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NY Review of Books, September 27, 2018 Issue
Green and Pleasant Land
Verlyn Klinkenborg
The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History
by Richard Lyman Bushman
Yale University Press, 376 pp., $40.00
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
by Ted Genoways
Norton, 226 pp., $26.95
Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice of a Family Farm
by Mike Madison
Chelsea Green, 164 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Walking the Flatlands: The Rural Landscape of the Lower Sacramento Valley
by Mike Madison
Great Valley/Heyday, 157 pp. (2004)
“I owe very little to books,” wrote William Cobbett in 1818. At the
time, he was living on Long Island in political exile from his native
England, and he was referring to practical books about how to farm and
garden. The sentiment sounds a little strange coming from him, for he
was a great maker of books of the kind he owed very little to—books like
Cottage Economy, A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn, The American Gardener,
The English Gardener, The Woodlands, A Year’s Residence in the United
States of America, and, in its own way, Rural Rides.
As a farmer and writer about farming, Cobbett was both an innovator and
a radical nostalgist, a forward-looking plantsman with an almost Roman
sense of the relationship between the farmer as cultivator and the
farmer as citizen. In his often obstreperous way, he wrote endlessly
about the link between farming and politics, farming and monetary
policy, farming and society itself. He was an unrelenting critic of the
effect of capital and its manipulation on farmers and farm laborers, and
his criticism is still instructive. Agriculturally, we live now on the
planet of Cobbett’s nightmares.
The United States, Cobbett wrote, “is really and truly a country of
farmers. Here, Governors, Legislators, Presidents, all are farmers.” Yet
what Cobbett complained of in England—that farming had become a form of
investment, purely a matter of profit and return—was barely understood
in America at the time. In his illuminating new study, The American
Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History, Richard
Lyman Bushman quotes a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington
in 1793, commenting on a query from Arthur Young in England. “I had
never before thought of calculating what were the profits of a capital
invested in Virginia agriculture,” Jefferson wrote.
An entirely different farming model prevailed in this nascent country,
where land was abundant and labor scarce. The ideal was the
“self-provisioning” farm, a family living upon a piece of land and
working first to survive, then “to amass resources for the next
generation.” As Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur put it in 1782, in one of
his widely read “Letters from an American Farmer,” every American farmer
was a kind of “universal fabricator like Crusoe,” struggling to develop
what Bushman calls “a core household economy to satisfy most of the
family’s wants.” Yet “almost no one,” he explains, “was self sufficient.
Farmers had to enter into exchanges to live.” Instead of
self-sufficiency, the goal was “to keep in balance with the world,” to
avoid debt by producing what you needed at home. Farming wasn’t a
vocation. It was “an activity, like gardening, that could be combined
with other work.” And that other work—building coffins or boats, for
instance, like Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut—was as much a
part of the system of exchange as the buying and selling of sheep or wheat.
The model of the self-provisioning farm eventually died, though it
persisted, Bushman notes, right up to World War II and was the basis of
the Homestead Act of 1862, which “adopted the small farm as the
predominant plan for disposing of the national domain.” Yet you can
still hear the idea echoing not only in the realm of small, diversified
market farms, which have begun to proliferate (again) in the past decade
or two, but also among conventional farmers trying to voice their
relevance in the national economy.
Take Meghan Hammond, the outspoken Nebraska farmer who appears in This
Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted
Genoways. She and her family go about farming in much the same way as
their neighbors, raising corn and soybeans and running some cattle. They
use conventional methods, which involve, as one writer puts it, killing
“everything but the crop.” And like their neighbors, they’re trapped,
financially and contractually. Late in the book—late enough that the
reader has a feel for her frustration—Hammond offers an impromptu survey
of the terribly wrong road that American agriculture has taken in the
past century, a road paved by the US Department of Agriculture and well
described by Genoways. She ends by asking him, “Are you ready to go
raise your own food?”
This sounds like a trenchant question until you realize that Hammond
isn’t really raising our food, or even her own. For the most part, she
and her family are growing industrial commodities—corn and soybeans—and
their work is carefully monitored by corporations like Monsanto and
Pioneer, who sell them the chemicals and lease them the seeds they use
and whose approach to farmers violating the letter of their contracts is
harshly punitive. Like nearly all conventional farms, hers supplies
almost none of its own resources and is tightly bound by debt and
government subsidies (and the controls that come with them), and by the
volatility of commodity prices.
