FREE ESSAY ON AGRICULTURAL CRISIS

AGRICULTURAL CRISIS

The Agricultural Crisis: Crisis of Culture
In this novel by Wendell Berry, Berry's describes in his thesis that modern culture is
destroying the agricultural culture. He feels that technology is seen as the easy way to
produce food faster and more efficiently. With this modern way of farming comes the idea
that hard work is not needed to make a living. The goal is comfort and leisure. Berry
feels that this is the reason for the deterioration of the agricultural culture. He
believes that hard work and pride in workmanship is more important than material goods
and money. This was by no means a perfect society. The people had often been violent wand
wasteful in the use of land of each other. Its present ills have already taken root in
it. Even with these faults, this society appreciated the hard work of farming compared to
the easy way of living today.
One point of Berry's argument is that he believes that the land is falling more and more
into the hands of speculators and professional people from the cities, who inspite of all
the scientific agricultural miracles still have more money than farmers. Big technology
and large economics has caused more abandonment of land in the country than ever before.
Many of the great farmers are clearly becoming different because they lack then manpower
and money to maintain properly. The number of part time farmers and ex-farmers increases
every year due to the problems with money and resources. Our harvests depend more and
more on the labor of elderly people and young children. The farm people are becoming less
dependent on their own produce and more from what they are buying. A lot of them are
worried more about their money so they overwork themselves more than before. The ideal of
hard work has been replaced with the desire to have a good time. This can be seen in the
example of Henry County, where the idea of Maurice Telleen's "The World's First
Broad-Based Hedonism." What Tellen means is the fact that young people expect to leave as
soon as they finish high school, they do not have permanent interest in farming. They
generally are not interested in anything that cannot be reached by automobile on a good
road. Some of the farmer's children will be able to afford to stay on the farm. Perhaps
even fewer will wish to do so, for it will cost too much, require too much work and
worry, and it is hardly a fashionable ambition.
Another argument that Berry proposes is the connection between the "modernization" of
agricultural techniques and the disintegration of the culture, as well as the communities
of farming and the consequent disintegration of structures of urban life. What we called
agriculture progress has involved the forcible displacement of millions of people. An
example of modernization can be seen through the idea of "Get big or get out." It's a
policy that says that you have to become more modern through change and be competitive in
order to keep up with the other competitors. If not, than you must get of what you are
doing. This can be used through a comparison of communist using military force in order
to remove those who refuse to follow their demand for change, and the government using
their economic power to force farmers to improve their farming techniques. In a "Free
Market" the most successful becomes the richest. To those who could not improve their
business or compete with those who are successful, they have to get out of the business
in order to save themselves. If they refuse to leave, they may suffer a huge loss to
their economic well being. For a social or economic goal, size is the most important
thing and it is establishing an inevitable tendency toward the one that will be the
biggest of all. Many of those who "got big" to stay in are now being driven out by those
who are even bigger. The aim of big businesses is to make as much money as possible but
at the cost of others. Hedonism is alive and well in this competitive game for power and
success. No one else matters but what you want.
Berry sums up his point through the example of food as a cultural product that cannot be
produced by technology alone. Those agriculturists that think the problems of food
production can be solved through technology fail to see the importance of the hard work
it takes to make the food. This hard work reinforces the cultural times among farmers and
their families. "A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical
necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of
memory, insight, value, and work, conviviality, reverence, and aspiration." It reveals
the needs of human as well as their limits. A healthy farm culture can be based only upon
familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land. It
supports and protects a person's knowledge of the earth that no amount possibility in the
farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of those communities
of this country. We cannot allow another generation to forget the importance of this
culture. If we do, the knowledge that is held will be lost forever.
It is by the measure of culture, rather than economics or technology, that we can begin
to understand the cost of people moving to the city and its effects on those who stay
behind to farm. From a cultural point of view, the movement from the farm to the city
involves a radical simplification of mind and of character. "there seems to be a rule
that we can simplify our minds and our culture only at the cost of an oppressive social
and mechanical complexity." We can simplify our society by freeing ourselves from
undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity. Farming includes this sort of
complexity, both in this character and culture. If you try to simplify either one, you
risk destroying them. The best farming requirements a husband, a nurturer, not a
technician or businessman. A technician or a business man is created through training. A
good farmer, on the other hand, is a cultural product. He is created by a sort of
training, seen through the time he imposes or demands, but he is also made by generations
of experience. If a culture is to hope for survival, then the relationships within it
must, in recognition of their independence, be mainly cooperative rather than
competitive. A people cannot live long at each other's expenses or at the expense of
their cultural birthright. The relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but
interdependent.
Berry does prove his thesis by showing that modernization has a hand in the destruction
in the farming culture. He stated that as the society's technology improves their way of
life we seem to forget the significance of the common knowledge about the land. Also he
looks down of the competition within the culture who are competing with one another. He
despises the fact that some small farmer cannot compete with the bigger farms because
small farms lack money, resources and manpower to keep up. All of this replaces the
distraction of the farming culture today.