Wendell Berry’s contribution to the literature of sound farming practices extends more than 40 years. Berry, who died on Aug. 31, was the 2006 Kentucky Monthly Kentuckian of the Year. He wrote such notable books as A Continuous Harmony, The Unsettling of America, The Gift of Good Land and, most recently, It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays.
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Wendell Berry
In 2013, writer Sean Patrick Hill interviewed Wendell Berry by phone on a Saturday morning, while he was between duties at his Henry County farm, to ask the farmer/author/activist about his views on current farming practices in Kentucky. That interview was published in Kentucky Monthly in the June/July 2013 issue. Later, Hill visited Berry at his home, where they “talked for hours,” Hill said. “And then he drove me around Port Royal and the countryside, showing me important places from his past. What a day that was—a real honor.”
SPH: In your 1971 book The Unforeseen Wilderness, you discussed improper use of the land by farming practices inappropriate to the landscape and terrain. In Kentucky, what would good, sustainable farming look like?
WB: The first rule on sloping, highly vulnerable land, which we have a lot of in Kentucky, is that it should be protected most or all the time by perennial plants. In the best years of the tobacco program, until at least the mid-1960s, we had a crop that paid a decent income on a small acreage, and that fit well into a highly diversified farm structure that also involved corn, small grains, cattle, hogs and often sheep. So in any year most of the land would be in pasture, which is to say under perennial cover, safe in the summer and in the winter. The trend now, in the absence of that old economy, is toward more exposure of the landscape under annual crops— soybeans and corn. Land that ought to be under grass most of the time is now, on some farms, entirely devoted to annual crops. Not only do you expose the ground to erosion, but you don’t harvest the sunlight for most of the year.
SPH: Has there been a progression? In other words, are Kentucky farmers doing better now?
WB: No. There are fewer farmers all the time. In order to farm well, you have to have enough people on the land to pay careful attention to it. In this so-called “rotation” of corn and soybeans, using herbicides, farmers are farming very large acreages and seeing that land twice a year, at planting time and harvest time. Good farming is diversified, I don’t care where it is. The more specialized it becomes, the worse it is.
SPH: I just finished reading your 1977 book The Unsettling of America. I’m surprised I never did!
WB: Well, that’s all right. You’re really ahead of the crowd (laughs).
SPH: It was a mind-changing book. The Unsettling of America addresses the significant problems that have been institutionalized in American agriculture.
WB: The program to industrialize agriculture really got going after World War II. So by the ’70s, when I began to think of that book, that program was well underway, and the damages were already visible.
SPH: At this point, based on your ideas in that book, do you have hope for the future farm communities of Kentucky?
WB: Of course. One either has hope or one gives up, and I haven’t given up. I think you could say that a large part of my writing has been the effort to establish an authentic ground of hope. Authentic reasons for hope. The way of doing that is, of course, to find and study examples of good agriculture. Some of them are historical, and some of them are contemporary.
SPH: I saw at The Berry Center website [berrycenter.org] you had a reading list. Who’s writing the good stuff today about this topic? Who’s writing what the public needs to read as far as farming and food practices?
WB: Well, there is a lineage among modern writers that goes back well into the last century. Liberty Hyde Bailey, who was a professor of agriculture and dean at Cornell late in the 19th century and early in the 20th, was talking about the dependence of agriculture on nature. Two of his many books are The Outlook on Nature and The Holy Earth. Then in 1911, F.H. King published a book called Farmers of Forty Centuries. It was about the peasant agricultures of Korea, China and Japan. His question was, “How can this land have been intensively farmed for 4,000 years and still be productive?” That is one of the foundation books of what I guess you’d call ecological agriculture, of which the standard has to be the health of the natural ecosystem.
Then in 1929, J. Russell Smith published Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. Like all these writers, he was worried about soil erosion. He saw the problem in agriculture as the movement of farming from the flatlands to the steep slopes. His idea was that you have to fit the farming to the farm; that is, you have to adapt your use of a place to its nature. And then an English agriculturist, Sir Albert Howard, wrote in the middle of the 20th century two books that are really necessary: An Agricultural Testament and [the publication later] reissued [as] The Soil and Health—which, by the way, the University Press of Kentucky published not very long ago with a foreword by me. About contemporary with Howard and his work was Aldo Leopold, who wrote A Sand County Almanac. He was talking about the land community and the necessity of ways of land use that don’t destroy the land community. His phrase “the land community” meant what we would call now the local ecosystem. Which is to say, the land and everything that lives on it and from it.
Then you get into our own time, and you’ve got the writings of people like Gene Logsdon, Stan Rowe and Wes Jackson. And so, you see, there is a lineage of writings in support of a sound ecological approach to farming, and it’s an old lineage; in fact, you can trace it through the literary tradition into antiquity. But the significant historical fact is that since at least the end of World War II, nobody has paid any attention to that lineage. That is, virtually nobody in official and academic agriculture has paid any attention to it. It has been ignored in favor of the industrialization of the landscapes and of course the sale of industrial so-called “input.”
