessary, all would be equally necessary. Because of the need to keep them all adequately staffed, it would be ruinous to prefer one above another by price, custom, or social prejudice. There must be a sustained economic parity among them.

      In such an economic structure the land-using occupations are primary. We must be mindful of what is, or should be, the fundamental difference between agriculture or forestry and mining, but until the farmers, ranchers, foresters, and miners have done their work, nothing else that we count as economic can happen. And unless the land users do their work well—which is to say without depleting the fertility of the earth’s surface—nothing we count as economic can happen for very long.

      The land-using occupations, then, are of primary importance, but they are also the most vulnerable. We must notice, to begin with, that almost nobody in the supposedly “higher” occupational and social strata has ever recognized the estimable care, intelligence, knowledge, and artistry required to use the land without degrading or destroying it. It is as customary now as it was in the Middle Ages to regard farmers as churls—“mind-numbed,” backward, laughable, and dispensable. Farmers may be the last minority that even liberals freely stereotype and insult. If farmers live and work in an economic squeeze between inflated purchases and depressed sales, if their earnings are severely depressed by surplus production, if they are priced out of the land market, it is assumed that they deserve no better: They need only to be “liberated from their chains.”

      The problem to be dealt with here is that the primary producers in agriculture and forestry do not work well inevitably. On the contrary, in our present economy there are constraints and even incentives that favor bad work, the result of which is waste of fertility and of the land itself. Good work in the use of the land is work that goes beyond production to maintenance. Production must not reduce productivity. Every mine eventually will be exhausted. But where the laws of nature are obeyed in use—as we know they can be, given sufficient care and skill—a farm, a ranch, or a forest will remain fertile and productive as long as nature lasts. Good work also is informed by traditional, locally adapted ways that must be passed down, taught and learned, generation after generation. The standard of such work, as the lineages of good farmers and of agrarian scientists have demonstrated, cannot be established only by “the market.” The standard must be partly economic, for people have to live, but it must be equally ecological in order to sustain the possibility of life, and if it is to be ecological it must be cultural. The economies of agriculture and forestry are vulnerable also because they are exceptional, in this way, to the rule of industry.

      To obtain the best work in the economies of land use, those who use the land must be enabled to afford the time and patience necessary to do the best work. They must know how, and must desire, to do it well. Owners and workers in the land economy who grow their own food will not likely be starved into mistreating their land. But they can be taxed and priced into mistreating it. And so the parity of necessary occupations must be supported by parity of income.

      Parity in this sense is not a new thought, although new thinking may be required in applying it to the variety of crops and commodities produced in a variety of regions. But we do fortunately have some precedence for such thinking. The Agricultural Adjustment Act defines parity as “that gross income from agriculture which will provide the farm operator and his family with a standard of living equivalent to those afforded persons dependent upon other gainful occupation.” Perhaps the idea of parity does not need much explanation or defense. If, as now and always, a sufficient staff of land-users is necessary to the health of the land and therefore to the lives of all of us, then they should be assured a decent livelihood. And this the so-called free market cannot provide except by accident.

      The concept of parity, as fair-minded as it is necessary, addresses one of the problems of farming and farmers in the industrial economy. Another such problem, more fundamental and most in need of understanding, is that of overproduction. “Other gainful employment” in the cities escapes this problem because the large industrial corporations have not characteristically overproduced. Overproduction moreover is not a problem of subsistence farming, or of those enterprises of any farm that are devoted to the subsistence of the farm family. The aim of the traditional economy of the farm household—a garden, poultry, family milk cow, meat animals, vines, fruit trees—was plenty, enough for the family to eat in season and to preserve, plus some to share or to sell. Surpluses and scraps were fed to the dogs or the livestock. There were no leftovers.

      Surplus production is a risk native to commercial agriculture. This is because farmers individually and collectively do not know, and cannot learn ahead of time, the extent either of public need or of market demand. Given the right weather and the “progressive” application of technologies, their failure to control production, even in their own interest, is thus inevitable. This is not so much because they won’t, but because, on their own, they can’t. Either because the market is good and they are encouraged, or because the market is bad and they are desperate, farmers tend to produce as much as they can. They tend logically, and almost by nature, toward overproduction. In the absence of imposed limits, overproduction will fairly predictably occur in agriculture as long as farmers and the land remain productive. It has only to be allowed by a political indifference prescribed by evangels of the “free market.” For the corporate purchasers the low price attendant upon overproduction is the greatest benefit, as for farmers it is the singular cruelty, of the current agricultural economy. Farm subsidies without production controls further encourage overproduction. In times of high costs and low prices, such subsidies are paid ultimately, and quickly, to the corporations.

      This version of a farm economy pushes farmers off their farms. By increasing the wealth of urban investors and shoppers for “country places,” it increases the price of farmland, making it impossible especially for small farmers, or would-be small farmers, to compete on the land market. The free market lays down the rule: Good land for investors and escapists, poor land or none for farmers. Young people wishing to farm are crowded to the economic margins and to the poorest land, or to no land at all. Meanwhile overproduction of farm commodities always implies overuse and abuse of the land.

      The traditional home economies of subsistence, while they lasted, gave farmers some hope of surviving their hard times. This was true especially when the chief energy source was the sun, and the dependence on purchased supplies was minimal. As farming became less and less subsistent and more and more commercial, it was exposed ever more nakedly to the vagaries and the predation of an economy fundamentally alien to it. When farming is large in scale, is highly specialized, and all needs and supplies are purchased, the farmer’s exposure to “the economy” is total.

      It ought to be obvious that an economy that works against its sources will finally undercut the law of supply and demand in the most fatal way, that is, by destroying the supply. A food economy staffed by producers who are always fewer and older, whose increasing dependence on industrial technologies puts them and their land at ever greater risk, obviously cannot feed without limit an increasing population. But the reality of such an increasing scarcity is unaccounted for by the doctrine of the free market as applied to agriculture. Even less can this version of freedom comprehend the need for strict limits upon land use in order to preserve for an unlimited time the land’s ability to produce. In a natural ecosystem, even on a conservatively managed farm, the fertility cycle may turn from life to death to life again to no foreseeable limit. By opposing to this cycle the delusion of a limitlessness exclusively economic and industrial, the supposedly free market overthrows the limits of nature and the land, thus imposing a mortal danger upon the land’s capacity to produce.

      When agricultural production is not controlled by a marketing cooperative such as the tobacco program, the market becomes, from the standpoint of the farmers, a sort of limitless commons, the inevitable tragedy of which is inherent in its limitlessness. In the absence of any imposed limit that they collectively agree to and abide by, all producers may have as large a share of the market as they want or can take. Only in this sense is the market, to them, “free.” To limit production as a way СКАЧАТЬ