Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  What these Amish farms suggest, on the contrary, is that in farming there is inevitably a scale that is suitable both to the productive capacity of the land and to the abilities of the farmer; and that agricultural problems are to be properly solved, not in expansion, but in management, diversity, balance, order, responsible maintenance, good character, and in the sensible limitation of investment and overhead. (Bill makes a careful distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” debt, a “healthy debt” being “one you can hope to pay off in a reasonable way.”)

  Most significant, perhaps, is that while conventional agriculture, blindly following the tendency of any industry to exhaust its sources, has made soil erosion a national catastrophe, these Amish farms conserve the land and improve it in use.

  And what is one to think of a national economy that drives such obviously able and valuable farmers to factory work? What value does such an economy impose upon thrift, effort, skill, good husbandry, family and community health?

  IN SPITE OF the unrelenting destructiveness of the larger economy, the Amish—as Hostetler points out with acknowledged surprise and respect—have almost doubled in population in the last twenty years. The doubling of a population is, of course, no significant achievement. What is significant is that these agricultural communities have doubled their population and yet remained agricultural communities during a time when conventional farmers have failed by the millions. This alone would seem to call for a careful look at Amish ways of farming. That those ways have, during the same time, been ignored by the colleges and the agencies of agriculture must rank as a prime intellectual wonder.

  Amish farming has been so ignored, I think, because it involves a complicated structure that is at once biological and cultural, rather than industrial or economic. I suspect that anyone who might attempt an accounting of the economy of an Amish farm would soon find himself dealing with virtually unaccountable values, expenses, and benefits. He would be dealing with biological forces and processes not always measurable, with spiritual and community values not quantifiable; at certain points he would be dealing with mysteries—and he would be finding that these unaccountables and inscrutables have results, among others, that are economic. Hardly an appropriate study for the “science” of agricultural economics.

  The economy of conventional agriculture or “agribusiness” is remarkable for the simplicity of its arithmetic. It involves a manipulation of quantities that are all entirely accountable. List your costs (land, equipment, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, wages), add them up, subtract them from your earnings, or subtract your earnings from them, and you have the result.

  Suppose, on the other hand, that you have an eighty-acre farm that is not a “food factory” but your home, your given portion of Creation which you are morally and spiritually obliged “to dress and to keep.” Suppose you farm, not for wealth, but to maintain the integrity and the practical supports of your family and community. Suppose that, the farm being small enough, you farm it with family work and work exchanged with neighbors. Suppose you have six Belgian brood mares that you use for field work. Suppose that you also have milk cows and hogs, and that you raise a variety of grain and hay crops in rotation. What happens to your accounting then?

  To start with, several of the costs of conventional farming are greatly diminished or done away with. Equipment, fertilizer, chemicals all cost much less. Fuel becomes feed, but you have the mares and are feeding them anyway; the work ration for a brood mare is not a lot more costly than a maintenance ration. And the horses, like the rest of the livestock, are making manure. Figure that in, and figure, if you can, the value of the difference between manure and chemical fertilizer. You can probably get an estimate of the value of the nitrogen fixed by your alfalfa, but how will you quantify the value to the soil of its residues and deep roots? Try to compute the value of humus in the soil—in improved drainage, improved drought resistance, improved tilth, improved health. Wages, if you pay your children, will still be among your costs. But compute the difference between paying your children and paying “labor.” Work exchanged with neighbors can be reduced to “man-hours” and assigned a dollar value. But compute the difference between a neighbor and “labor.” Compute the value of a family or a community to any one of its members. We may, as we must, grant that among the values of family and community there is economic value—but what is it?

  In the Louisville Courier-Journal of April 5, 1981, the Mobil Oil Corporation ran an advertisement which was yet another celebration of “scientific agriculture.” American farming, the Mobile people are of course happy to say, “requires more petroleum products than almost any other industry. A gallon of gasoline to produce a single bushel of corn, for example. . . .” This, they say, enables “each American farmer to feed sixty-seven people.” And they say that this is “a-maizing.”

  Well, it certainly is! And the chances are good that an agriculture totally dependent on the petroleum industry is not yet as amazing as it is going to be. But one thing that is already sufficiently amazing is that a bushel of corn produced by the burning of one gallon of gasoline has already cost more than six times as much as a bushel of corn grown by Bill Yoder. How does Bill Yoder escape what may justly be called the petroleum tax on agriculture? He does so by a series of substitutions: of horses for tractors, of feed for fuel, of manure for fertilizer, of sound agricultural methods and patterns for the exploitive methods and patterns of industry. But he has done more than that—or, rather, he and his people and their tradition have done more. They have substituted themselves, their families, and their communities for petroleum. The Amish use little petroleum—and need little—because they have those other things.

