Bringing It to the Table (16 page)

That comes to a total of $31.15 per acre—or, if the corn makes only a hundred bushels per acre, a little over $0.31 per bushel. In the second year his per-acre cost is $14.75, less than $0.15 per bushel, bringing the two-year average to $22.95 per acre or about $0.23 per bushel.

The herbicide is used because, extra horses being on the farm during the winter, Bill has to buy eighty to a hundred tons of hay, and in that way brings in weed seed. He had no weed problem until he started buying hay. Even though he uses the herbicide, he still cultivates his corn three times.

His cost per acre of oats came to $33.00 ($12.00 for seed and $21.00 for fertilizer)—or, at ninety bushels per acre, about $0.37 per bushel.

Of Bill’s eighty acres, sixty-two are tillable. He has ten acres of permanent pasture, and seven or eight of woodland, which produced the lumber for all the building he has done on the place. In addition, for $500 a year he rents an adjoining eighty acres of “hill and woods pasture” which provides summer grazing for twenty heifers; and on another neighboring farm he rents varying amounts of cropland.

All the field work is done with horses, and this, of course, comes virtually free—a by-product of the horse-breeding enterprise. Bill has an ancient Model D John Deere tractor that he uses for belt power.

At the time of our visit, there were twenty-two head of horses on the place. But that number was unusually low, for Bill aims to keep “around thirty head.” He has a band of excellent brood mares and three stallions, plus young stock of assorted ages. Since October 1 of last year, he had sold eighteen head of registered Belgian horses. In the winters he operates a “urine line,” collecting “pregnant mare urine,” which is sold to a pharmaceutical company for the extraction of various hormones. For this purpose he boards a good many mares belonging to neighbors; that is why he must buy the extra hay that causes his weed problem. (Horses are so numerous on this farm because they are one of its money-making
enterprises. If horses were used only for work on this farm, four good geldings would be enough.)

One bad result of the dramatic rise in draft horse prices over the last eight or ten years is that it has tended to focus attention on such characteristics as size and color to the neglect of less obvious qualities such as good feet. To me, foot quality seems a critical issue. A good horse with bad feet is good for nothing but decoration, and at sales and shows there are far too many flawed feet disguised by plastic wood and black shoe polish. And so I was pleased to see that every horse on Bill Yoder’s place had sound, strong-walled, correctly shaped feet. They were good horses all around, but their other qualities were well-founded; they stood on good feet, and this speaks of the thoroughness of his judgment and also of his honesty.

Though he is a master horseman, and the draft horse business is more lucrative now than ever in its history, Bill does not specialize in horses, and that is perhaps the clearest indication of his integrity as a farmer. Whatever may be the dependability of the horse economy, on this farm it rests upon a diversified agricultural economy that is sound.

He was milking five Holstein cows; he had fifteen Holstein heifers that he had raised to sell; and he had just marketed thirty finished hogs, which is the number that he usually has on hand. All the animals had been well wintered—Bill quotes his father approvingly: “Well wintered is half summered”—and were in excellent condition. Another saying of his father’s that Bill likes to quote—“Keep the horses on the side of the fence the feed is on”—has obviously been obeyed here. The feeding is careful, the feed is good, and it is abundant. Though it was almost spring, there were ample surpluses in the hayloft and in the corn cribs.

Other signs of the farm’s good health were three sizable garden plots, and newly pruned grapevines and raspberry canes. The gardener of the family is Mrs.Yoder. Though most of the children are now gone from home, Bill says that she still grows as much garden stuff as she ever did.
ALL SEVEN OF the Yoders’ sons live in the community. Floyd, the youngest, is still at home. Harley has a house on nearly three acres, works in town, and returns in the afternoons to his own shop where he works as a farrier. Henry, who also works in town, lives with Harley and his wife. The other four sons are now settled on farms that they are in the process of paying for. Richard has eighty acres, Orla eighty, Mel fifty-seven, and Wilbur eighty. Two sons-in-law also living in the community are Perry Bontrager, who owns ninety-five acres, and Ervin Mast, who owns sixty-five. Counting Bill’s eighty acres, the seven families are living on 537 acres. Of the seven farms, only Mel’s is entirely tillable, the acreages in woods or permanent pasture varying from five to twenty-six.

