Sustaining Cultivation 509hardly seems like farming anymore. To repeat the sociologist Paul Lasley’s phrase,
agriculture is increasingly just Ag-ag business, ag chemicals, ag machinery, and
perhaps just plain agony for some, given the stress, the struggle, the loss of eco-
nomic control, the loss of community, the loss of environment, the loss of culture.
Also, the US has for many years been the world’s largest food importer.^15 We are
wealthy enough that we could probably easily import more, if need be.
For many, these trends are to be decried and resisted, lest we truly lose the real
meaning of agriculture and the close interaction with communities natural and
human that it affords and preserves. Indeed, this book might be read as such a
decrying and resisting. And in a way it is. But in a way it isn’t, for I believe that
some of the concern to save agriculture is misplaced.^16 To decry and resist the
‘emptying’, ‘swamping’, or ‘obsolescence’ of agriculture is, in some measure, to
accept the terms by which these three visions of the end of the agriculture frame
our understandings. And to accept the terms of the end-of-agriculture debate,
whether pro or con, is to accept an unhelpful presumption: that agriculture is
something that farmers do.
As Wendell Berry has written, ‘eating is an agricultural act’.^17 To eat is to shape
the contours of farmland as effectively as any tractor. What we eat is what we grow.
How we eat is how we grow. Why we eat is why we grow, and there are many rea-
sons for eating in addition to attending to the necessary, if generally pleasurable,
sustenance of our individual bodies. The pleasures and necessities of eating, as we
understand them, may be as much about the connections it makes with other
places and other lives as about the filling of the self.
Among those connections are connections to the rural places that yield the
bulk of what we eat, and to the people who plant the seeds, tend the plants, and
harvest the crop. In this sense, there has been no emptying of agriculture. There is
just as large a percentage of people involved in agriculture as there has always been:
all of us. There may be fewer farmers, but there are no fewer agriculturalists.
Indeed, given the increase in the human population, there are substantially more.
Nor, in this sense, can we say that agriculture has been swamped by the forces
of the city. There is nothing non-agricultural about urban living. Without agricul-
ture, there would be no urban living, and indeed little human living of any kind.
Agriculture is indeed in many ways much different from what it once was, but
that’s largely because urban life has become part of it, not because urban life has
become a source of agriculture’s demise.
Nor is agriculture obsolete. If we were to switch to importing all our food, that
would not make agriculture any less a part of the American economic portfolio.
We would still be eating, paying for it and shaping the lives of farmers and the land
thereby. Those farmers and that land would just be that much further away, mak-
ing our sense of connection to, and understanding of, eating as an agricultural act
that much further away in our minds as well.
For while it is true, as long as we yet eat and live, that agriculture is not over,
nor even close to it, it is also true that most of us no longer feel a part of its con-
versation.