SPH: Since you wrote The Unsettling of America, I can say just by my life experience the culture has rapidly changed, and the kind of “land community” that Leopold talks about seems ever more distant now from American and even Kentuckian culture. How is this good farming essential to the development in the present, the development in the future, of American and Kentuckian culture? What’s that going to do for us now, and how will that change what we have?
WB: It will help us to continue to have something to eat.
There are two strands to the history of agriculture at this time. One is the continuation of the old mechanistic, industry-oriented agriculture that has been dominant for a long time. The other strand is the development of an interest in the quality of food, the growth of an urban agrarianism concerned with where food comes from and what’s in it, what’s the quality of it. This is a movement that has grown very rapidly in the last 20 years. If you want a good example of that, you need to talk to some of the people who are involved in the development of a regional food economy for Louisville. That may be the best example of an ongoing, and so far very impressive, effort to develop a regional food supply for a city of substantial size.
SPH: That leads right into my next question, actually, because this is a real point of interest for me. I’ve been interviewing chefs in Louisville restaurants who are, as much as possible, undertaking the farm-to-table movement. How do you see this helping the farms specifically, and also, is this a sustainable economy? Can we continue to keep these restaurants afloat using nothing but local produce, do you think?
WB: Well, we’re going to have to try. To provide a secure, sustainable local food supply for Louisville is an effort that involves immense complexity and difficulty.
What’s going on in Louisville—and this is happening all over the country; it’s happening, in fact, all over the world—is the effort to make a local demand and a local supply come into being more or less simultaneously. There are two nightmares involved. One is the nightmare of supply: Where is it going to come from? The other is the nightmare of demand: Who wants it? At present in this Louisville effort, the demand is running ahead of supply. Part of that goes to the question that farmers are always going to ask: If I bring this product to market, how do I know that it will be worth my time and labor? You can see how this involves lots of dealing with lots of people, and the development of contracts that protect both the seller and the buyer.
SPH: In The Unsettling of America, you talked about the crisis of character as being one of the crises of agriculture in general. We’re going through a bad economy right now, and it seems economically feasible to a lot of people to just shop at Walmart and buy industrial corn, so what is going to change that? As a side point, I’ve heard a lot of arguments about organic farming saying that if more people buy it, it’s going to drive the price down. What do we need to do to encourage that, and what is it about our character that might be getting in the way today, in 2013?
WB: On the one hand, we’ve taught our people to be passive consumers; that is, to take uncritically whatever is offered at the cheapest price. The related flaw is that we’ve applied the principle of competition to everything. So the conventional assumption in the food economy is that the consumer and the producer are in competition with each other, the farm is in competition with the urban market, and so on. This calls for a renewal of the community principle, which is the principle of cooperation.
If it’s possible for there to be a cooperative relationship between the producer and the consumer, then that is a way for urban people to become active consumers. The consumer then is able to influence production. People who eat have agricultural responsibilities, you see.
SPH: Right. I’d like to ask you about energy. Poet Gary Snyder, in his book Turtle Island, talked about the energy crisis as coming down to people needing to use human energy. Now, you’ve talked about using the power of animals and the power of the human body. Energy is obviously a huge issue in our country right now. What sort of energy development should Kentucky consider to get this whole thing off the ground?
WB: This brings up the issue of “scale,” among other issues. The fewer farmers there are in relation to the area that’s being farmed, the more dependent they are on purchased energy. It becomes unthinkable to get off the tractor or out of the cab and do something physical. The progress, so called, that I’ve seen in my lifetime is from the teams of mules and draft horses to the tractor and all the other technology of industrial agriculture. The farms that I first knew were very largely independent—not just in energy, but in other ways, too. By now, the conventional farmers, who grow large acreages, corn and beans and other extensive crops, are dependent on the agribusiness and energy corporations for everything. They don’t originate anything on the farm except the crops. The farms that I first knew were the sources of most of their own energy, their own traction power, their own working energy. They were also sources of their own subsistence; the horse and mule teams and the people were fed largely from the farms they lived and worked on. If you go from that to the issue of food security for a region, you can see how significant the measure of independence is.
SPH: I recently interviewed Bruce Ucán, the chef of the Mayan Café in downtown Louisville, and found his restaurant attempts to use 100 percent local produce. He was talking about the kids in West Louisville, more or less inner-city kids who’ve probably never seen a farm, don’t know what good nutrition is, and in some cases probably live in what’s called a “food desert,” where they don’t have access to fresh food. How can we help them in addition to patrons of some of these restaurants, as well as health food stores, which tend to be more expensive? How can we help these kids?
WB: It is right to ask what’s so good about the so-called alternative agriculture if only the wealthy people can afford it. Or only the moderately wealthy. If you can’t get better food to West Louisville, what’s the point? I honor that question.
