The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ of freedom. But freedom for what? For producers, it is the freedom to produce themselves into bankruptcy—to fail, that is, by succeeding. For the purchaser, it is the freedom to destroy the producers as a normal and acceptable expense. The only solution to the tragedy of the limitless market is for the producers to divide their side, the selling side, of the market into limited fair shares by limiting production, which is exactly what the tobacco program accomplished here in my region. By preventing the farmers’ overuse of the market, it prevented as well the overuse of the land.

      Agribusiness corporations of course don’t openly advocate overproduction. They don’t have to assume visibly the moral burden of their bad motive. All they have to do is stand by, praising American agriculture’s record-breaking harvests, while either hope or despair drives the remaining farmers to produce as much as they can. The agribusinesses then are glad to sell the very expensive surplus of seeds, chemicals, and machines needed for surplus production.

      The agricultural tragedy of the market is in part political. And how was the by-now entirely dominant political position on the agricultural free market defined? In the middle of the twentieth century, think tanks containing corporate and academic experts laid down the decree that there were too many farmers. They decreed further that the excess should be removed as rapidly as possible, and that the instrument of this removal should be the free market, with all price supports and production controls eliminated. The assumption evidently was that the removed farmers would be replaced by industrial technologies, recommended by the land-grant universities, and supplied by the corporations. The surplus farmers would increase the industrial labor force, and they and their families would enlarge the population of consumers of industrial products. It was proposed of course that all of society, including the displaced farm families and farm workers, would benefit from this. There would be no costs, social or agricultural, no problems, no debits, nothing at all to subtract from the accrued economic and social assets. This would institute an evolutionary process that would unerringly eliminate “the least efficient producers.” Only the fittest would survive.

      In short, by granting a limitless permission and scope to the free market and technological progress—which is assumed to work invariably for the best—politicians, by doing merely nothing, could rid themselves of any concern for farmers or farmland. The representatives of the people and the guardians of the common good were thus able to “free” the market to promote the (allegedly) inefficient farmers to (supposedly) the suburbs while subjecting the countryside to limitless progress and modernization. Against this heartless determinism, it is useful to remember that it was the aim of the program for burley tobacco in my region to include and help every farmer, even the smallest, who wanted to grow the crop. The difference was in the minds of the people whose work during four decades at last shaped an effective program. Those people, unlike the experts of the midcentury think tanks, were thoughtful of the needs of farming and farmers as opposed to the needs of the corporate free market known as the economy. The doctrine of “too many farmers” has never been revoked. No limit to the attrition has been proposed.

      As evidence of the persistence of this doctrine, here is a passage from a letter of October 3, 2016, from John Logan Brent, Judge Executive of Henry County, Kentucky:

      I have taken a couple of afternoons to work on the accounting for farming cattle under the current terms. Enclosed you will find that product based upon a real example, which is our 100 acre farm . . . and its approximately 25 cow herd. . . . The good news is that for a young man wishing to earn a middle, to slightly below middle class annual salary of $45,000 farming cattle full-time, he only has to have $3,281,000 in capital to get started. If he can find 780 acres to rent, he only has to have $551,000 for used cows and equipment. I say this is the good news, because the reality is that this was based on a weaned calf price of $850 from June of this year. According to today’s sales reports, that same calf is now $650 at best.

      That alone, forgetting other adverse agricultural markets, would be an excellent recipe for the elimination of farmers. And conservationists should take note, as mostly they have not done, that in the absence of the eliminated farmers and with the consequent increase of agricultural dependence on the fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, there will be more pollution of water and air.

      The related problems of low prices and overproduction of a single but significant crop were solved for about sixty years, in my part of the country and in others, in the only way they could be solved: by a combination of price supports and production controls. This was the purpose and the work of the tobacco program. I want now to look more closely at the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, not this time as the brightest public occurrence in the history of my home countryside, but in terms of the suitability of its economic strategy to farming everywhere.

      Here I must acknowledge that this organization and, more important, its economic principles have had the allegiance and the service of members of my family for three generations. Beginning in the winter of 1941, when the “Burley Association” renewed its work under the New Deal, my father, John M. Berry, Sr., served as vice president for sixteen and as president for eighteen years, retiring in 1975 but serving as an advisor until a few years before his death in 1991. My brother, John M. Berry, Jr., served as president from 1987 to 1993. My daughter, Mary Berry, started the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, in 2011 for the purpose mainly of remembering, advocating, and applying the Association’s proven economic strategy and its purpose of assuring a decent livelihood for small farmers. My son serves on the Berry Center board.

      Under this program, support prices for the various grades of tobacco were set according to a formula for assuring a fair return on the cost of production. Production was controlled by allotting to each farm, according to its history of production, at first an acreage, and later a poundage, that would be eligible for price supports under the program. The total of the allotments for each year was determined by the supply, worldwide, that was available for manufacture. The rule was that the supply on hand should be sufficient for 2.4 years. If the supply was less than the predicted demand for 2.4 years, allotments would be increased; if more, allotments would be reduced. I don’t know why the factor was set at 2.4. Its significance, however, is that production was limited according to an established measure of expected demand.

      To buy a crop or a portion of a crop protected by the program, a purchaser had to bid a penny a pound above the support price. The government’s assistance to the program consisted of a loan, made annually “against the crop,” which permitted the program to purchase, store, and resell the portion of any year’s crop that did not earn the extra penny a pound—which, thanks to the loan, would be purchased by the Association and the grower paid at the warehouse. The cost to the government was only administrative until, in response to protests, this cost was charged to the farmers, and the program then operated on the basis of “no net cost” to the government. This program succeeded remarkably well in doing what it was designed to do, and a part of its success is that it still provides a pattern for the thought and hope of those who are working for the survival of land and people.

      The tobacco program is an example of a necessary service that government can provide to people who cannot provide it to themselves. The point most needing to be made now is that parity of pricing under the tobacco program was in no sense a subsidy. It did not involve a grant of money, a government giveaway, or a public charity. The concept of parity was used, by intention, to prevent government subsidation. Its purpose was to achieve fair prices, fairly determined, and with minimal help from the government. My father defended parity as an appropriate incentive: “It accords with our way of life, and it gives real and tangible meaning to the philosophy of ‘equal opportunity.’” He thought of “direct subsidy payments” as virtually opposite to parity and an “abominable form of regimentation.”

      The tobacco program in all of its versions was finally defeated and destroyed in 2004 by the political free marketers who had always opposed it, and who had resented it in proportion to its success. During the six decades of its life, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association helped keep farm families on their farms and gainfully employed СКАЧАТЬ