Bringing It to the Table. Wendell Berry

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      IT MAY TURN out that the most powerful and the most destructive change of modern times has been a change in language: the rise of the image, or metaphor, of the machine. Until the industrial revolution occurred in the minds of most of the people in the so-called developed countries, the dominant images were organic: They had to do with living things; they were biological, pastoral, agricultural, or familial. God was seen as a “shepherd,” the faithful as “the sheep of His pasture.” One’s home country was known as one’s “motherland.” Certain people were said to have the strength of a lion, the grace of a deer, the speed of a falcon, the cunning of a fox, etc. Jesus spoke of himself as a “bridegroom.” People who took good care of the earth were said to practice “husbandry.” The ideal relationships among people were “brotherhood” and “sisterhood.”

      Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as “units” as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one’s thoughts are “inputs”; other people’s responses are “feedback.” And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as “fuel”; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its “efficiency,” which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One’s country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a “motherland,” but rather priced according to its “productivity” of “raw materials” and “natural resources” —valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster Fuller asserted that “the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology”—the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, “can only be expressed mathematically.”

      In view of this revolution of language, which is in effect the uprooting of the human mind, it is not surprising to realize that farming too has been made to serve under the yoke of this extremely reductive metaphor. Farming, according to most of the most powerful people now concerned with it, is no longer a way of life, no longer husbandry or even agriculture; it is an industry known as “agribusiness,” which looks upon a farm as a “factory,” and upon farmers, plants, animals, and the land itself as interchangeable parts or “units of production.”

      This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very “efficiently” according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to “feed” the rest. So long as we keep the focus narrowed to the “food factory” itself, we have to be impressed: It is elaborately organized; it is technologically sophisticated; it is, by its own definition of the term, marvelously “efficient.”

      Only when we widen the focus do we see that this “factory” is in fact a failure. Within itself it has the order of a machine, but, like other enterprises of the industrial vision, it is part of a rapidly widening and deepening disorder. It will be sufficient here to list some of the serious problems that have a demonstrable connection with industrial agriculture: (1) soil erosion, (2) soil compaction, (3) soil and water pollution, (4) pests and diseases resulting from monoculture and ecological deterioration, (5) depopulation of rural communities, and (6) decivilization of the cities.

      The most obvious falsehood of “agribusiness” accounting has to do with the alleged “efficiency” of “agribusiness” technology. This is, in the first place, an efficiency calculated in the productivity of workers, not of acres. In the second place the productivity per “man-hour,” as given out by “agribusiness” apologists, is dangerously—and, one must assume, intentionally—misleading. For the 4 percent of our population that is left on the farm does not, by any stretch of imagination, feed the rest. That 4 percent is only a small part, and the worst-paid part, of a food production network that includes purchasers, wholesalers, retailers, processors, packagers, transporters, and the manufacturers and salesmen of machines, building materials, feeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, medicines, and fuel. All these producers are at once in competition with each other and dependent on each other, and all are dependent on the petroleum industry.

      As for the farmers themselves, they have long ago lost control of their destiny. They are no longer “independent farmers,” subscribing to that ancient and perhaps indispensable ideal, but are agents of their creditors and of the market. They are “units of production” who, or which, must perform “efficiently”—regardless of what they get out of it either as investors or as human beings.

      In the larger accounting, then, industrial agriculture is a failure on its way to being a catastrophe. Why is it a failure? There are, I think, two inescapable reasons.

      The first is that the industrial vision is perhaps inherently an oversimplifying vision, which proceeds on the assumption that consequence is always singular; industrialists invariably assume that they are solving for X—X being production. In order to solve for X, industrial agriculturists have to reduce any agricultural problem to a problem in mechanics—as, for example, modern confinement-feeding techniques became possible only when animals could be considered as machines.

      What this vision excludes, as a matter of course, are biology on the one hand, and human culture on the other. Once vision is enlarged to include these considerations, we see readily that—as wisdom has always counseled us—consequences are invariably multiple, self-multiplying, long-lasting, and unforeseeable in something like geometric proportion to the size or power of the cause. Taking our bearings from traditional wisdom and from the insights of the ecologists—which, so far as I can see, confirm traditional wisdom—we realize that in a country the size of the United States, and economically uniform, the smallest possible agricultural “unit of production” is very large indeed. It consists of all the farmland, plus all the farmers, plus all the farming communities, plus all the knowledge and the technical means of agriculture, plus all the available species of domestic plants and animals, plus the natural systems and cycles that surround farming and support it, plus the knowledge, taste, judgment, kitchen skills, etc. of all the people who buy food. A proper solution to an agricultural problem must preserve and promote the good health of this “unit.” Nothing less will do.

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