The important thing to me, as a person very marginally involved, is to define the question adequately. To start with, the cheap food policy is as much a fraud as the cheap energy policy because it’s externalizing too many of the costs. If you’re marketing cheap food that, in order to be cheap, overlooks the whole issue of soil conservation, then your food is cheap simply because of rigged accounting. You’re not counting the real cost. If you’ve got “cheap” energy at the cost of destroying the forest ecology of eastern Kentucky, you’re not counting the cost. If you undertake the justice of paying a decent income to farmers, and not just to produce but to maintain the health of the land, that ends the cheap food policy. So we have three very important needs coming together here: justice to farmers, maintenance of the health and productivity of the land, and availability of healthful food to everybody. So I would be crazy to offer, or expect, a simple solution. But a good solution will answer all these needs.
SPH: I was driving up through Trimble County, and I started to really pay attention to the number of degraded farm buildings. Obviously it’s extensive, and I have a feeling people, even myself, tend to look at those buildings in a vague way, failing to see the deeper significance of what is being lost in the economy of those farms. What kind of investment, financial or otherwise, do we need to get this agricultural economy back on its feet, and where do you think the energy and the will for that will come from?
WB: It’s impossible to give a general answer to that question. This thing that we’re trying to make happen can’t happen because of a “crash program.” It can’t happen overnight. This is something that especially the young people who are involved in this effort need to understand. The problem of land abuse is a big problem. The toxicity of agriculture, for instance, is a big problem. But there are no big solutions to any of the big problems. These are problems that are going to be solved by individual people on individual parcels of land. And they’re going to be solved to the extent that these people can afford to do the right thing. Before we talk about solutions, we need to talk about standards. We need to talk about technologies and methods. And we have to realize that there is no general technology or method for good land use any more than there’s a good technology or method for a good family household—because of the uniqueness of the places and the people involved, you see.
The effort must be to fit the farming to the farm—to revert to J. Russell Smith, a person I revert to pretty often. Fit the farming to the farm. We’re talking about a kind of knowledge, a kind of sensitivity, even a kind of sympathy.
SPH: Could you say a word or two about your support of a 50-year Farm Bill?
WB: The idea, to go back to that principle we started with, is that the land needs to be covered; that’s the first responsibility of land use. It needs to be protected from erosion. After that, all the other good rules come into effect, but if you’re not keeping the land covered, you’re losing it. I should mention here that Wes Jackson talks about the “eyes-to-acres ratio.” If there aren’t enough eyes on the acres, then things that need to be noticed will be ignored. The 50-year Farm Bill addresses the problems of erosion, toxicity, and the destruction of rural communities. Along with the land, we’re destroying the human element in the land community. To have good farming, you’ve got to keep the conserving knowledge in place, generation after generation, children listening to their parents and, maybe more important, their grandparents. That’s the fundamental cultural connection, you see, that would keep it going. Anyway, at present, we have 20 percent of the farmable land in perennial cover—that’s hayfields, pastures, and the like—and 80 percent in annuals. The proposal of the 50-year Farm Bill is to reverse that ratio in 50 years to 80 percent perennial and 20 percent annual.
SPH: In your imagination, in your vision, what does this food economy ultimately look like? Does this mean a lot more farmers markets rather than stores? How does that look on the rural and urban sides? What might we expect to see?
WB: When we look to the future, the thing we ought to expect is to be surprised (laughs). But it’s legitimate to talk about this within limits, not as if you’re an expert on the future, which really doesn’t exist, you know. But we’ve got an employment problem, and if we’re talking about a local food economy, we’re talking about more people at work in the countryside. To feed Louisville, the tributary landscape would have to be highly diversified, because the tastes in Louisville, the needs in Louisville in fact, are highly diversified. Meat and vegetables and fruits, root crops, leaf crops, seed crops, grain crops—all those things have to be produced. As you diversify, you increase the amount of work needing to be done, the amount of skill that needs to be applied, and so you need more workers. The “eyes-to-acres ratio” would improve.
This is a part of the solution to the employment problem. A lot of the work of good farming is not going to be done by a machine or by remote control. If you’re coming around to the season of calving or lambing or farrowing, and you’re raising the livestock in the right way, somebody’s got to be there with the right knowledge and able to do the handwork. In a local food economy, you have more people involved in everything—growing, gathering, hauling, processing, marketing.
So this goes back to those abandoned buildings you’re talking about. A lot of those abandoned buildings are houses that a few years ago were perfectly livable, and they were lived in. You’ve got houses rotting and falling down all over the rural United States, and then you’ve got homelessness. Homelessness is a result of the replacement of people by technology. We need to be talking about the proper use of technology. We need standards. We don’t realize, when we talk about industrialization, that part of the industrial program is the replacement of people by technologies. So if you want to talk to a company, or a government agency now, who do you get? You don’t get somebody who’s friendly and eager to help you with your problem. You’re going to talk to a robot who gives you a menu of possibilities, and if none of them fits your problem, that’s just tough. Robots are competing against people, and the people are losing. But here is where we need to go back to the principle of cooperation that I mentioned earlier. This is the fundamental principle of a sustainable local economy, in which people would be doing good work for people. The principle of cooperation forbids us even to think of replacing and displacing people with machines.