Read Online Bringing It to the Table by Wendell Berry - Free Book Online
Authors: Wendell Berry
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agribusiness corporation. They do not, like Cincinnatus, leave the plow to serve their people and return to the plow. They leave the plow, simply, for the sake of leaving the plow.
This means that there has been for several decades a radical disconnection between the land-grant institutions and the farms, and this disconnection has left the land-grant professionals free to give bad advice; indeed, if they can get this advice published in the right place, from the standpoint of their careers it does not matter whether their advice is good or not.
For example, after years of milk glut, when dairy farmers are everywhere threatened by their surplus production, university experts are still working to increase milk production and still advising farmers to cull their least productive cows—apparently oblivious both of the possible existence of other standards of judgment and of the fact that this culling of the least productive cows is, ultimately, the culling of the smaller farmers.
Perhaps this could be dismissed as human frailty or inevitable bureaucratic blundering—except that the result is damage, caused by people who probably would not have given such advice if they were themselves in a position to suffer from it. Serious responsibilities are undertaken by public givers of advice, and serious wrong is done when the advice is bad. Surely a kind of monstrosity is involved when tenured professors with protected incomes recommend or even tolerate Darwinian economic policies for farmers, or announce (as one university economist after another has done) that the failure of so-called inefficient farmers is good for agriculture and good for the country. They see no inconsistency, apparently, between their own protectionist economy and the “free market” economy that they recommend to their supposed constituents, to whom
the “free market” has proved, time and again, to be fatal. Nor do they see any inconsistency, apparently, between the economy of a university, whose sources, like those of any tax-supported institution, are highly diversified, and the extremely specialized economies that they have recommended to their farmer-constituents. These inconsistencies nevertheless exist, and they explain why, so far, there has been no epidemic of bankruptcies among professors of agricultural economics.
These, of course, are simply instances of the notorious discrepancy between theory and practice. But this discrepancy need not exist, or it need not be so extreme, in the colleges of agriculture. The answer to the problem is simply that those who profess should practice. Or at least a significant percentage of them should. This is, in fact, the rule in other colleges and departments of the university. A professor of medicine who was no doctor would readily be seen as an oddity; so would a law professor who could not try a case; so would a professor of architecture who could not design a building. What, then, would be so strange about an agriculture professor who would be, and who would be expected to be, a proven farmer?
BUT IT WOULD be wrong, I think, to imply that the farmers are merely the victims of their predicament and share none of the blame. In fact, they, along with all the rest of us, do share the blame, and their first hope of survival is in understanding that they do.
Farmers, as much as any other group, have subscribed to the industrial fantasies that I listed earlier: that value equals price, that all relations are mechanical, and that competitiveness is a proper and sufficient motive. Farmers, like the rest of us, have assumed, under the tutelage of people with things to sell, that selfishness and extravagance are merely normal. Like the rest of us, farmers have believed that they might safely live a life prescribed by the advertisers of products, rather than the life required by fundamental human necessities and responsibilities.
One could argue that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred
This means that there has been for several decades a radical disconnection between the land-grant institutions and the farms, and this disconnection has left the land-grant professionals free to give bad advice; indeed, if they can get this advice published in the right place, from the standpoint of their careers it does not matter whether their advice is good or not.
For example, after years of milk glut, when dairy farmers are everywhere threatened by their surplus production, university experts are still working to increase milk production and still advising farmers to cull their least productive cows—apparently oblivious both of the possible existence of other standards of judgment and of the fact that this culling of the least productive cows is, ultimately, the culling of the smaller farmers.
Perhaps this could be dismissed as human frailty or inevitable bureaucratic blundering—except that the result is damage, caused by people who probably would not have given such advice if they were themselves in a position to suffer from it. Serious responsibilities are undertaken by public givers of advice, and serious wrong is done when the advice is bad. Surely a kind of monstrosity is involved when tenured professors with protected incomes recommend or even tolerate Darwinian economic policies for farmers, or announce (as one university economist after another has done) that the failure of so-called inefficient farmers is good for agriculture and good for the country. They see no inconsistency, apparently, between their own protectionist economy and the “free market” economy that they recommend to their supposed constituents, to whom
the “free market” has proved, time and again, to be fatal. Nor do they see any inconsistency, apparently, between the economy of a university, whose sources, like those of any tax-supported institution, are highly diversified, and the extremely specialized economies that they have recommended to their farmer-constituents. These inconsistencies nevertheless exist, and they explain why, so far, there has been no epidemic of bankruptcies among professors of agricultural economics.
These, of course, are simply instances of the notorious discrepancy between theory and practice. But this discrepancy need not exist, or it need not be so extreme, in the colleges of agriculture. The answer to the problem is simply that those who profess should practice. Or at least a significant percentage of them should. This is, in fact, the rule in other colleges and departments of the university. A professor of medicine who was no doctor would readily be seen as an oddity; so would a law professor who could not try a case; so would a professor of architecture who could not design a building. What, then, would be so strange about an agriculture professor who would be, and who would be expected to be, a proven farmer?
BUT IT WOULD be wrong, I think, to imply that the farmers are merely the victims of their predicament and share none of the blame. In fact, they, along with all the rest of us, do share the blame, and their first hope of survival is in understanding that they do.
Farmers, as much as any other group, have subscribed to the industrial fantasies that I listed earlier: that value equals price, that all relations are mechanical, and that competitiveness is a proper and sufficient motive. Farmers, like the rest of us, have assumed, under the tutelage of people with things to sell, that selfishness and extravagance are merely normal. Like the rest of us, farmers have believed that they might safely live a life prescribed by the advertisers of products, rather than the life required by fundamental human necessities and responsibilities.
One could argue that the great breakthrough of industrial agriculture occurred
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