  I do not think that we can make sense of Amish farming until we see it, until we become willing to see it, as belonging essentially to the Amish practice of Christianity, which instructs that one’s neighbors are to be loved as oneself. To farmers who give priority to the maintenance of their community, the economy of scale (that is, the economy of large scale, of “growth”) can make no sense, for it requires the ruination and displacement of neighbors. A farm cannot be increased except by the decrease of a neighborhood. What the interest of the community proposes is invariably an economy of proper scale. A whole set of agricultural proprieties must be observed: of farm size, of methods, of tools, of energy sources, of plant and animal species. Community interest also requires charity, neighborliness, the care and instruction of the young, respect for the old; thus it ensures its integrity and survival. Above all, it requires good stewardship of the land, for the community, as the Amish have always understood, is no better than its land. “If treated violently or exploited selfishly,” John Hostetler writes, the land “will yield poorly.” There could be no better statement of the meaning of the practice and the practicality of charity. Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

  The Amish have steadfastly subordinated economic value to the values of religion and community. What is too readily overlooked by a secular, exploitive society is that their ways of doing this are not “empty gestures” and are not “backward.” In the first place, these ways have kept the communities intact through many varieties of hard times. In the second place, they conserve the land. In the third place, they yield economic benefits. The community, the religious fellowship, has many kinds of value, and among them is economic value. It is the result of the practice of neighborliness, and of the practice of stewardship. What moved me most, what I liked best, in those days we spent with Bill Yoder was the sense of the continuity of the community in his dealings with his children and in their dealings with their children.

  Bill has helped his sons financially so far as he has been able. He has helped them with his work. He has helped them by sharing what he has—lending a stallion, say, at breeding time, or lending a team. And he helps them by buying good pieces of equipment that come up for sale. “If he ever gets any money,” he says of one of th
e boys, for whom he has bought an implement, “he’ll pay me for it. If he don’t, he’ll just use it.” He has been their teacher, and he remains their advisor. But he does not stand before them as a domineering patriarch or “authority figure.” He seems to speak, rather, as a representative of family and community experience. In their respect for him, his sons respect their tradition. They are glad for his help, advice, and example, but there is nothing servile in this. It seems to be given and taken in a kind of familial friendship, respect going both ways.

  Everywhere we went, when school was not in session, the children were at the barns, helping with the work, watching, listening, learning to farm in the way it is best learned. Wilbur told us that his eleven-year-old son had cultivated twenty-three acres of corn last year with a team and a riding cultivator. That reminded Bill of the way he taught Wilbur to do the same job.

  Wilbur was little then, and he loved to sit in his father’s lap and drive the team while Bill worked the cultivator. If Wilbur could drive, Bill thought, he could do the rest of it. So he got off and shortened the stirrups so the boy could reach them with his feet. Wilbur started the team, and within a few steps began plowing up the corn.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  And Bill, who was walking behind him, said, “Come up!”

  And it went that way for a little bit:

  “Whoa!”

  “Come up!”

  And then Wilbur started to cry, and Bill said:

  “Don’t cry! Go ahead!”

  A Good Farmer of the Old School

  (1985)

  AT THE 1982 Draft Horse Sale in Columbus, Ohio, Maury Telleen summoned me over to the group of horsemen with whom he was talking: “Come here,” he said, “I want you to hear this.” One of those horsemen was Lancie Clippinger, and what Maury wanted me to hear was the story of Lancie’s corn crop of the year before.

  The story, which Lancie obligingly told again, was as interesting to me as Maury had expected it to be. Lancie, that year, had planted forty acres of corn; he had also bred forty gilts that he had raised so that their pigs would be ready to feed when the corn would be ripe. The gilts produced 360 pigs, an average of nine per head. When the corn was ready for harvest, Lancie divided off a strip of the field with an electric fence and turned in the 360 shoats. After the shoats had fed on that strip for a while, Lancie opened a new strip for them. He then picked the strip where they had just fed. In that way, he fattened his 360 shoats and also harvested all the corn he needed for his other stock.

  The shoats brought $40,000. Lancie’s expenses had been for seed corn, 275 pounds of fertilizer per acre, and one quart per acre of herbicide. He did not say what the total costs amounted to, but it was clear enough that his net income from the forty acres of corn had been high, in a year when the corn itself would have brought perhaps two dollars a bushel.

  At the end of the story, I remember, Lancie and Maury had a conversation that went about like this:

  “Do you farrow your sows in a farrowing house?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you do it in huts, then?”

  “No, I have a field I turn them out in. It has plenty of shade and water. And I see them every day.”

  Here was an intelligent man, obviously, who knew the value of doing his own thinking and paying attention, who understood clearly that the profit is in the difference between costs and earnings, and who proceeded directly to minimize his costs. In a time when hog farmers often spend many thousands of dollars on highly specialized housing and equipment, Lancie’s “hog operation” consisted almost entirely of hogs. His principal outlays otherwise were for the farm itself and for fencing. But what struck me most, I think, was the way he had employed nature and the hogs themselves to his own advantage. The bred sows needed plenty of shade, water, and room for exercise; Lancie provided those things, and nature did the rest. He also supplied his own care and attention, which came free; they did not have to be purchased at an inflated cost from an industrial supplier. And then, instead of harvesting his corn mechanically, hauling it, storing it, grinding it, and hauling it to his shoats, he let the shoats harvest and grind it for themselves. He had the use of the whole hog, whereas in a “confinement operation,” the hog’s feet, teeth, and eyes have virtually no use and produce no profit.