These young men have all taken over run-down farms, on which they are establishing rotations and soil husbandry practices that, being traditional, more or less resemble Bill’s. It seemed generally agreed that after three years of this treatment the land would grow corn, as Perry Bontrager said, “like anywhere else.”

These are good farmers, capable of the intelligent planning, sound judgment, and hard work that good farming requires. Abused land heals and flourishes in their care. None of them expressed a wish to own more land; all, I believe, feel that what they have will be enough—when it is paid for. The big problems are high land prices and high interest rates, the latter apparently being the worst.

The answer, for Bill’s sons so far, has been town work. All of them, after leaving home, have worked for Redman Industries, a manufacturer of mobile homes in Topeka. They do piecework, starting at seven in the morning and quitting at two in the afternoon, using the rest of the day for farming or other work. This, Bill thinks, is now “the only way” to get started farming. Even so, there is “a lot of debt” in the community—“more than ever.”

With a start in factory work, with family help, with government and bank loans, with extraordinary industry and perseverance, with highly
developed farming skills, it is still possible for young Amish families to own a small farm that will eventually support them. But there is more strain in that effort now than there used to be, and more than there should be. When the burden of usurious interest becomes too great, these young men are finding it necessary to make temporary returns to their town jobs.

The only one who spoke of his income was Mel, who owns fifty-seven acres, which, he says,
will be
enough. He and his family milk six Holsteins. He had nine mares on the urine line last winter, seven of which belonged to him. And he had twelve brood sows. Last year his gross income was $43,000. Of this, $12,000 came from hogs, $7,000 from his milk cows, the rest from his horses and the sale of his wheat. After his production costs, but
before
payment of interest, he netted $22,000. In order to cope with the interest payments, Mel was preparing to return to work in town.

These little Amish farms thus become the measure both of “conventional” American agriculture and of the cultural meaning of the national industrial economy.

To begin with, these farms give the lie directly to that false god of “agribusiness”: the so-called economy of scale. The small farm is not an anachronism, is not unproductive, is not unprofitable. Among the Amish, it is still thriving, and is still the economic foundation of what John A. Hostetler (in
Amish Society
, third edition) rightly calls “a healthy culture.” Though they do not produce the “record-breaking yields” so touted by the “agribusiness” establishment, these farms are nevertheless highly productive. And if they are not likely to make their owners rich (never an Amish goal), they can certainly be said to be sufficiently profitable. The economy of scale has helped corporations and banks, not farmers and farm communities. It has been an economy of dispossession and waste—plutocratic, if not in aim, then certainly in result.

What these Amish farms suggest, on the contrary, is that in farming there is inevitably a scale that is suitable both to the productive capacity of the land and to the abilities of the farmer; and that agricultural problems are to be properly solved, not in expansion, but in management, diversity, balance, order, responsible maintenance, good character, and in the sensible limitation of investment and overhead. (Bill makes a careful distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” debt, a “healthy debt” being “one you can hope to pay off in a reasonable way.”)

Most significant, perhaps, is that while conventional agriculture, blindly following the tendency of any industry to exhaust its sources, has made soil erosion a national catastrophe, these Amish farms conserve the land and improve it in use.

And what is one to think of a national economy that drives such obviously able and valuable farmers to factory work? What value does such an economy impose upon thrift, effort, skill, good husbandry, family and community health?

 

IN SPITE OF the unrelenting destructiveness of the larger economy, the Amish—as Hostetler points out with acknowledged surprise and respect—have almost doubled in population in the last twenty years. The doubling of a population is, of course, no significant achievement. What is significant is that these agricultural communities have doubled their population
and yet remained agricultural communities
during a time when conventional farmers have failed by the millions. This alone would seem to call for a careful look at Amish ways of farming. That those ways have, during the same time, been ignored by the colleges and the agencies of agriculture must rank as a prime intellectual wonder.

