Food fight: local farming vs. agribusiness

Christian Century, Dec 27, 2003 by Bill McKibben

The Essential Agrarian Reader. Edited by Norman Wirzba. University Press of Kentucky, 256 pp., $27.00.

THE FARMER'S DINER in Barre, Vermont, serves the foods you would expect at a diner--ham and eggs, home fries, hamburgers, milkshakes. And it serves them at prices you would expect--the average cheek is about $7.50. Almost all of the food comes from within a 50-mile radius--which you also might expect, given that Barre is surrounded by good farmland, supporting pigs, chickens, potatoes, steers and dairy cows. But the fact that the food it serves is locally grown actually makes this place decidedly weird, the strangest diner in the country.

To open his restaurant Tod Murphy had to buck every trend in American agriculture, He had to buy his own smokehouse, persuade schoolkids to raise pork and find someplace to get chickens slaughtered. He had to try to relocalize farming.

At the moment American agriculture is anything but local. The average North American supper travels 1,500 miles between farm gate and dinner plate. Depending on your perspective, this might seem a kind of miracle. Our farms are so vast and efficient that they provide us with mountains of cheap food even though less than 2 percent of us work on them--fewer Americans than inhabit our jails. The other 98 percent of us have been freed to do something else: write software, preach sermons, collect tolls.

But you could look at this another way--as more of a curse than a miracle. You could see rural communities emptied, and farms dependent on the unsustainable use of chemicals and fossil fuel. You could see animals concentrated in such massive numbers that abuse is a synonym for existence. You could see cheap, subsidized food wrecking the lives of peasant farmers around the world. You could see tasteless, overprocessed "food products" filling our supermarkets and inflating our bodies. You could see urban and suburban Americans robbed of any connection to the source of their sustenance. This is the perspective of the persuasive group of authors collected in The Essential Agrarian Reader, which is an unhysterical but thorough indictment not just of American agriculture but of the larger American culture of which it is a diminished part.

Many of the pieces in this book originated as a tribute to Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer who 25 years ago published The Unsettling of America. Berry's essays have proven to be seminal, in many ways even more long-lasting and deep-reaching than E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. With an authority that stretches from the practical to the moral, his words have done more than any other force to launch the wave of farmer's markets, community-supported agriculture and small organic experiments that have enlivened our dinner tables in recent times.

In a larger sense, however, Berry's work must be counted a failure. As in the effort to get Americans to protect the climate, small victories have been overwhelmed by crushing losses. As Berry points out in the opening essay, America now has half the number of farms it had in 1977. Farm communities are poorer, suburban sprawl is uglier. "The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world's agricultural diversity, which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations." A thousand edible nasturtiums may have bloomed in a thousand farmer's markets, but Monsanto, Cargill and ADM have blighted a million villages with their crushing industrial farming. So far the momentum is going the wrong way.

This volume attempts, mostly successfully, to broaden the discussion, to build the ranks of those who would support a new agrarianism--a localized, careful, beautiful, reined-in agriculture (and forestry and fisheries) that builds dignified lives and strong communities. Brian Donahue is a professor at Brandeis University, not one of America's foremost ag schools. But he writes a remarkably smart and hopeful essay imagining a compromise between the arcadian and the agrarian--a countryside composed mostly of suburban dwellers who nonetheless support and benefit from a healthy working farm community in their midst.

Taking his cues from the many New England communities that have experimented with the widespread use of easements and conservation land to protect working landscapes, he envisions a new commons taking hold. Travel through most American farmland, be notes, and you'll see vast stretches of unpopulated fields waiting for the occasional visit by crop duster or combine. "Then we reach the beltways surrounding our cities, and see tract housing going up at a furious pace, often on prime farmland." Wouldn't it be nice, he mites, "if all of that eerily unsettled rural countryside were instead dense with diversified 100-acre farmsteads, with their grain and hay rotations, livestock, and pastures embedded in a landscape of protected forest, wetland, and prairie," and in turn supporting an infinity of small villages, connected to the world via all our modern communications pipelines so that people could work at a variety of jobs, but remain connected to the real world by sheer immersion in a particular landscape.