What Matters?. Wendell Berry
or subsidies without production controls. This is because surplus production is an economic weapon, allowing corporations to reduce income to farmers while increasing their own income.
2. Return to 100 percent parity between agriculture and industry. Parity (fair) prices for agricultural products would make proposed payments for “ecological services” unnecessary, and would solve other problems as well.
3. Enforce anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws. Don’t let any corporation get big, rich, or powerful enough to hold the nation for ransom. This applies with exceptional force to agribusiness and food corporations.
4. Help young farmers to own farms. In a sane economy such help would be unnecessary, but the departure of farm-raised young people from farming is now an agricultural crisis of the greatest urgency. And we don’t have enough farm-raised young people. Others need to be drawn in. Here are some measures we should consider. We should set appropriate and reasonable acreage limits, according to region, for family-scale farms and ranches. Taxes should be heavy on holdings above those limits. Holdings within the prescribed limits should be taxed at their agricultural value. There should be inheritance taxes on large holdings; none on small holdings. No-interest loans should be made available to young farmers and ranchers buying acreages under the limits. (These suggestions raise a lot of problems, and I flinch in making them. Acreage limits are hard to set appropriately, as we learned from the homestead laws. Also some of these measures would be unnecessary if land prices were not inflated above agricultural value, and if food prices were not deflated below their actual economic and ecological cost.
5. Phase out toxic chemicals, which are inconsistent with the principles of good agriculture, and which are polluting the rivers and the oceans.
6. Phase out biofuels as quickly as possible. We have got to observe a strict distinction between fire and food, driving and eating. We can’t “feed the hungry” and feed automobiles from the same land, using the same land-destroying technologies and methods, forever.
7. Phase in perennial plants—for pasture, winter forage, and grain crops—to replace annual crops requiring annual soil disturbance or annual applications of “no-till” chemicals. This would bring a substantial reduction of soil erosion and toxicity.
8. Set and enforce high standards of water quality.
9. High water quality standards (enforced) and a program to replace annual crops with perennials would tend strongly toward the elimination of animal factories. But let us be forthright on this issue. We should get rid of animal factories, those abominations, as quickly as we can. Get the farm animals, including hogs and chickens, back on grass. Put the animals where they belong, and their manure where it belongs.
10. Animal production should be returned to the scale of localities and communities. Do away with subsidies, incentives, and legislation favorable to gigantism in dairy, meat, and egg production.
11. Encourage the development of local food economies, which make more sense agriculturally and economically than our present overspecialized, too-concentrated, long-distance food economy. Local food economies are desirable also from the standpoints of public health, “homeland security,” and the energy economy. Provide economic incentives and supportive legislation for the establishment of local, small-scale food-processing plants, canneries, year-round farmers’ markets, etc.
12. Local food economies, to be genuine, require local adaptation of domestic species and varieties of plants and animals. The universal evolutionary requirement of local adaptation has unaccountably been waived with respect to humans. But this waiver is potentially disastrous. We need ways of agriculture that are preservingly adapted to the ecological mosaic and even to individual farms and ranches. For the sake of local adaptation, and the genetic diversity that is necessary to it, we need to put an end to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s proposed National Animal Identification System, to the patenting of species, and to genetic engineering—all of which aim at a general agricultural uniformity and corporate control of agriculture and food. Central planning and its inevitable goal of uniformity cannot work in agriculture because of the requirement of local adaptation and the consequent need for local intelligence. Central planning and uniformity are effective only for the diminishment of genetic and biological diversity and the destruction of small producers.
13. Help and encourage small-scale forestry and owners of small woodlands. See that current market prices for sawlogs and other forest products are readily available everywhere. Tax fairly.
14. Study and teach sustainable forestry, using examples such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and the Pioneer Forest in Missouri.
15. Promote the good use and care of farm woodlands as assets integral to the economy of farms.
16. Encourage the development, in forested regions, of local forest economies, providing economic incentives for local processing and value-adding, as for food.
Would such measures increase significantly the number of people at work in the land economy? Of course they would. This would be an authentic version, for a change, of “job creation.” This work would help our economy, our people, and our country all at the same time. And that is the authentic test of practicality, for it makes complete economic sense.
(2009)
Major in Homecoming
For Commencement, Northern Kentucky University
Commencement speakers conventionally advise graduates that they must not think of the end of school as the end of education: They must continue to think of themselves as students and to study and learn for as long as they live.
I agree with that, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. I am now obliged to say to you graduates, not only that your education must continue, but also that it must change. It is necessary to say to you, moreover, that the institutions that so far have helped to educate you are going to have to change. As loyal alumni and responsible citizens, you are going to have to help them to change, even as you change yourselves.
I am taking the theme of this talk from my friend Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas, who has said, correctly, that our system of education until now has had only one major: Upward Mobility. Now, Wes says, a second major needs to be added, and the name of this major will be Homecoming.
The Upward Mobility major has put our schools far too much at the service of what we have been calling overconfidently our “economy.” Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations. There has been an ongoing feeble objection to this reduction, but most people have been willing to ignore or tolerate it, or even applaud it, despite the obvious dangers. Now, however, the failure of the economy and its subservient institutions has become too obvious to be denied. We are now facing a hardship long deferred. We have no choice but to do better.
That our economy has been enormously destructive has been evident for many years, and nowhere has this been more evident than here in Kentucky. The occupation of this state by people predominantly European began 234 years ago. In so brief a time we have destroyed or blighted or used up a far greater fraction of the state’s natural bounty than good care for as many years could restore. Most of this damage has been done, and at an ever-accelerating rate, during my lifetime. Much of what we have destroyed is gone forever. The fossil fuels that we have so regardlessly extracted and burned cannot be unburned. The topsoils and forests and watersheds destroyed by mining will not be replenished in a time imaginable by humans. Virtually all of the original forest is long gone, and much of the regrowth has been abusively logged. Virtually all of our streams are polluted, and we are contributing our share to the pollution of the earth’s atmosphere. Erosion has carried away immense tonnages of soil from our farms and woodlands, which are increasingly threatened also by invasive plants, insects, and diseases. All this