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Chronicle of Higher Education
>From the issue dated June 21, 2002
 

  Postmodern Farming, Quietly Flourishing
By STEVEN STOLL

David and Elsie Kline do not farm like other people. They never view
wildlife as a threat to their livelihood. They use no pesticides,
herbicides, or genetically modified organisms. They never spray anything.
Feed corn will be harvested, dried, and stored in cribs for winter fodder,
while the oats will be eaten off the stem when 35 dairy cows chew them down
and manure the field at the same time. The Klines' implements for mowing,
baling, binding, reaping, cultivating, and threshing date from the 1930s to
the 1960s, and all their field traction is provided by draft horses. They
produce nothing for sale on the Chicago Board of Trade. "Let those
speculators speculate on themselves," says David. "They aren't using me as
their pawn." Whenever possible they plant their own seed instead of buying
it. By choice, they have no electric power in their home and own no
automobiles. They buy few consumer goods, distrust centralized authority,
and dress plainly. The Klines are Amish farmers. They are not dead-end
holdouts left over from the agrarian 19th century; rather, their system of
food production represents the future of American agriculture.

In the few days I spent with the Klines, I saw how their cultivation anchors
their material lives. It is not true that the Amish use no motorized
machinery. They simply refuse to use it for fieldwork where it would
transform production from a biological to a machine scale. Farmers operating
with the latest technology can mow and bale in one operation while sitting
alone, fully enclosed behind air-conditioned windows. The Klines need every
available family member to pull in the timothy grass (seven people that day,
eight counting me), and they like it that way. Elsie and I sat down and
talked for a long hour, waiting for David to return from the lower field.
When one of their daughters appeared with milkshakes a while later, it all
made sense. The work of the farm is the life of the family, so it must
always embrace rest and pleasure. It makes no difference that tractors haul
things back and forth, or that the Klines switch on a diesel generator to
create suction for milking. The principle behind the policy is not difficult
to discern. The Amish hold these values above all others: Anything that
undermines their ability to cohere as a community of neighbors and linked
families, anything that isolates them in their work or places production for
profit ahead of the collective process, is prohibited. David adds a
corollary: No practice will be allowed to denigrate the wholeness of the
land and its capacity to sustain wild as well as domesticated animals.

Agribusiness managers and their advocates at the United States Department of
Agriculture represent the counterfactual point of view: Nothing could be
more irrelevant than Amish farming. Nice and good that some people still do
things the old way and manage to support themselves. The Klines and their
neighbors make central Ohio pleasant to drive through, and their tenacious
rejection of popular culture creates a fascinating enclave. Generalize Amish
ways to the world's agricultural production, however, and a billion people
would be dead in a year. The world has no more high-quality farmland, but it
does have a rising population, so all the high-tech tools devised to feed
people -- especially those much-maligned genetically modified organisms --
have become the saviors of humankind. We have created a world in which they
are absolutely necessary. The rising costs and increasing complexity of food
production have caused the rapid depopulation of countrysides from Argentina
to India, contributing to the explosive growth of cities. All those people,
who once fed themselves, now need to be fed by larger and larger
concentrations of government, capital, and technology. Like it or not, so
the argument goes, the high-modernist farm is the only option for the
soon-to-be world of 10 billion.

Yet just because something is necessary in the present does not mean that it
will be around for very long, nor does it mean that it fosters human and
nonhuman communities. If agriculture has taken up just a minute in the day
of human history, industrial agriculture has been a nanosecond. No one has
any reason to believe that it will survive in its present form. It tends to
destroy the very systems it depends on: by polluting and overfertilizing
lakes and rivers, by causing soil erosion, by radically simplifying
biological diversity, and by requiring the constant combustion of fossil
fuels. Industrial farming is more complicated than this, of course, and a
technological gradient extends from the factory farms of the Imperial Valley
in California to the fields of Holmes County, Ohio. Some of David Kline's
non-Amish neighbors use the assortment of products that defines them as
"tractor farmers."

