Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  The making of a form begins in the recognition and acceptance of limits. The farm is limited by its topography, its climate, its ecosystem, its human neighborhood and local economy, and of course by the larger economies, and by the preferences and abilities of the farmer. The true husbandman shapes the farm within an assured sense of what it cannot be and what it should not be. And thus the problem of form returns us to that of local adaptation.

  THE TASK BEFORE us, now as always before, is to renew and husband the means, both natural and human, of agriculture. But to talk now about renewing husbandry is to talk about unsimplifying what is in reality an extremely complex subject. This will require us to accept again, and more competently than before, the health of the ecosystem, the farm, and the human community as the ultimate standard of agricultural performance.

  Unsimplification is difficult, I imagine, in any circumstances; our present circumstances will make it especially so. Soon the majority of the world’s people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs. The problem of renewing husbandry, and the need to promote a general awareness of everybody’s agricultural responsibilities, thus become urgent.

  How are we to do this? How can we restore a competent husbandry to the minds of the world’s producers and consumers?

  For a start of course we must recognize that this effort is already in progress on many farms and in many urban consumer groups scattered across our country and the world. But we must recognize too that this effort needs an authorizing focus and force that would grant it a new legitimacy, intellectual rigor, scientific respectability, and responsible teaching. There are many reasons to hope that this might be supplied by our colleges of agriculture, and there are some reasons to think that this hope is not fantastical.

  With that hope in mind, I want to return to the precaution that I mentioned earlier. The effort of husbandry is partly scientific, but it is entirely cultural, and a cultural initiative can exist only by becoming personal. It will become increasingly clear, I believe, that agricultural scientists, and the rest of us as well, are going to have to be less specialized, or less isolated by our specialization. Agricultural scientists will need to work as indwelling members of agricultural communities or of consumer communities. Their scientific work will need to accept the limits and the influence of that membership. It is not irrational to propose that a significant number of these scientists should be farmers, and so subject their scientific work, and that of their colleagues, to the influence of a farmer’s practical circumstances. Along with the rest of us, they will need to accept all the imperatives of husbandry as the context of their work. We cannot keep things from falling apart in our society if they do not cohere in our minds and in our lives.

  PART II

  FARMERS

  Seven Amish Farms

  (1981)

  IN TYPICAL MIDWESTERN farming country the distances between inhabited houses are stretching out as bigger farmers buy out their smaller neighbors in order to “stay in.” The signs of this “movement” and its consequent specialization are everywhere: good houses standing empty, going to ruin; good stock barns going to ruin; pasture fences fallen down or gone; machines too large for available doorways left in the weather; windbreaks and woodlots gone down before the bulldozers; small schoolhouses and churches deserted or filled with grain.

  In the latter part of March this country shows little life. Field after field lies under the dead stalks of last year’s corn and soybeans, or lies broken for the next crop; one may drive many miles between fields that are either sodded or planted in winter grain. If the weather is wet, the country will seem virtually deserted. If the ground is dry enough to support their wheels, there will be tractors at work, huge machines with glassed cabs, rolling into the distances of fields larger than whole farms used to be, as solitary as seaborne ships.

  The difference between such country and the Amish farmlands in northeast Indiana seems almost as great as that between a desert and an oasis. And it is the same difference. In the Amish country there is a great deal more life: more natural life, more agricultural life, more human life. Because the farms are small—most of them containing well under a hundred acres—the Amish neighborhoods are more thickly populated than most rural areas, and you see more people at work. And because the Amish are diversified farmers, their plowed croplands are interspersed with pastures and hayfields and often with woodlots. It is a varied, interesting, healthy-looking farm country, pleasant to drive through.When we were there, on the twentieth and twenty-first of last March, the spring plowing had just started, and so you could still see everywhere the annual covering of stable manure on the fields, and the teams of Belgians or Percherons still coming out from the barns with loaded spreaders.

