Farming in Unsettled America — Past and Future
Wendell Berry long ago saw that abusing land would lead people to abuse themselves and others. Can America find a way out?
American farmer, essayist, and poet/novelist saw it coming. His famed 1977 book traced how the US government was even then destroying the social fabric of the country by pushing Americans off farms to make way for fossil fuel-dependent agribusinesses reliant on monoculture, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. It’s a model that abuses the land, everything on it, and the climate, to provide cheap, unhealthy food for the many and high profits for the few.
Berry — now in his 90s and in rural Kentucky — is a self-styled Jeffersonian. He believes that how people relate to the land determines not only the food they eat and their physical health, but their character, their relationships to each other, and the culture they perpetuate.
In a preface to the second publication of the Unsettling a decade later, when farm depopulation was largely done, Berry wrote: “…at least for farmers and rural communities, the situation is catastrophic: Farmers are losing their farms, some are killing themselves, some in the madness of despair are killing other people, and rural economy and rural life are gravely stricken.”
That pattern of abuse has through the half century since. America’s relationship to the land has been “exploitive, destructive, and indifferent,” as a Maine farmer-philosopher friend and 1970s ‘back-to-the-lander’ put it recently. That unhealthy relationship to the land is reflected across the culture of not only the heartland but most of America, as Berry foresaw: Social breakdown, drug addiction, ill-health, and increasingly, destruction of the climate and ecosystem.
This is Trump country. This is the Middle America that’s imposing payback on a government which, as many of them see it, decimated their farms and farming communities, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. I’m not saying Trump voters are closet environmentalists longing to get back to small organic farms. I am saying they have cause not to like their government, or the “elites” they often see as benefiting from and mocking their predicament.
The Other 1%
The USDA, which in the 1970s was still bragging about the declining number of farmers required to produce food in America, reported in its latest agricultural overview, the , that barely more than 1% of Americans, 3.37 million people, are farm “producers.” That’s defined as farm owners or those “involved in making decisions” about the operation of the country’s 1.9 million farms.
The billions of dollars in “farm subsidies” spent by the USDA annually helps the biggest of that 1% but does nothing other than hand out meager charity to the now rootless people of Middle America, as they tend to see it.
The subsidies also further degrade the land and add to carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, coastal “elites” rarely notice because the agricultural decimation is in “flyover country,” the great expanse between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains where much of the nation’s and world’s primary food is grown and fed to massive numbers of cattle, pigs, and chickens. Coastal urbanites seldom visit.
The decimation is also in the factory belt, now called Rust Belt, around the Great Lakes, where much of the nation’s and the world’s stuff used to be manufactured. That stuff was often made by displaced farmers who flocked to factories, only to be displaced from factory jobs when the big US corporations moved their operations to spots where labor was cheaper. By the 1980s, if not before, the ever-expanding US government existed — through Republican and Democratic administrations alike — to serve those corporations, not to help displaced farmers and factory workers.
When the coastal “elites” chanced to pick up rumors of trouble in the heartland, they didn’t care, since the immediate result was cheap, plentiful food. Americans pay a much lower than most other rich countries and, in the end, they get what they pay for. Unhealthy heavily processed food, with too much beef and pork — fed on subsidized soybeans and corn — and too much sugar and corn syrup in everything.
Social breakdown, drug addiction, and the collapse of health and longevity gradually spread to the coasts too, although good corporate-financed health insurance and a seemingly unstoppable stock market continue to shield many in the upper reaches of society. Or did, until Trump 2.0 arrived.
Paying the Piper
The bills coming due aren’t limited to whatever damage Donald the Disruptor has or will impose on America and the world in a misbegotten attempt to make America great again by restoring its manufacturing and farming “dominance.”
Having done so much to unravel the fabric of America, Big Ag itself is heavily stressed and in danger of collapse. Monsanto, now owned by German chemical one-time giant Bayer, is on the verge of corporate collapse. Bayer’s value on the stock exchange is only some 20% of what it was in 2018, when it bought Monsanto. The German company has paid out $10 billion to settle that glyphosate, the pesticide/weed killer in its famed Roundup, causes cancer.
That didn’t stop the rot, though. The company was just hit with by a jury in the US state of Georgia. The award will probably be slashed on appeal, as other huge jury awards against Monsanto have been, but it’s only one of over 60,000 such US lawsuits pending. Big jury awards against Monsanto are also a black eye for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has consistently sided with Monsanto in saying that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer in humans, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) and many other national regulators have labeled the pesticide a possible or likely carcinogen.
