Bringing It to the Table (10 page)

Apologists for industrial agriculture frequently stop with that first figure—showing that agriculture uses only a small amount of energy, relatively speaking, and that people hunting a cause of the “energy crisis” should therefore point their fingers elsewhere. The other figures, amounting to 13.5 percent of national energy consumption, are more interesting, for they suggest the way the food system has been expanded to make room for industrial enterprise. Between farm and home, producer and consumer, we have interposed manufacturers, a complex marketing structure, and food preparation. I am not sure how this last category differs from “manufacturing.” And I would like to know what percentage of the energy budget goes for transportation, and whether or not Professor Shaw figured in the miles that people now drive to shop. The gist is nevertheless plain enough: The industrial economy grows and thrives by lengthening and complicating the essential connection between producer and consumer. In a
local
food economy, dealing in fresh produce to be prepared in the home (thus eliminating transporters, manufacturers, packagers, preparers, etc.), the energy budget would be substantially lower, and we might have both cheaper food and higher earnings on the farm.

But Professor Shaw provides another set of figures that is even more telling. These have to do with the “sources of energy for Pennsylvania agriculture” (I don’t think the significance would vary much from one state to another):

And so we see that, though our agriculture may use relatively little fossil fuel energy, it is almost totally dependent on what it does use. It uses fossil fuel energy almost exclusively and uses it in competition with other users. And the sources of this energy are not renewable.

This critical dependence on nonrenewable energy sources is the direct result of the industrialization of agriculture. Before industrialization, agriculture depended almost exclusively on solar energy. Solar energy not only grew the plants, as it still does, but also provided the productive power of farms in the form of the work of humans and animals. This energy is derived and made available biologically, and it is recyclable. It is inexhaustible in the topsoil so long as good husbandry keeps the life cycle intact.

This old sun-based agriculture was fundamentally alien to the industrial economy; industrial corporations could make relatively little profit from it. In order to make agriculture fully exploitable by industry it was necessary (in Barry Commoner’s terms) to weaken “the farm’s link to the sun” and to make the farmland a “colony” of the industrial corporations. The farmers had to be persuaded to give up the free energy of the sun in order to pay dearly for the machine-derived energy of the fossil fuels.

Thus we have another example of a system artificially expanded for profit. The farm’s originally organic, coherent, independent production system was expanded into a complex dependence on remote sources and on manufactured supplies.

What happened, from a cultural point of view, was that machines were substituted for farmers, and energy took the place of skill. As farmers became more and more dependent on fossil fuel energy, a radical change occurred in their minds. Once focused on biology, the life and health of living things, their thinking now began to focus on technology
and economics. Credit, for example, became as pressing an issue as the weather, for farmers had begun to climb the one-way ladder of survival by debt. Bigger machines required more land, and more land required yet bigger machines, which required yet more land, and on and on—the survivors climbing to precarious and often temporary success by way of machines and mortgages and the ruin of their neighbors. And so the farm became a “factory,” where speed, “efficiency,” and profitability were the main standards of performance. These standards, of course, are industrial, not agricultural.

The old solar agriculture, moreover, was time oriented. Timeliness was its virtue. One took pride in having the knowledge to do things at the right time. Industrial agriculture is space oriented. Its virtue is speed. One takes pride in being first. The right time, by contrast, could be late as well as early; the proof of the work was in its quality.

 

THE MOST IMPORTANT point I have to make is that once agriculture shifted its dependence from solar, biologically derived energy to machine-derived fossil fuel energy, it committed itself, as a matter of course, to several kinds of waste:

A problem related to soil waste is that of soil compaction. Part of the reason for this is that industrial agriculture reduces the humus in the soil, which becomes more cohesive and less porous as a result. Another reason is the use of heavier equipment, which becomes necessary, in the first place, because of soil compaction. But the main reason, I think, is again that we don’t have enough farmers to farm the land properly. The industrial farmer has so much land that he cannot afford to wait for “the right time” to work his fields. As long as the ground will support his equipment, he plows and harrows; the time is right for the work whenever the work is mechanically possible. It is commonplace now, wherever I have traveled in farm country, to see fields cut to pieces by deep wheel tracks.

The final irony is that we are abusing our land in this way partly in order to correct our “balance of payments”—that is, in order to buy foreign petroleum. In the language of some “agribusiness” experts we are using “agridollars” to offset the drain of “petrodollars.” We are, in effect, exporting our topsoil in order to keep our tractors running.

There is no question that you can cover a lot of ground with the big machines now on the market. A lot of people seem entranced by the power and speed of those machines, which the manufacturers love to refer to as “monsters” and “acre eaters.” But the result is not farming; it is a process closely akin to mining. In what is left of the country communities, in earshot of the monster acre eaters of the “agribusinessmen,” a lot of old farmers must be turning over in their graves.

(2002)

I
AM A CONSERVATIONIST and a farmer, a wilderness advocate and an agrarian. I am in favor of the world’s wildness, not only because I like it, but also because I think it is necessary to the world’s life and to our own. For the same reason, I want to preserve the natural health and integrity of the world’s economic landscapes, which is to say that I want the world’s farmers, ranchers, and foresters to live in stable, locally adapted, resource-preserving communities, and I want them to thrive.

One thing that this means is that I have spent my life on two losing sides. As long as I have been conscious, the great causes of agrarianism and conservation, despite local victories, have suffered an accumulation of losses, some of them probably irreparable—while the third side, that of the land-exploiting corporations, has appeared to grow ever richer. I say “appeared” because I think their wealth is illusory. Their capitalism is based, finally, not on the resources of nature, which it is recklessly destroying, but on fantasy. Not long ago I heard an economist say, “If the consumer ever stops living beyond his means, we’ll have a recession.” And so the two sides of nature and the rural communities are being defeated by a third side that will eventually be found to have defeated itself.