Genoways begins his book by showing us Kyle Galloway, Meghan’s fiancé,
doing some modern self-provisioning: welding the floor of a grain bin
from salvaged steel so he can store his own soybeans (instead of paying
to store them at the grain elevator) as a hedge against fluctuations in
the soybean market. The farmscape Genoways portrays is the land of the
unfree trying desperately to retain the illusion of their freedom, an
illusion made all the more illusory in the era of Trump, whose proposed
tariffs will surely hurt farmers.
Industrial agriculture—shaped by the USDA, by chemical and seed
companies, by the vagaries of domestic and export markets—relies on a
picture of the family farmer to soften its image. It wants it both ways.
It wants to celebrate its technical innovations, like genetically
modified crops, computer-driven tractors, and satellite-monitored
fields. And yet it also wants to foster our national nostalgia for
farming and the men and women who do it. The contradiction is
intolerable, especially to farmers.
Genoways tries to make the reader feel the contradiction too, and he
gets it right, for by the time you finish reading This Blessed Earth,
you feel hopeless and agitated. Meghan and Kyle marry and will go on
farming. They will remain unwilling apologists for an agricultural
system that has driven farmers off the depleted soil, drawn down the
aquifers, and killed the small towns of Nebraska—a system, Hammond says,
in which “everything has been built around a certain way of doing
things.” They’ll oppose the Keystone XL pipeline—dead under Obama,
revived under Trump—which threatens their land, their livelihood, and
their friendships. They’ll work as hard as possible because how hard
they work is the only thing they can control, and because labor is the
only thing they have to offer. An article of faith in their world,
writes Genoways, is “that the greatest success belongs to the family
that works the hardest.” Like so many articles of faith, this is simply
not true.
No one is going to read This Blessed Earth and come away thinking,
“Gosh, I’d like to be a farmer.” Farmers, as Cobbett pointed out, don’t
tend to come from books, and especially not from books as grimly
accurate as this one. And yet it’s no longer true that farmers have to
be raised, like turnips, from the soil itself, inheriting the methods by
which they were raised. Most of the young farmers so visible in places
like the Hudson Valley come from what you might call nontraditional
farming backgrounds. They didn’t grow up on farms: they chose to become
farmers. Moreover, they’ve chosen how to farm, and they do so usually in
ways that flout the USDA’s mantra of growth at any cost.
If farming has become, for many young farmers, an elective vocation, it
raises an important question: Who do you need to be in order to farm?
Could good farming be a matter of character? In my young Iowa life,
surrounded by farming aunts and uncles and cousins, I often heard them
talk about the state of their neighbors’ fields. But only once do I
remember the question of character coming up, when one of my cousins
said of another cousin, “He always has trouble getting things done on
time.” It was simply assumed that farming would turn you into a farmer,
whether you had it in you or not.
There are plenty of books about farming these days, and a few of them
are even intended for farmers, not consumers. Most of them, of course,
are actually about food. But to me, it doesn’t really feel like a
farming book unless it’s about labor—what farmers do and how they do
it—and about the topography, cultural and literal, of the farm itself.
And there’s something else too. A good farming book—a book about the
work of farming—shows a kind of narrative reluctance, an unwillingness
to tell stories as if the main thing that matters is the way they end.
Think of it as a Jeffersonian indifference to profit or the bottom
line—a nonnarrative approach. What matters instead is the quality of
observation, the details. From these things a sense of character will
emerge. This isn’t just a conceit on my part. There are good models for
this kind of writing, like Stanley Crawford’s Majordomo and A Garlic
Testament. But perhaps the best example I’ve ever found is a new book by
Mike Madison called Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice
of a Family Farm.
