Blog #4- The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture

Wendell Berry philosophy is we should "act locally, think globally" rather than the reverse. This is a slogan supported by many environmental activists.
In this Selection, he argues for the cultural dimensions that leads to sustainable agriculture.
In the past a farmer could easily market its surplus cream, eggs, old hens, and chicken. These minor markets are now banned due to the name of sanitation. The germs that used to be in our food is now replaced by poisons. The field work power was also mainly horses and mules. Nowadays the farms have become increasingly mechanized and less diversified than they used to be. The land is falling more and more into the hands of speculators and professional people from cities- which still have more money than farmers.
The farm people live less and less from their own produce and more from what they buy. The ideas are goals of leisure, comfort, and entertainment.
Few farmers'children will be able to afford to stay on the farm- perhaps even fewer will wish to do so, it will cost too much, require too much work and worry, and it is hardly a fashionable ambition. Many famers who got big "get big or get out" are now replaced with those who got bigger.
Along with the rest of society, agriculture has shifter its emphasis from quality to quantity, even though the two ideas are inseparable.
Wendell Berry's point of this selecetion is that food is a cultural product; it cannot be produced by technology alone.
A healthy farm culture is based on familiarity with the people and their land, no amount of technology can replace this knowledge.
A competent farmer is his own boss, he has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by the economic obligation, loyalty, and pride in his work.
The best kind of farming is a task that calls for a sort of complexity both in the character of the farmer and in his culture. to simplify this is to destroy it. A good farmer is a cultural product, he is made in what his time imposes or demands, and he is also made by generations of experience.
The economy of money has shifted from economies of nature, energy, and the human spirit. Man has become a consumptive machine.
Everything in the Creation is related to everything else and dependant on everything else.
We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another.