Bringing It to the Table (12 page)

And so the first thing farmers as conservationists must try to conserve is their love of farming and their love of independence. Of course they can conserve these things only by handing them down, by passing them on to their children, or to
somebody’s
children. Perhaps the most urgent task for all of us who want to eat well and to keep eating is to encourage farm-raised children to take up farming. And we must recognize that this only can be done economically. Farm children are not encouraged by watching their parents take their products to market only to have them stolen at prices less than the cost of production.

But farmers obviously are responsible for conserving much more than agrarian skills and attitudes. I have already told why farmers should be, as much as any conservationists, conservers of the wildness of the world—and that is their inescapable dependence on nature. Good farmers, I believe, recognize a difference that is fundamental between what is natural and what is man-made. They know that if you treat a farm as a factory and living creatures as machines, or if you tolerate the idea of “engineering” organisms, then you are on your way to something destructive and, sooner or later, too expensive. To treat creatures as machines is an error with large practical implications.

Good farmers know too that nature can be an economic ally. Natural fertility is cheaper, often in the short run, always in the long run, than purchased fertility. Natural health, inbred and nurtured, is cheaper than
pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Solar energy—if you know how to capture and use it: in grass, say, and the bodies of animals—is cheaper than petroleum. The highly industrialized factory farm is entirely dependent on “purchased inputs.” The agrarian farm, well integrated into the natural systems that support it, runs to an economically significant extent on resources and supplies that are free.

It is now commonly assumed that when humans took to agriculture they gave up hunting and gathering. But hunting and gathering remained until recently an integral and lively part of my own region’s traditional farming life. People hunted for wild game; they fished the ponds and streams; they gathered wild greens in the spring, hickory nuts and walnuts in the fall; they picked wild berries and other fruits; they prospected for wild honey. Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures; they were wilderness pleasures, not greatly different from the pleasures pursued by conservationists and wilderness lovers. As I was always aware, my friends the coon hunters were not motivated just by the wish to tree coons and listen to hounds and listen to each other, all of which were sufficiently attractive; they were coon hunters also because they wanted to be afoot in the woods at night. Most of the farmers I have known, and certainly the most interesting ones, have had the capacity to ramble about outdoors for the mere happiness of it, alert to the doings of the creatures, amused by the sight of a fox catching grasshoppers, or by the puzzle of wild tracks in the snow.

As the countryside has depopulated and the remaining farmers have come under greater stress, these wilderness pleasures have fallen away. But they have not yet been altogether abandoned; they represent something probably essential to the character of the best farming, and they should be remembered and revived.

Those, then, are some reasons why good farmers are conservationists, and why all farmers ought to be.

 

WHAT I HAVE been trying to do is to define a congruity or community of interest between farmers and conservationists who are not farmers. To name the interests that these two groups have in common, and to observe, as I did at the beginning, that they also have common enemies, is to raise a question that is becoming increasingly urgent: Why don’t the two groups publicly and forcefully agree on the things they agree on, and make an effort to cooperate? I don’t mean to belittle their disagreements, which I acknowledge to be important. Nevertheless, cooperation is now necessary, and it is possible. If Kentucky tobacco farmers can meet with antismoking groups, draw up a set of “core principles” to which they all agree, and then support those principles, something of the sort surely could happen between conservationists and certain land-using enterprises: family farms and ranches, small-scale, locally owned forestry and forest products industries, and perhaps others. Something of the sort, in fact, is beginning to happen, but so far the efforts are too small and too scattered. The larger organizations on both sides need to take an interest and get involved.

If these two sides, which need to cooperate, have so far been at odds, what is the problem? The problem, I think, is economic. The small land users, on the one hand, are struggling so hard to survive in an economy controlled by the corporations that they are distracted from their own economy’s actual basis in nature. They also have not paid enough attention to the difference between their always threatened local economies and the apparently thriving corporate economy that is exploiting them.

On the other hand, the mostly urban conservationists, who mostly are ignorant of the economic adversities of, say, family-scale farming or ranching, have paid far too little attention to the connection between
their
economic life and the despoliation of nature. They have trouble seeing that the bad farming and forestry practices that they oppose as conservationists are done on their behalf, and with their consent implied in the economic proxies they have given as consumers.

These clearly are serious problems. Both of them indicate that the industrial economy is not a true description of economic reality, and moreover that this economy has been wonderfully successful in getting its falsehoods believed. Too many land users and too many conservationists seem to have accepted the doctrine that the availability of goods is determined by the availability of cash, or credit, and by the market. In other words, they have accepted the idea always implicit in the arguments of the land-exploiting corporations: that there can be, and that there is, a safe disconnection between economy and ecology, between human domesticity and the wild world. Industrializing farmers have too readily assumed that the nature of their land could safely be subordinated to the capability of their technology, and that conservation could safely be left to conservationists. Conservationists have too readily assumed that the integrity of the natural world could be preserved mainly by preserving tracts of wilderness, and that the nature and nurture of the economic landscapes could safely be left to agribusiness, the timber industry, debt-ridden farmers and ranchers, and migrant laborers.