The pressure is so intense that Bayer is threatening to halt all glyphosate sales in the US if it doesn’t get stronger legal protection from litigation, . This wouldn’t seem like a potent threat, since glyphosate has long-since been overused and many weeds have learned to live with it. A new pesticide is needed to support the blockbuster business model in which Monsanto sells genetically modified (GMO) soybean, corn, and other seeds that are “resistant” to glyphosate, meaning if you spray glyphosate on the plants grown from these seeds, they will live but all plants around them will die. That’s the theory.
The problem is that neither Monsanto, nor its main agrochemical competitors Syngenta (now wholly ) and Bayer-compatriot firm BASF, has come up with an effective new pesticide for decades. Monsanto tried a chemical called “dicamba” beginning in 2016, but it “drifts,” or blows from where it’s sprayed into neighboring fields, potentially killing other farmers’ crops and even fruit trees.
Lawsuits and bans or restrictions by conservative Midwestern state regulators followed. Last year even the ever-Monsanto-loyal US EPA finally put a hold on dicamba’s use on virtually everything except corn, and expectations are that altogether. What happens next is unclear.
Peak Food?
All this comes on top of the spread of disease in factory-farmed animals. Starting in 2019, a complex virus led to the death of over half of China’s enormous pig population from . More recently, a flu-like virus is afflicting chickens and other birds, leading to a runup in egg prices. It’s spreading to cattle and, more . So far neither virus has spread from human to human, but pandemic potential exists.
There’s ruination of the soil across much of the once astoundingly rich farmland of middle America, contributing to heavy reliance on fossil fuel-based nitrogen fertilizer. War between Russia and Ukraine and trade wars, especially between the US and Canada, have pushed up prices for fertilizers of all types.
And most critically, there’s the rapidly worsening climate crisis, with not just higher temperatures but drought, flood, storm and wildfire damage that threatens millions of acres. The cheap and plentiful food that used to justify Washington’s support for agribusiness and accompanying rural depopulation is no longer dependably cheap and may soon cease to be plentiful.
“We think food is where the energy sector and this whole talk about energy transition was about 10 years ago,” Taimur Hyat, chief operating officer for PGIM, the investment management arm of big US insurance company Prudential, . “…the current food system is simply not fit for purpose. It is not going to work for our planet [and] it’s not going to work for our consumption needs for a variety of reasons.”
One of those reasons is that the production, processing, and transportation of food now accounts for at least at a time when most countries — the US partially excepted — are trying desperately to reduce fossil fuel use in order to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and contain the damage to the climate. Some estimates put agribusiness’s contribution to GHG emissions even higher than 15%.
Food and Fuel Transitions
What would a food and agriculture “transition” look like? Following Hyat’s comparison with the energy transition, the aim would be a food system better adapted to an instable climate and a less centralized and growth-addicted economy, with little-to-no reliance on oil and natural gas. Farms would likely be smaller, and much more diverse and adaptable in what they grow.
It seems implausible that humanity will return to rural living en masse, but it’s quite conceivable that 10% or more of the population in the US could again become agricultural “producers,” rather than the meagre 1% the USDA sees now. That would allow farms to again play a meaningful role in supporting towns and other “farm-market centers.”
But not all our food is likely to come from rural farms after the collapse of Big Ag. Urban farming is already developing and will likely expand. Interest is growing among suburbanites and town dwellers in “food gardens,” that provide a portion of a family’s food — along the lines of so-called that supplied some 40% of US fresh vegetables in World War II.
Some see “plant-based diets” with no meat or fish as the only solution. I think that ignores the tremendous benefits of manure as fertilizer, if animals are grown in relatively small numbers in association with farming of vegetables, fruit, and grains. This would likely mean less meat than many people eat now, but it doesn’t demand either no meat whatsoever or the creation of chemically manipulated food substitutes.
A future along these lines would require that people who don’t grow their own food pay more of their income for the food they buy. That was already the clear message from farmers around the world who went on strike in 2023–24, and the message has gotten louder and clearer since then. For people in wealthier parts of the world, this aligns with a need to consume much less manufactured “stuff.”
Small farming will be tough in a world in which weather is harsh and unpredictable. Ways will have to be found to feed people when instable weather kills local crops they were depending on and long-distance trading of food commodities is no longer widespread. It isn’t an easy path, but Berry has spent a lifetime showing us just how rewarding a path it can potentially be.
