The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry

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СКАЧАТЬ of farm tenancy among the growers from 33 percent in 1940 to 9 percent in 1970. During those years some of the population of tenant farmers undoubtedly died, and some left farming, but most of them ceased to be tenant farmers by becoming owners of farms. This was a defining event in the lives of a considerable number of worthy people whom I knew. The farmer-members of the Association overwhelmingly renewed their support in referendum after referendum.

      The Burley Association was thus truly a commons and a common good, based not only upon correct political and economic principles, but also upon the common history and culture, and thus upon the understanding consent of its sharers. So complete was the understanding of the members that in 1955, because of an oversupply of tobacco in storage, they voted for a 25 percent reduction of their allotments. On April 8, 2016, my neighbor Thomas Grissom, by far the best historian of the Association, wrote in a personal letter to me:

      After years of research, I have concluded that the most distinctive characteristic of the Kentucky [Burley] Tobacco Program is its design and application of an industrial agriculture commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.

      I think that Tom’s perception is exactly right and that he found the right and necessary terms to describe it.

      Burley tobacco, despite the dire health problems that it was found to cause and the consequent disfavor, was very much an agrarian crop. It was characteristically and mainly the product of small family farms, produced mainly by family labor and exchanges of work among neighbors. It was for a long time the staple crop in a highly diversified way of farming on landscapes that typically required considerate and affectionate care. As long as the market paid highly for high quality (which it finally ceased to do), the production of burley tobacco demanded, and from its many highly competent producers it received, both conscientious land husbandry and a fine artistry.

      Industrialism and agrarianism are almost exactly opposite and opposed. Industrialism regards mechanical or technical functions as ideal. It rates its accomplishments by quantitative measures. Though it values the prestige of public charity, it is motivated necessarily by the antisocial traits that assure success in competition. Agrarianism, by contrast, arises from the primal wish for a home land or home place—the wish, in the terms of our tradition, for the freedom and independence that come with dependence on a parcel of land, however small, that one owns and is owned by or has at least the use of. Agrarianism grants its highest practical value to the good husbandry of the land. It is motivated, to an extent effective and significant, by neighborliness, family loyalty, and devotion to the coherence and longevity of communities.

      As long as it has a sufficiency of “natural resources” and remains free of imposed political or economic restraint, an industrial economy will dominate and destroy an agrarian economy—no matter that the agrarian economy is indispensable for a continuing supply of resources. This defines precisely the need for the “design and application of an industrial agricultural commodity program to the cultivation and production of an agrarian crop indigenous to an agrarian society.” For a while the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association—never mind the deserved infamy of tobacco—did preserve a sort of balance between the interests of industrialism and agrarianism, which prevented their inherent difference and opposition from becoming absolute, and thus absolutely destructive of the agrarian society. This balance was fair enough to the industry and it permitted the growers to prosper. The program worked in fact to the best interest of both economies.

      From the perspective of this balance during the decades when it worked as it should have, it is possible to see that a step too far toward industrialism was probably taken by the Burley Association itself when, in 1971, it permitted the “lease and transfer” of production quotas away from the farms to which they had been assigned. This change, made under pressure from industrializing members, permitted the accumulation of allotments finally into very large acreages dependent upon more extensive technology and migrant labor. The program then was obliged to “balance” a reduced agrarianism against an increased industrialism.

      With the demise of the program in 2004, the region’s indigenous agrarianism could survive only as a history, a memory, and a set of vital principles that someday may be revived and reincarnated in reaction against the damages of industrialism.

      For the past six decades, except for such a remnant of the New Deal, the government has done nothing for farmers except to quiet them down by subsidizing uncontrolled production, which really is worse than nothing. But this “policy,” in the minds of the dominant politicians, signified that they were “doing something for agriculture” and so relieved them of thinking or knowing about agriculture’s actual requirements. For example, the Democratic platform preceding President Clinton’s first term initially contained no agricultural plank. My brother, John M. Berry, Jr., who was on the platform committee, was dismayed by this innovation, and he said so. He was then told that a plank was being drafted. When he saw the result, he laughed. He asked if he might draft a more meaningful plank. After much resistance, he was allowed to do so. He then “spent the next six hours redrafting the amendment so as to satisfy the Clinton staff.” I am quoting his letter of June 29, 1992, to Dr. Grady Stumbo, chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party. The letter goes on to say that Clinton’s staff refused to permit any reference to

      “supply management,” “price support” or any government guarantee of a fair price for farmers. They also refused to permit any reference to agribusiness control of farm policy or the level of agribusiness profits. They also refused to permit any language that could be construed as a commitment . . . to anything specific for agriculture or the rural community. . . .

      I had already been advised that Chairman Ron Brown had formed an agriculture task force and sold seats to its members for $15,000** contributions to the Democratic National Committee.

      Those seats went to representatives of agribusiness and other interests that have traditionally written farm policy for the Republicans.

      The doctrine of “too many farmers” thus had become the established orthodoxy of the leaders of both parties. My brother was then president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which was still a major life support of our state’s small farmers. By 1992 tobacco had become indefensible as a product, and it bore too great a public stigma to be touchable by a national candidate. My brother understood that, and he did not expect approval specifically of the tobacco program. But he knew that the working principles of that program would protect farmers who produced commodities other than tobacco everywhere in the country—and would also protect our own farmers when they no longer produced tobacco. He knew that Mr. Clinton, if he wanted to, could endorse the program’s principles without endorsing its product. The agricultural plank of the 1992 Democratic platform, as published, gave a general approval to “family farmers receiving a fair price,” to “a sufficient and sustainable agricultural economy . . . achieved through fiscally responsible programs,” and to “the private–public partnership to ensure that family farmers get a fair return for their labor and investment.” And of course it condemned “Republican farm policy.” It committed Mr. Clinton and his party to do nothing. And nothing was what they did.

      In 1995 President Clinton spoke to an audience of farmers and farm leaders in Billings, Montana. He acknowledged that the farm population by then was “dramatically lower . . . than it was a generation ago.” But, he said, “that was inevitable because of the increasing productivity of agriculture.” Nevertheless, he wanted to save the family farm, which he held to be “alive and well” in Montana. He believed we had “bottomed out in the shrinking of the farm sector.” He said he wanted to help young farmers. He spoke of the need to make American agriculture “competitive with people around the world.” And so on.

      He could not have meant what he said, because he was speaking without benefit of thought. And why should he have thought when he was not expected to do so? He was speaking forty or fifty years after politicians and their consulting experts СКАЧАТЬ