One big bad idea and one big fat lie

I'm trying to keep this blog from turning into something that only talks about war and politics.

Map from NASS

It's meant to be about other things as well. (The map above, by the way, tracks change in number of farms from 1997 to 2002 and gives a new meaning to "red" and "blue" states). The dumb life of roots for example:

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride or excess of power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

That's the Wendell Berry poem that has given this blog its incredibly affected name, in case you hadn't noticed.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of that, here is a Salon interview with George Pyle, the author of Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Agriculture. Pyle isn't saying anything Gene Logsdon and Wendell Berry haven't said before, but every new mainstread voice who takes up this cause is welcome, and besides his seems an articulate and aptly pissed off take on the subject:

... In Pyle's view, our farming culture is based on one big bad idea and one big fat lie.

"The bad idea," he writes, "is the increasing concentration -- economic, political, and genetic -- of the ways in which our food is produced." The lie behind it is that "the world is either short of food or risks being short of food in the near future." With the help of an editorial writers' fellowship, and later as the director of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Pyle took time away from his daily deadlines to research a book on the American farm economy.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm, but Pyle is no sentimentalist when it comes to the fate of family farms. What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

Meanwhile, the true costs of the industrial system -- eroded soil and depleted aquifers, polluted water and air, desperate and indebted farmers, rundown main streets, unhealthy diets, and a food supply at risk –- are not factored into the price of food.

Even as we push to grow more, the government subsidizes farmers for growing less. The subsidies continually fail to keep up with gains in production, leading to a surplus of food that costs less than it should. This gets shipped abroad and cripples the efforts of third-world countries to develop their own agricultural base. And so the system fails even on its promise to feed the world.

Read the whole interview...