Farming and the Global Economy

This is a pretty lazy time here on Liberty Farm as the daylength continues to wane toward the solstice and then slowly begins waxing once again as we march toward spring. The ram is busy watching over his harem and checking the ewes for standing heat but the human inhabitants here only have to fill the hayboxes, chicken feeder and water buckets daily and keep an eye on the general health of the flocks. We've got a little work left to finish putting the garden to bed for the winter and the weather forecast for the coming week makes us hopeful that we'll finish that up soon. I've also got a couple small project in the works for this long weekend that I'll write about later.

In general, though, this time of year is one for planning, reading and enjoying long evenings over good meals. Right now I'm reading Another Turn Of The Crank, a collection of essays by Wendell Berry and I’d like to provide some thoughts and quotes from each of the six essays over the next couple of weeks. The first essay is “Farming and the Global Economy.” Berry writes about how American agriculture was still primarily solar powered as late as World War II but nevertheless was “still drawing, without sufficient repayment, against an account of natural fertility accumulated over thousands of years beneath the native forest trees and prairie grasses.” He goes on to write about the path taken after the Second World War:

Instead, the adopted agenda called for a shift from the cheap, clean, and, for all practical purposes, limitless energy of the sun to the expensive, filthy, and limited energy of fossil fuels. It called for the massive use of chemical fertilizers to offset the destruction of topsoil and the depletion of natural fertility. It called also for the displacement of nearly the entire farming population and the replacement of their labor and good farming practices by machines and toxic chemicals. This agenda has succeeded in its aims, but to the benefit of no one and nothing except the corporations that have supplied the necessary machines, fuels, and chemicals - and the corporations that have bought cheap and sold high the products that, as a result of this agenda, have been increasingly expensive for farmers to produce.

Being Wendell Berry, of course, he doesn’t just point out where we’ve went wrong and then leave it at that. Rather, Berry offers us solutions - diversification, on-farm production of fertility and energy, replacing purchased goods with natural health and diversity, and cooperation between farmers and consumers. Here are a couple more quotes:

If farmers do not wish to cooperate any longer in their own destruction, then they will have to reduce their dependence on those global economic forces that intend and approve and profit from the destruction of farmers, and they will have to increase their dependence on local nature and local intelligence.

If communities of farmers and consumers wish to promote a sustainable, safe, and reasonably inexpensive supply of good food, then they must see that the best, the safest, and most dependable source of food for a city is not the global economy with its extreme vulnerabilities and extravagant transportation costs, but its own surrounding countryside. It is, in every way, in the best interest of urban consumers to be surrounded by productive land, well farmed and well maintained by thriving farm families in thriving farm communities.

Since this essay was published in 1995, I think we've come a long way with things like the Eat Local Challenge and the 100-Mile Diet and related 100-Mile Thanksgiving. Certainly only a small minority of farmers and consumers alike are even aware of such ideas but I still think the tide is turning. The absurdity of our global food economy becomes apparent whenever an outbreak of food-borne illness such as the recent E. Coli infection of bagged spinach and the ground beef recalls comes to light. Berry points out that this shift to a local food economy is best done gradually and the signs are there that it's happening. This little 3-4 county area in north central Ohio where I live has a thriving little food economy of grass-based farms working toward sustainability.