The earth is given as a common stock for man
to labor and live on.... The small landowners are the
most precious part of a state.
Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), U.S. president.
Letter, 28 Oct. 1785, to politician (later president)
James Madison.
The founders of our nation, especially
Jefferson, envisioned the United States as a nation of
farmer-philosophers. Clearly, this has not come to pass.
Perhaps the idea was utopian. Regardless, we cannot go
back to "the way things used to be".
What we can do is learn from our past,
retaining the good and discarding the bad, in order to
reshape our future into something better than the sum of
its parts. The area that we most desperately need to
reshape is agriculture, yet it is the area in which we
are most prone to ignore the past.
The prevailing attitude in agriculture is
that yesterday's knowledge and wisdom is worthless in the
face of today's technology. This attitude comes closer to
being the truth with every passing year. Yes, we actually
agree that yesterday's knowledge and wisdom is becoming
worth less and less. The reason is that modern farming is
so different from and so far divorced from the farming
techniques of the early twentieth century (old farming)
that they are almost two different fields of knowledge.
Old farming was an art practiced by
individuals and families. Farmers worked relatively small
parcels of land using draft animals and diversified
crops, including animal husbandry. Their farms did not
require massive amounts of credit, expensive equipment,
and large quantities of fossil fuel, nor did they
generate huge profits. But, they did require labor.
Modern farming is a technology that is
directly or indirectly controlled by corporations (artificial people). Even the relatively few small family
farmers still hanging on have bought into the pipe-dream
of unsustainable yields, high profits, and low labor
costs, effectively making themselves employees of
corporate America. Its farms require hundreds of
monocropped acres, large pieces of equipment, a heavy
debt load, and petroleum for equipment and pest and weed
control. They do not require much labor, and they are
quite profitable for most, enabling farmers to enjoy
million-dollar retirements in RV parks in Florida and
Arizona.
In short, modern farming was so different
from old farming that it did not improve upon old farming
techniques, it replaced them. The two styles
were so disparate that in the span of just a few years
all research into improving old farming techniques
stopped. There was nothing inherently wrong with old
farming, but modern farming was easier, cheaper, and
"better" -- it was scientific! Old farming
virtually died in less than a decade, hanging on in just
a few pockets here and there.
Now, more than half a century later, we
are seeing the problems of modern farming, namely that it
is an unsustainable fantasy. The temptation is to call
for another agricultural revolution, throw the whole
knowledgebase of modern farming out the window, and go
back to "the good ol' days". But believing that
that will solve the problem is just as misguided and
delusional as the switch to modern farming was.
It has been more than fifty years since
any of our land grant colleges did any significant
research into improving old farming techniques and much
knowledge has actually been lost, or nearly so. We cannot
return to yesteryear, because doing so would be taking a
huge step backward into a time of poor
education, illiteracy, infant mortality, and questionable
food safety. Instead, we must bring yesteryear forward.
So....