Amish farming has been so ignored, I think, because it involves a complicated structure that is at once biological and cultural, rather than industrial or economic. I suspect that anyone who might attempt an accounting of the economy of an Amish farm would soon find himself
dealing with virtually unaccountable values, expenses, and benefits. He would be dealing with biological forces and processes not always measurable, with spiritual and community values not quantifiable; at certain points he would be dealing with mysteries—and he would be finding that these unaccountables and inscrutables have results, among others, that are economic. Hardly an appropriate study for the “science” of agricultural economics.

The economy of conventional agriculture or “agribusiness” is remarkable for the simplicity of its arithmetic. It involves a manipulation of quantities that are all entirely accountable. List your costs (land, equipment, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, wages), add them up, subtract them from your earnings, or subtract your earnings from them, and you have the result.

Suppose, on the other hand, that you have an eighty-acre farm that is not a “food factory” but your home, your given portion of Creation which you are morally and spiritually obliged “to dress and to keep.” Suppose you farm, not for wealth, but to maintain the integrity and the practical supports of your family and community. Suppose that, the farm being small enough, you farm it with family work and work exchanged with neighbors. Suppose you have six Belgian brood mares that you use for field work. Suppose that you also have milk cows and hogs, and that you raise a variety of grain and hay crops in rotation. What happens to your accounting then?

To start with, several of the costs of conventional farming are greatly diminished or done away with. Equipment, fertilizer, chemicals all cost much less. Fuel becomes feed, but you have the mares and are feeding them anyway; the work ration for a brood mare is not a lot more costly than a maintenance ration. And the horses, like the rest of the livestock, are making manure. Figure that in, and figure, if you can, the value of the difference between manure and chemical fertilizer. You can probably get an estimate of the value of the nitrogen fixed by your alfalfa, but
how will you quantify the value to the soil of its residues and deep roots? Try to compute the value of humus in the soil—in improved drainage, improved drought resistance, improved tilth, improved health. Wages, if you pay your children, will still be among your costs. But compute the difference between paying your children and paying “labor.” Work exchanged with neighbors can be reduced to “man-hours” and assigned a dollar value. But compute the difference between a neighbor and “labor.” Compute the value of a family or a community to any one of its members. We may, as we must, grant that among the values of family and community there is economic value—but what is it?

In the Louisville
Courier-Journal
of April 5, 1981, the Mobil Oil Corporation ran an advertisement which was yet another celebration of “scientific agriculture.” American farming, the Mobile people are of course happy to say, “requires more petroleum products than almost any other industry. A gallon of gasoline to produce a single bushel of corn, for example. . . .” This, they say, enables “each American farmer to feed sixty-seven people.” And they say that this is “a-maizing.”

Well, it certainly is! And the chances are good that an agriculture totally dependent on the petroleum industry is not yet as amazing as it is going to be. But one thing that is already sufficiently amazing is that a bushel of corn produced by the burning of one gallon of gasoline has already cost more than
six times
as much as a bushel of corn grown by Bill Yoder. How does Bill Yoder escape what may justly be called the petroleum tax on agriculture? He does so by a series of substitutions: of horses for tractors, of feed for fuel, of manure for fertilizer, of sound agricultural methods and patterns for the exploitive methods and patterns of industry. But he has done more than that—or, rather, he and his people and their tradition have done more. They have substituted themselves, their families, and their communities for petroleum. The Amish use little petroleum—and need little—because they have those other things.

I do not think that we can make sense of Amish farming until we see it, until we become willing to see it, as belonging essentially to the Amish practice of Christianity, which instructs that one’s neighbors are to be loved as oneself. To farmers who give priority to the maintenance of their community, the economy of scale (that is, the economy of
large
scale, of “growth”) can make no sense, for it requires the ruination and displacement of neighbors. A farm cannot be increased except by the decrease of a neighborhood. What the interest of the community proposes is invariably an economy of
proper
scale. A whole set of agricultural proprieties must be observed: of farm size, of methods, of tools, of energy sources, of plant and animal species. Community interest also requires charity, neighborliness, the care and instruction of the young, respect for the old; thus it ensures its integrity and survival. Above all, it requires good stewardship of the land, for the community, as the Amish have always understood, is no better than its land. “If treated violently or exploited selfishly,” John Hostetler writes, the land “will yield poorly.” There could be no better statement of the meaning of the
practice
and the practicality of charity. Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.