Madison and his wife, Diane, farm twenty-one acres along Putah Creek in
the Sacramento Valley, a few miles west of Davis, California. They raise
mostly citrus, stone fruits, flowers, and olives, which they’ve been
selling at the Davis Farmers’ Market for some thirty years. All that
time, it seems, Madison has been thinking about three questions: Where
am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? He has written two books that
try to answer these questions, Fruitful Labor and, on a somewhat broader
geographic scale, Walking the Flatlands: The Rural Landscape of the
Lower Sacramento Valley (2004). Together, they form “the simple and
sincere account of his own life” that Thoreau required of every
writer—or was it every farmer?—except that Madison’s account is not so
simple. It is detailed, analytic, imbued with a warm rationality, and it
constitutes a thoughtful farmer’s answer to Thoreau, on economic matters
at least. It also has a densely layered sense of perspective.
Here, for instance, is a sentence from the chapter called “Crops” about
the area where Madison farms: “The region has a fairly stable and
orderly society, and the rule of law predominates most of the time.”
This sentence struck me when I first read it, and only later did I
realize why. It sounds like something from Cobbett’s The Emigrant’s
Guide (1829) or John Lorain’s Hints to Emigrants (1819) or John Woods’s
Two Years’ Residence in the Settlement on the English Prairie in the
Illinois Country, United States (1821). It is the sound of a farmer
considering the nature of the region and whether it would be wise to
settle there. We take it for granted that an orderly society and general
obedience to the rule of law are prerequisites for farming, which
requires stable land tenure and continued access to markets and credit.
But why should we take these things for granted? After all, farming in
early America required not only opening the land but also creating the
political and economic stability needed for farming to continue. This
wasn’t done by someone else on behalf of farmers. It was done by
farmers. To notice these things, as Madison does, is to accept
responsibility for them, to acknowledge a historic continuity.
“Where am I?” turns out to be a profound question, especially given the
location of Madison’s farm. A few miles east is what is arguably the
most important agricultural research university in the world, UC Davis,
a place where even now scientists are working on patentable, genetically
modified soil bacteria. Over the hills to the west is the Napa Valley,
an agricultural enclave that has become a byword for nonagricultural
excess. On the flatland where Madison lives, the Sacramento Valley makes
its transition from highly industrialized agriculture on an enormous
scale to the small market farms that thread their way north through the
Capay Valley. Because of California’s peculiar history, this is a place
where “self-provisioning” farms never prevailed, where “farming was
strictly a cash enterprise, right from the outset.” It’s also a place
where a farmer like Madison can imagine what’s been lost—what might have
been—if Japanese farmers in his district hadn’t been interned during
World War II or Congress hadn’t passed the Alien Land Law in 1913,
“which prohibited most Asians from owning land.”
Inevitably, Madison’s reflections bring to mind Bushman’s description of
the tragic contradiction at the heart of American agriculture. “The
family farmer,” Bushman writes, “was both the embodiment of the American
dream and the leading actor in the displacement of the native peoples.”
This is a thought that has never loomed large at the Farm Bureau.
Instead of taking us through his work, season by season, crop by
crop—the narrative approach—Madison explores his farm and its methods
analytically, from many overlapping angles. The result is profoundly
interesting. He looks at the way he spreads his labor during the year,
“so that I always have work to do”—and by work, he means “pleasant,
interesting, autonomous, meaningful work carried out under the open
sky.” He tries to calculate the rates of energy production and
consumption on the farm, including measurements of human and animal
labor—a calculation, as he says, with lots of “fuzzy edges.” He attempts
a rough estimate “of the biomass of larger herbivores” on the farm,
which includes approximately seventy squirrels, eight hundred pocket
gophers, and a thousand voles. He assembles a catalog of the twenty-five
“Government Agencies Regulating Farm Activities” in his district. He
creates a long list of “Tools and Machines in Use on the Farm,” which
ends with “500 other miscellaneous small tools.” He concludes that on
his farm, “counting only the active equipment, there is about eight
hundred pounds of steel per acre farmed.” He pauses to consider the
intrinsic value of a single bent nail, reminding us that iron in that
form, “with the oxygen driven from it…is exceptional on our planet, and
goes against the grain of planetary chemistry.”
