Excerpt from: The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
Both the foraging in fields and woods and the small husbandries of household and barn have now been almost entirely replaced by the “consumer economy”, which assumes that it is better to buy whatever one needs than to make it or grow it.
Advertisements and other forms of propaganda suggest that people should congregate themselves on the quantity and variety of their purchases. Shopping, in spite of traffic and crowds, is held to be “easy” and “convenient.”
Spending money gives one status. And physical exertion for any purpose is looked down upon; it is permissible to work hard for “sport” or “recreation”, but to make any practical use of the body is beneath dignity.
Aside from the fashions of leisure and affluence – so valuable to corporations, so destructive of values – the greatest destroyer of the small economies of the small farms has been the doctrine of sanitation. I have no argument against cleanliness and healthfulness; I am for them as much as anyone. I do, however, question the validity and the honesty of the sanitation laws always required more, and more expensive equipment? Why have they always worked against the survival of the small producer?
Is it impossible to be inexpensively healthful and clean? I am not a scientist or a sanitation expert, and cannot give conclusive answers to those questions; I can only say what I have observed and what I think.
In a remarkably short time, I have seen the demise of all the small dairy operations in my part of the country, the shutting down of all local creameries and all of the small local dealers in milk and milk products. I have seen the grocers forced to quit dealing in eggs produced by local farmers, and have seen the closing of all markets for small quantities of poultry.
Recently, the continuation of this “trend”, the local slaughterhouses in Kentucky were required to make expensive alterations or go out of business. Most of them went out of business. These were not offering meat for sale in the wholesale or retail trade. They did custom work mainly for local farmers who brought their animals in for slaughter and took the meat home or to a locker plant for processing. They were essential to the effort of many people to live self-sufficiently from their own produce – and these people had raised no objections to the way their meat was being handled.
The few establishments that managed to survive this “improvement” found it necessary, of course, to charge higher prices for their work. Who benefited from this? Not the customers, who were put to considerable expense and inconvenience, if they were not forced to quit producing their own meat altogether. Not, certainly, the slaughterhouses or local economies. Not, so far as I can see, the public health.
The only conceivable beneficiaries were the meat-packing corporations, and for this questionable gain, local life was weakened at its economic roots.
This sort of thing is always justified as “consumer protection.” But we need to ask a few questions about that. How are consumers protected by a system that puts more and more miles, agencies, and inspectors between them and the producers? How, over all these obstacles, can consumers make producers aware of their tastes and needs? How are consumers protected by a system that apparently cannot “improve” except by eliminating the small producer, increasing the cost of production, and increasing the retail price of the product? Does the concentration of production in the hands of fewer and fewer big operators really serve the ends of cleanliness and health? Or does it make easier and more lucrative the possibility of collusion between irresponsible producers and corrupt inspectors?
In so strenuously and expensively protecting food from contamination by germs, how much have we increased the possibility of its contamination by antibiotics, preservatives, and various industrial poisons? And, finally, what do we do to our people, our communities, our economy, and our political system when we allow our necessities to be produced by a centralized system of large operators, dependent on expensive technology, and regulated by expensive bureaucracy?
The modern food industry is said to be a “miracle of technology.” But it is well to remember that this technology, in addition to so-called miracles, produces economic and political consequences that are not favorable to democracy. The connections among farming, technology, economics, and politics are important for many reasons, one of the most obvious being their influence on food production. Probably the worst fault of our present system is that it simply eliminates from production the land that is not suitable for, as well as the people that cannot afford, large-scale technology. And it ignores the potential productivity of these “marginal” lands and people.
It is possible to raise these issues because our leaders have been telling us for years that our agriculture needs to become more and more productive. If they mean what they say, they will have to revise production standards and open the necessary markets to provide a livelihood for small farmers. Only small farmers can keep the so-called marginal land in production, for only they can give the intensive care necessary to keep it productive.
-Wendell Berry, 1977 – The Gift of Good Land. One of my most ear-marked and margin-scribbled books.
Thanks, Rachel Bouressa, for sharing this passage from The Gift of Good Land and being a leader in regenerative agriculture in the Waupaca area.