  Our host, those days, was William J. Yoder, a widely respected breeder of Belgian horses, an able farmer and carpenter, and a most generous and enjoyable companion. He is a vigorous man, strenuously involved in the work of his farm and in the life of his family and community. From the look of him and the look of his place, you know that he has not just done a lot of work in his time, but has done it well, learned from it, mastered the necessary disciplines. He speaks with heavy stress on certain words—the emphasis of conviction, but also of pleasure, for he enjoys the talk that goes on among people interested in horses and in farming. But unlike many people who enjoy talking, he speaks with care. Bill was born in this community, has lived there all his life, and he has grandchildren who will probably live there all their lives. He belongs there, then, root and branch, and he knows the history and the quality of many of the farms. On the two days, we visited farms belonging to Bill himself, four of his sons, and two of his sons-in-law.

  The Amish farms tend to divide up between established ones, which are prosperous-looking and well maintained, and run-down, abused, or neglected ones, on which young farmers are getting started. Young Amish farmers are still getting started, in spite of inflation, speculators’ prices, and usurious interest rates. My impression is that the proportion of young farmers buying farms is significantly greater among the Amish than among conventional farmers.

  Bill Yoder’s own eighty-acre farm is among the established ones. I had been there in the fall of 1975 and had not forgotten its aspect of cleanness and good order, its well-kept white buildings, neat lawns, and garden plots. Bill has owned the place for twenty-six years. Before he bought it, it had been rented and row cropped, with the usual result: It was nearly played out. “The buildings,” he says, “were nothing,” and there were no fences. The first year, the place produced five loads (maybe five tons) of hay, “and that was mostly sorrel.” The only healthy plants on it were the spurts of grass and clover that grew out of the previous year’s manure piles. The corn crop that first year “might have been thirty bushels an acre,” all nubbins. The sandy soil blew in every strong wind, and when he plowed the fields his horses’ feet sank into “quicksand potholes” that the share uncovered.

  The remedy has been a set of farming practices traditional among the Amish since the seventeenth century: diversification, rotation of crops, use of manure, seeding of legumes. These practices began when the Anabaptist sects were disfranchised in their European homelands and forced to the use of poor soil. We saw them still working to restore farmed-out soils in Indiana. One thing these practices do is build humus in the soil, and humus does several things: increases fertility, improves soil structure, improves both water-holding capacity and drainage. “No humus, you’re in trouble,” Bill says.

  After his rotations were established and the land had begun to be properly manured, the potholes disappeared, and the soil quit blowing. “There’s something in
it now—there’s some substance there.” Now the farm produces abundant crops of corn, oats, wheat, and alfalfa. Oats now yield 90-100 bushels per acre. The corn averages 100-125 bushels per acre, and the ears are long, thick, and well filled.

  Bill’s rotation begins and ends with alfalfa. Every fall he puts in a new seeding of alfalfa with his wheat; every spring he plows down an old stand of alfalfa, “no matter how good it is.” From alfalfa he goes to corn for two years, planting thirty acres, twenty-five for ear corn and five for silage. After the second year of corn, he sows oats in the spring, wheat and alfalfa in the fall. In the fourth year the wheat is harvested; the alfalfa then comes on and remains through the fifth and sixth years. Two cuttings of alfalfa are taken each year. After curing in the field, the hay is hauled to the barn, chopped, and blown into the loft. The third cutting is pastured.

  Unlike cow manure, which is heavy and chunky, horse manure is light and breaks up well coming out of the spreader; it interferes less with the growth of small seedlings and is less likely to be picked up by a hay rake. On Bill’s place, horse manure is used on the fall seedings of wheat and alfalfa, on the young alfalfa after the wheat harvest, and both years on the established alfalfa stands. The cow manure goes on the corn ground both years. He usually has about 350 eighty-bushel spreader loads of manure, and each year he covers the whole farm—cropland, hayland, and pasture.

  With such an abundance of manure there obviously is no dependence on chemical fertilizers, but Bill uses some as a “starter” on his corn and oats. On corn he applies 125 pounds of nitrogen in the row. On oats he uses 200-250 pounds of 16-16-16, 20-20-20, or 24-24-24. He routinely spreads two tons of lime to the acre on the ground being prepared for wheat.

  His out-of-pocket costs per acre of corn last year were as follows:Seed (planted at a rate of seven acres per bushel) $7.00 Fertilizer $7.75

  Herbicide (custom applied, first year only) $16.40

  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 beco
mes 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.