To me, it appears that these two sides are as divided as they are because each is clinging to its own version of a common economic error. How can this be corrected? I don’t think it can be, so long as each of the two sides remains closed up in its own conversation. I think the two sides need to enter into
one
conversation. They have got to talk to one another. Conservationists have got to know and deal competently with the methods and economics of land use. Land users have got to recognize the urgency, even the economic urgency, of the requirements of conservation.

Failing this, these two sides will simply concede an easy victory to their common enemy, the third side, the corporate totalitarianism which is now rapidly consolidating as “the global economy” and which will utterly dominate both the natural world and its human communities.

(1971)

I
N THE TIME when my memories begin—the late 1930s—people in the country did not go around empty-handed as much as they do now. As I remember them from that time, farm people on the way somewhere characteristically had buckets or kettles or baskets in their hands, sometimes sacks on their shoulders.

Those were hard times—not unusual in our agricultural history—and so a lot of the fetching and carrying had to do with foraging, searching the fields and woods for nature’s free provisions: greens in the springtime, fruits and berries in the summer, nuts in the fall. There was fishing in warm weather and hunting in cold weather; people did these things for food and for pleasure, not for “sport.” The economies of many households were small and thorough, and people took these seasonal opportunities seriously.

For the same reason, they practiced household husbandry. They raised gardens, fattened meat hogs, milked cows, kept flocks of chickens and other poultry. These enterprises were marginal to the farm, but central to the household. In a sense, they comprised the direct bond between farm and household. These enterprises produced surpluses which,
in those days, were marketable. And so when one saw farm people in town they would be laden with buckets of cream or baskets of eggs. Or maybe you would see a woman going into the grocery store, carrying two or three old hens with their legs tied together. Sometimes this surplus paid for what the family had to buy at the store. Sometimes after they “bought” their groceries in this way, they had money to take home. These households were places of production, at least some of the time operating at a net economic
gain
. The idea of “consumption” was alien to them. I am not talking about practices of exceptional families, but about what was ordinarily done on virtually all farms.

That economy was in the truest sense democratic. Everybody could participate in it—even little children. An important source of instruction and pleasure to a child growing up on a farm was participation in the family economy. Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money—a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One’s elders in those days were always admonishing one to save nickels and dimes, and there was tangible purpose in their advice: With enough nickels and dimes, one could buy a cow or a sow; with the income from a cow or a sow, one could begin to save to buy a farm. This scheme was plausible enough, evidently, for it seemed that all grown-ups had meditated on it. Now, according to the savants of agriculture—and most grown-ups now believe them—one does not start in farming with a sow or a cow; one must start with a quarter of a million dollars. What are the political implications of
that
economy?

I have so far mentioned only the most common small items of trade, but it was also possible to sell prepared foods: pies, bread, butter, beaten biscuits, cured hams, etc. And among the most attractive enterprises of that time were the small dairies that were added without much expense or trouble to the small, diversified farms. There would usually
be a milking room or stall partitioned off in a barn, with homemade wooden stanchions to accommodate perhaps three to half a dozen cows. The cows were milked by hand. The milk was cooled in cans in a tub of well water. For a minimal expenditure and an hour or so of effort night and morning, the farm gained a steady, dependable income. All this conformed to the ideal of my grandfather’s generation of farmers, which was to “sell something every week”—a maxim of diversity, stability, and small scale.

Both the foraging in fields and woods and the small husbandries of household and barn have now been almost entirely replaced by the “consumer economy,” which assumes that it is better to buy whatever one needs than to find it or make it or grow it. Advertisements and other forms of propaganda suggest that people should congratulate themselves on the quantity and variety of their purchases. Shopping, in spite of traffic and crowds, is held to be “easy” and “convenient.” Spending money gives one status. And physical exertion for any useful purpose is looked down upon; it is permissible to work hard for “sport” or “recreation,” but to make any practical use of the body is considered beneath dignity.

Aside from the fashions of leisure and affluence—so valuable to corporations, so destructive of values—the greatest destroyer of the small economies of the small farms has been the doctrine of sanitation. I have no argument against cleanliness and healthfulness; I am for them as much as anyone. I do, however, question the validity and the honesty of the sanitation laws that have come to rule over farm production in the last thirty or forty years. Why have new sanitation laws always required more, and more expensive, equipment? Why have they always worked against the survival of the small producer? Is it impossible to be inexpensively healthful and clean?

I am not a scientist or a sanitation expert, and cannot give conclusive answers to those questions; I can only say what I have observed and what I think. In a remarkably short time I have seen the demise of all the small
dairy operations in my part of the country, the shutting down of all local creameries and of all the small local dealers in milk and milk products. I have seen the grocers forced to quit dealing in eggs produced by local farmers, and have seen the closing of all markets for small quantities of poultry.