In natural or biological systems, waste does not occur. And it is easy to produce examples of nonindustrial human cultures in which waste was or is virtually unknown. All that is sloughed off in the living arc of a natural cycle remains within the cycle; it becomes fertility, the power of life to continue. In nature death and decay are as necessary—are, one may almost say, as lively—as life; and so nothing is wasted. There is really no such thing, then, as natural production; in nature, there is only reproduction.
But waste—so far, at least—has always been intrinsic to industrial production. There have always been unusable “by-products.” Because industrial cycles are never complete—because there is no return—there are two characteristic results of industrial enterprise: exhaustion and contamination. The energy industry, for instance, is not a cycle, but only a short arc between an empty hole and poisoned air. And farming, which is inherently cyclic, capable of regenerating and reproducing itself indefinitely, becomes similarly destructive and self-exhausting when transformed into an industry. Agricultural pollution is a serious and growing problem. And industrial agriculture is forced by its very character to treat the soil itself as a “raw material,” which it proceeds to “use up.” It has been estimated, for instance, that at the present rate of cropland erosion Iowa’s soil will be exhausted by the year 2050. I have seen no attempt to calculate the human cost of such farming—by attrition, displacement, social disruption, etc.—I assume because it is incalculable.
This failure of industrial agriculture is not more obvious, or more noticed, because many of its worst social and economic consequences have collected in the cities, and are erroneously called “urban problems.” Also, because the farm population is now so small, most people know nothing of farming, and cannot recognize agricultural problems when they see them.
But if industrial agriculture is a failure, then how does it continue to produce such an enormous volume of food? One reason is that most countries where industrial agriculture is practiced have soils that were originally good, possessing great natural reserves of fertility. (Industrial agriculture is much more quickly destructive in places where the fertility reserves of the soil are not great—as in the Amazon basin.) Another reason is that, as natural fertility has declined, we have so far been able to subsidize food production by large applications of chemical fertilizer. These have effectively disguised the loss of natural fertility, but it is important to emphasize that they are a disguise. They delay some of the consequences of failure, but cannot prevent them. Chemical fertilizers are required in vast amounts, they are increasingly expensive, and most of them come from sources that are not renewable. Industrial agriculture is now absolutely dependent on them, and this dependence is one of its fundamental weaknesses.
Another weakness of industrial agriculture is its absolute dependence on an enormous and intricate—hence fragile—economic and industrial organization. Industrial food production can be gravely impaired or stopped by any number of causes, none of which need be agricultural: a trucker’s strike, an oil shortage, a credit shortage, a manufacturing “error” such as the PBB catastrophe in Michigan.
A third weakness is the absolute dependence of most of the population on industrial agriculture—and the lack of any “backup system.” We have an unprecedentedly large urban population that has no land to grow food on, no knowledge of how to grow it, and less and less knowledge of what to do with it after it is grown. That this population can continue to eat through shortage, strike, embargo, riot, depression, war—or any of the other large-scale afflictions that societies have always been heir to and that industrial societies are uniquely vulnerable to—is not a certainty or even a faith; it is a superstition.
As an example of the unexamined confusions and contradictions that underlie industrial agriculture, consider Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland’s recent remarks on the state of agriculture in China: “From the manpower-production point of view, they’re terribly inefficient—700 million people doing the most pedestrian kind of things. But in production per acre, they’re enormously successful. They get nine times as many calories per acre as we do in the United States.”
This comment is remarkable for its failure to acknowledge any possible connection between China’s large agricultural work force and its high per-acre productivity. In many parts of China, according to one recent observer, the agriculture is still much closer to what we call gardening than to what we call farming. Because their farming is done on comparatively small plots, using a lot of hand labor, Chinese farmers have at their disposal such high-production techniques as intercropping and close rotations, which with us are available only to home gardeners. Many Chinese fields have maintained the productivity of gardens for thousands of years, and this is directly attributable to the great numbers of the farming population. Each acre can be intensively used and cared for, maintained for centuries at maximum fertility and yield, because there are enough knowledgeable people to do the necessary handwork.
It is naive to assume, as Mr. Bergland implicitly does, that such an agriculture can be improved by “modernization”—that is, by the introduction of industrial standards, methods, and technology. How can this agriculture be industrialized without destroying its intensive methods, and thus reducing its productivity per acre? How can the so-called pedestrian tasks be taken over by machines without displacing people, increasing unemployment, degrading the quality of land maintenance, increasing slums and other urban blights? How, in other words, can this revolution fail to cause in China the same disorders that it has already caused in the United States? I do not mean to imply that these questions can be answered simply. My point is that before we participate in the industrialization of Chinese agriculture we ought to ask and answer these questions.
Finally, the Secretary’s statement is remarkable for its revealing use of the word “pedestrian.” This is a usage strictly in keeping with the industrial revolution of our language. The farther industrialization has gone with us, and the more it has influenced our values and behavior, the more contemptuous and belittling has the adjective “pedestrian” become. If you want to know how highly anything “pedestrian” is regarded, try walking along the edge of a busy highway; you will see that you are regarded mainly as an obstruction to the progress of greater power and velocity. The less power and velocity a thing has, the more “pedestrian” it is. A plow with one bottom is, as a matter of course, more “pedestrian” than a plow with eight bottoms; the quality of use is not recognized as an issue. The hand laborers are thus to be eliminated from China’s fields for the same reason that we now build housing developments without sidewalks: The pedestrian, not being allowed for, is not allowed. By the use of this term, the Secretary ignores the issue of the quality of work on the one hand, and on the other hand the issue of social values and aims. Is field work necessarily improved when done with machines instead of people? And is a worker necessarily improved by being replaced by a machine? Does a worker invariably work better, more ably, with more interest and satisfaction, when his power is mechanically magnified? And is a worker better off working at a “pedestrian” farm task or unemployed in an urban ghetto? In which instance is his country better off?
I have belabored Secretary Bergland’s statement at such length not because it is so odd, but because it is so characteristic of the dominant American approach to agriculture. He is using—unconsciously, I suspect—the language of agricultural industrialism, which fails to solve agricultural problems correctly because it cannot understand or define them as agricultural problems.
I WILL NOW try to define an approach to agriculture that is agricultural, that will lead to proper solutions, and that will, in consequence, safeguard and promote the health of the great unit of food production, which includes us all and all of our country. In order to do this I will deal with four problems, which seem to me inherent in the discipline of farming, and which are practical in the sense that their ultimate solutions cannot occur in public places—in organizations, in markets, or in policies—but only on farms. These are the problems of scale, of balance, of diversity, of quality. That these problems cannot be separated, and that no one of them can be solved without solving the others, testifies to their authenticity.