The point of all these lists and calculations is to help measure
Madison’s efforts to keep his farm in balance with the world. “It is
instructive,” he writes, “to draw a line around the perimeter of a farm
and then to measure the movement of materials (or energy) across that
line, onto and off the farm.” By this standard, conventional
farms—heavily reliant on petroleum-based chemicals, fossil fuels, and
leased seeds—are sinkholes of consumption. Madison’s goal is to make the
farm operation as self-provisioning as possible, so that the farm
supplies as many of its own requirements—energy and fertility, for
example—as it can. This, of course, is one of the basic measures of
sustainability. So is the “psychological well-being of the farm family,”
a standard you’ll want to keep in mind while reading This Blessed Earth.
In America—thanks to its abundance of land—there have always been two
kinds of farmers: movers and improvers. Movers were the ones who farmed
out the fertility in a patch of ground and then moved along to the next
patch. This is more or less how America was settled. Improvers were the
ones who did everything they could to preserve and increase the
fertility of their soil. The intensity of the debate over these methods
reached its peak in the early nineteenth century.* In the long run, the
improvers faded from the discussion, especially after World War II and
the introduction of chemical fertilizers. The movers continue to move,
but in a different manner these days. When farmers ran out of new land,
they simply mined their way downward through the fertility of eroding
layers of farmland until they reached the place we are now.
Farmland, instead of being a carbon sink, has been forced to surrender
its carbon. Iowa’s once-black soils are now “a washed-out tan color from
loss of organic matter.” All that lost fertility is replaced annually by
injections of anhydrous ammonia, which is toxic to soil organisms and
slowly acidifies the soil. You could argue that modern agriculture has
brought about the most wholesale ecocide on the planet by killing the
astonishingly rich microbial life of the soil. It’s worth drawing up
another analytical model of the kind Mike Madison employs. Ask, simply,
where soil is being replenished with organic matter—cover crops and
manure, for instance—and where it is not. What you end up with is a
perfect map of the division between conventional, large-scale,
industrial agriculture and small-market farms. A map like that would
also provide a stark reminder of how colossal the scale of conventional
farming really is when compared to small, artisanal farming, something
that’s easily forgotten when you’re shopping at the farmers’ market.
Madison believes that “farming is not a perversion of nature, but a
natural development in our planet’s evolution.” There is a lot of
optimism lurking in that thought. Anyone who can write “I expect to
still be farming at age 80” is an optimist at heart, no matter how
cautionary or skeptical he often sounds. In fact, I would say that
Fruitful Labor may be the most optimistic book it is possible to write
that also contains this sentence: “We are a flawed species unable to
make good use of the wisdom available to us, and we have earned our
unhappy destiny by our foolishness.”
The optimism shows, too, in Madison’s candor. He says of himself and his
wife, with no apology, that “our business plan, insofar as we have one,
is of a sort that might be found in 18th-century Italy or Spain.” He
describes his own failed projects—crops or methods that didn’t work
out—with equanimity, alluding in a telling phrase to “the infidelity of
one’s enthusiasms.” Keeping the farm in balance with the world is
especially hard when the world is so out of balance: “In an unjust
society,” he writes, “there is no such thing as a just price.” Reading
Madison, you begin to wonder about the psychological cost of America’s
agricultural history when this was still a country of farmers. “Possibly
only one person in a dozen, or one in twenty,” he writes, “is
temperamentally suited to farming. Which is why when half the population
is farming, most will do a poor job of it, and be unhappy in the process.”
Madison’s fundamental argument about the deep ecology of farming is one
that another Madison—James Madison—would have agreed with. In May 1818,
while Cobbett was still living on Long Island, the former president—an
improving farmer—gave a speech to the Agricultural Society in Albemarle,
Virginia. He said something that has become almost unsayable in the
world we inhabit now—unsayable at least by the sitting president and his
environmental and agricultural appointees. “We can scarcely be
warranted,” Madison said, “in supposing that all the productive powers
of [Earth’s] surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in
exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of
subsistence.” It is truly painful to leap ahead two hundred years and
realize that one of Mike Madison’s reasons for continuing to farm is
this: “In an increasingly unstable world it is important to keep the
farm as a refuge for family and friends in times of economic collapse
and social disarray.”
*
See Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in
Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2002). ↩
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