Yet the vulnerabilities are almost identical in every case, and it remains
to be seen whether the petrochemical-genetic complex will find stability or
whether it possesses all the fortitude against disturbance of a Roman arch
-- its perfect tension failing with any loose stone. An insect or blight
destructive to a key species of rice or wheat might evolve that cannot be
killed by any known pesticide or genetic modification. Crude oil might soon
run out or become too expensive, driving up the price of food. The
fundamental natural body sustaining settled society -- topsoil -- has
disappeared in regions all over the United States, replaced by fertilizers
that require manufacturing and transportation. If any of these systems were
to fail, a billion people would be dead in a year. The more likely scenario
is that family farmers who attempt high-modern agriculture will continue to
fail. If that does not narrow the world's food supply, it narrows the limits
of human freedom. When none derive their own subsistence or provide for
small communities, the countryside will belong to great capital. As Wendell
Berry once put it, the question of the survival of the family farm is really
the question of "who will own the people."

American consumers have had no reason to protest, since industrial
agriculture has always served them first and foremost. The single
accomplishment of industrial agriculture should not be overlooked: There is
an astonishing amount of food. Hunger has not been eliminated from the
United States, but its causes, at least right now, cannot be linked to high
commodity prices. The handful of companies that provide chemical and
biological products make abundance their stated goal, and they deliver it.
Yet abundance has an entirely different meaning to small farmers, most of
whom purchase the same fertilizers and seeds as factory farmers but without
the same capital to back them. Rigging up the entire process from fertilizer
to harvesting, paying the big suppliers every step of the way, exposes small
farmers to every sudden drop in price, every dry year, every rise in
interest rates. Think of them as people standing neck-deep in water; they
can drown under any rise in the river. The response of agricultural
economists has been "Get big or get out," but that is not a prescription for
good food, a diversified landscape, or the reign of community values over
the countryside.

David Kline's manure-centered husbandry, not much different from what
American reformers and their British tutors urged and implemented back in
the 1820s, represents an alternative -- a progressive occupancy of land for
the 21st century. No matter how unlikely the prospect that people the world
over will take up small farms as they once did, that is no reason to reject
the Amish as unfit for the future. On the contrary, there could be no land
management better suited for a small and crowded planet. Amish farming is
highly productive and environmentally stable and represents a profitable way
for families to remain in control of rural places. David Kline's land
thinking is traditional without being nostalgic, practical without nodding
to technology. And while industrial agriculture still has its viability to
prove, the Amish hold fast to practices that are 400 years old. Amish
farming is not modern, but it might be postmodern.

I am interested in the profitability of Amish agriculture but tread gingerly
over the subject at first. The margins between profit and loss among farmers
can be wrenchingly narrow. Millions of dollars can pass through a family's
hands, though they may end up keeping only hundreds. The Klines do better
than that. Dropping his voice and looking at me square, David intones, "It's
extremely profitable." Each year he grosses $2,000 per cow, compared with
the $200-to-$300 profit common on industrial farms. His harvests may not be
quite as large as those on farms where Monsanto has determined the exact
combination of crops and chemicals, but they're "very close." When he grew
wheat, David harvested 75 bushels per acre. For comparison, I found two
reports from different parts of the country. Michigan wheat farmers
collected a record-setting 67 bushels per acre in 1999 -- an accomplishment
that local people attributed to "prayers and technology." Kansas farmers
brought in an average yield of only 46 bushels per acre in 2000, under good
conditions. Just as important as its quantity, David's wheat cost him almost
nothing to grow -- just two bushels of seed per acre, selected from his own
reserves (though first purchased out of a seed catalog and representing
modern breeding). His principal tool for reaping and binding is a simple
mechanism with a rotating reel, manufactured by the McCormick-Deering
company. Sitting in the shed next to an equally vintage double plow, the
reaper looks like the first one ever made.

No one in the county is making a fortune this way. Mean household income for
Fredericksburg, Ohio, in 1989 was $23,750, but income from farm
self-employment was $30,000 -- the highest category in the county. The
estimated market value of land and buildings per farm in Holmes County came
to $349,203 in 1997, compared with $449,748 for the United States as a
whole, but that $100,000 difference is not at all what it seems. The average
American farm enclosed 487 acres in 1997, yielding a per-acre value of $923.
Farms in Holmes are much smaller -- just 122 acres, for a per-acre value of
$2,862. The people maintain this value and a high quality of life even
though they dedicate a significant portion of land to feed 5,000 horses
every year.