  At the next Columbus Sale, I hunted Lancie up, and again we spent a long time talking. We talked about draft horses, of course, but also about milk cows and dairying. And that part of our conversation interested me about as much as the hog story had the year before. What so impressed me was Lancie’s belief that there is a limit to the number of cows that a dairy farmer can manage well; he thought the maximum number to be about twenty-five: “If a fellow milks twenty-five cows, he’ll see them all.” If he milks more than that, Lancie said, even though he may touch them all, he will not see them all. As in Lancie’s account of his corn crop and the 360 shoats, the emphasis here was on the importance of seeing, of paying attention. That this is important economically, he made clear in something he said to me later: “You can take care of twenty or twenty-five cows and do it right. More, you’re overlooking things that cost you money.” It is necessary, Lancie thinks, to limit the scale of operation, not only in dairying, but in all other enterprises on the farm because proper scale permits a correct balance between work and care. The distinction he was making, it seemed to me, was between work, as it has been understood traditionally on the farm, and processing, as it is understood in industry.

  Those two conversations stayed in my mind, proving useful many times in my effort to understand the troubles developing in our agricultural economy. I knew that Lancie Clippinger was one of the best farmers of the old school, and I promised myself that I would visit him at his farm, which I was finally able to do in October 1985.

  The farm is on somewhat rolling land, surrounded by woodlots and brushy fencerows, so that it has a little of the feeling of a large forest clearing. There are 175 acres, of which about 135 are cropped; the rest are in permanent pasture and woods. Although conveniently close to the state road, the farm is at the end of a lane, set off to itself. It is pretty and quiet, a pleasant place to live and to farm, as well as to visit. Lancie and his wife, Verna Bell, bought the place and moved there in the fall of 1971.

  When my wife and I drove into the yard, Kathy, one of Lancie’s granddaughters, who had evidently been watching for us, came out of the house to meet us. She took us out through the barn lot to a granary where Lancie, his son Keith, and Sherri, another granddaughter, were sacking some oats. We waited, talking with Kathy, while they finished the job, and then we went with Lancie and Keith to look at the horses.

  Lancie keeps only geldings, buying them at sales as weanlings, raising and breaking them, selling them, and then replacing them with new colts. When we were there, he had nine head: a pair of black Percherons, a handsome crossbred bay with black mane and tail, and six Belgians. Though he prefers Percherons, he does not specialize; at the sales, his only aim is to buy “colts that look like they’ll grow into good big horses.” He wants them big because the big ones bring the best prices, but, like nearly all draft horse people who use their horses, he would rather have smaller ones—fifteen hundred pounds or so—if he were keeping them only to work.

  The horses he led out for us were in prime condition, and he had been right about them: They had, sure enough, grown into good big ones. These horses may be destined for pulling contests and show hitches, but while they are at Lancie’s they put in a lot of time at farm work—they work their way through school, you might say. Like so many farmers of his time, Lancie once made the change from horses to tractors, but with him this did not last long. He was without horses “for a little while” in the seventies, and after that he began to use them again. Now he uses the horses for “just about everything” except cutting and baling his hay and picking his corn. Last spring he used his big tractor only two days. The last time he went to use it, it wouldn’t start, and he left it sitting
in the shed; it was still sitting there at the time of our visit.

  Part of the justification for the return to the use of horses is economic. When he was doing all his work with tractors, Lancie’s fuel bill was $6,000 a year; now it is about $2,000. Since the horses themselves are a profit-making enterprise on this farm, the $4,000 they save on fuel is money in the bank. But the economic reason is not the only one: “Pleasure,” Lancie says, “is a big part of it.” At the year’s end, his bank account will show a difference that the horses have made, but day by day his reason for working them is that he likes to.

  He does not need nine horses in order to do his farming. He has so many because he needs to keep replacements on hand for the horses he sells. He aims, he says, to sell “two or three or four horses every year.” To farm his 175 acres, he needs only four good geldings, although he would probably like to keep five, in case he needed a spare. With four horses on his grain drill, he can plant fifteen or twenty acres in a day. He uses four horses also on an eight-foot tandem disk and a springtooth harrow, and he can plant twelve or fifteen acres of corn a day “and not half try.”

  In plowing, he goes by the old rule of thumb that you can plow an acre per horse per day, provided the horses are in hard condition. “If you start at seven in the morning and stay there the way you ought to,” he says, “you can plow three acres a day with three horses.” That is what he does, and he does it with a walking plow because, he says, it is easier to walk than to ride. That, of course, is hardly a popular opinion, and Lancie is amused by the surprise it sometimes causes.

  One spring, he says, after he had started plowing, he ordered some lime. When the trucker brought the first load, he stopped by the house to ask where to spread it. Mrs. Clippinger told him that Lancie was plowing, and pointed out to the field where Lancie could be seen walking in the furrow behind his plow and team. The trucker was astonished: “Even the Amish ride!”