Farming in America

Michael Pollan is probably one of the most widely known writers on food, sustainability and farming, but he is by no means the first (and maybe not the best). I've recently read two books that highlight that there is much more out there to read on the subjects. The first actually has Michael Pollan writing the preface, noting his intellectual debt to Wendell Berry, a Kentucky-based farmer and writer. His collection of essays, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, spans some three decades of writing and acknowledges along the way his debt to another writer before him, Sir Albert Hayward, revealing how a long line of writing and debate has occured over at least the last seventy years demonstrating that our current debate over organic versus conventional, agribusiness versus sustainability is nothing new. We have been lamenting the demise of the family farm since the 1950s, at least, and wondering whether the method of farming we have migrated towards is sustainable economically, ecologically, and socially for at least as long.

Which makes me wonder whether the renewed interest is sustainable itself, or is it a passing fad that will remain of interest to only a few, while the bulk of the population continues to remain (often blissfully) ignorant of the true state of agriculture and food production in America. And yet the other book I read, Lisa Hamilton's Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age Agribusiness, somehow gives me hope, because she shows that life is tough, but manageable on farms that are outside the mainstream. I found it particularly attractive in her book that she is not as romantic about the family farm or the iconoclast. It strikes me that we can too easily romanticize the small-scale, family farmer who refuses to use GMO seeds or fertilize their fields with thousands of pounds of industrial nitrogen while collecting tons of cow manure in a concrete basin that poisons water tables. These are not tales from Hollywood movies, but real people who have made real choices about what their lives mean. The choices farmers make are not easy, and there are broader questions of the ability of a growing population to feed itself over the long term if all agriculture were to migrate back to a former paradigm or continue on its current path of "get big or get out."

The best part of these books is that they are deeply human stories that don't glorify the independent farmer as a white knight or a David seeking to fell agribusiness's Goliath with one blow. Rather, the books show that it is possible to go one's own way and maintain a sustainable life on a farm; it just takes choosing that lifestyle and ignoring the idea that well-being only comes from seeing the farm as factory, as opposed to the complex social system it should be recognized to be.