Yet for all that, income, no matter how high or low, is not the best
indicator of the success of the Amish, because they have eliminated the need
to shell out cash for all sorts of things. They own no large machinery
requiring monthly payments and purchase no chemical preparations for seed or
soil. They pay little or nothing for insurance, fuel, or child care. Most of
the cherries I picked went to family and neighbors and the rest to market.
Farms pass to sons whenever possible, preventing (or internalizing) the most
significant source of debt in any rural society. There is never any need to
hire labor for wages, no matter how large the task. Community provides the
only real insurance the Amish have, and it carries no price.

The most indispensable economies come from wily agronomy. The Amish strategy
for competing with big-business dairy farmers is to radically lower the cost
of feed by planting high-quality ryegrass or clover with an
energy-and-protein profile to rival that of the traditional combination of
alfalfa and corn. Allowing cattle to graze appears to violate the core
principle of convertible husbandry. The dung is not collected. In fact,
19th-century farmers often planted fine grasses and then "penned" their
animals in the field, letting them manure the ground where they stood. For
the Amish, that method saves all the labor of harvesting the hay and
spreading the manure. The method requires far less corn than usual methods
of feeding, which opens land for other purposes; and because forage grass is
perennial, it grows whenever weather permits, whereas corn has a specific
season. Most conventional dairies yield 5,000 to 7,000 pounds of milk per
acre, but skilled graziers have been known to produce 8,000 to 10,000. The
cash savings resulting from this modern adaptation of an ancient shortcut
protect the Amish like a storm door against low milk prices. Tim, David's
son, who recently purchased a farm of 80 acres, will pay off a $200,000
mortgage in 10 years without difficulty. "Some people are getting
$12,000-a-month milk checks," Tim tells me, while the cost of a typical
operation is not more than $1,000.

This is not the way farmers are supposed to talk. The televised image of
farmers' selling out, no longer able to continue because of mounting debt,
bitter and weeping at the sight of their combines and kitchen tables at
auction, has been common in news and documentaries since the 1980s. As any
farmer in the hard-hit upper Midwest might explain, the reasons have nothing
to do with the ability of rural people to raise commodities. They have to do
with the fatal collision between prices and debt. All through the 1970s,
farmers enjoyed high prices for their crops and low-cost financing for land
and new equipment. Thinking the good times would never end, many went deeply
into debt in order to purchase the newest machines. Some bought combines
costing up to $60,000 and took out additional mortgages for additional
acres. Boom expectations inspired those purchases more often than any felt
need. When prices slipped and the prime rate bounced from 6.8 percent in
1976 to 18.9 percent in 1981, families owing more money on their loans than
the total value of their equity lost it all. Every newspaper story seemed to
carry the same photograph of men with hands in their pockets, looking down
at the ground, the giant machines stuck and silent.

The worst farm crisis since the end of World War I never hit Amish farmers.
The people of Holmes County and adjacent Wayne County suffer the defections
of young people to town life, and the total number of Amish farms has
declined since 1987, but not because the "plain people" fell into the
technology trap. Government representatives have told farmers for a century
that they need to secure themselves against the hard and unpredictable winds
of the market economy by constantly increasing production. It is ironic,
then, that Amish farmers, who never took that advice, live more resiliently
(in this respect) than the great majority. Amish farmers are some of the
best farmers in the world and the preservers of a genuine land ethic. The
cycle of nutrients that recreates the land is not an antiquated idea; it
expresses a fundamental ecological principle that has maintained Amish
livelihood on this continent for 200 years. Manure and grazing figure in the
curriculums of agricultural colleges and are regarded as cutting-edge ideas
in environmental thought. There is no mystery about these methods, and David
advocates them every chance he gets, convinced that others can take them up.
Bucking every trend of contemporary American society, he says, as though
calling out over the hills, "We need more people on the land!"

Steven Stoll is an assistant professor of history at Yale University. This
article is adapted and condensed from his Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and
Society in Nineteenth-Century America, to be published next month by Hill
and Wang. Copyright ©2002 by Steven Stoll.