Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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PLOWBOY: Do many of the farmers you know around here use organic methods on their land?

BERRY: Not really. In order to change from chemical to organic farming, most farmers are going to need somebody to prove that it can be done economically. Because of the economic stresses they're under, they're not the ones who are going to initiate the changes. Most of them have a large investment in land and equipment and the farm economy is unstable. Labor is scarce because their sons don't stay on the farm anymore, and because they can't compete with industrial pay. Chemical methods are attractive because they take less time. That doesn't mean the farmers always like those shortcuts. But what choice do they have'?

There are farms around the country that are beginning to serve as models for large-scale organic practices, thereby showing that these methods can work even with the tight economics and the labor shortages. And these farms are getting easier to find.

PLOWBOY: As in the "organic directory" published by Rodale Press?

BERRY: Yes. People like the New Alchemists are also contributing something very important by getting the farmers and gardeners to do the experimental work themselves. This is exactly where the agriculture colleges and extention services have failed the farmers. Those institutions develop new varieties and new methods, and then more or less lose interest in them. I think they ought to work out programs in which the ag school would invite the farmers to do the experimenting, and then underwrite the cost of any crop failure caused by the use of the new seed or method. In that approach the experiment would succeed or fail in terms of the practicalities of people's lives. If it succeeded, the knowledge would already be in the community where it belonged.

PLOWBOY: Besides Rodale Press and the New Alchemists, are there any other groups helping the large farmers experiment with organic methods?

BERRY: None that I know of. The big farm magazines are giving their effort to pseudo-experiments and editorial opinions attempting to write off or laugh off the claims that organic methods ought rightfully to have on their attention. They've been bought by the chemical companies and the agribusinessmen.

PLOWBOY: Your resistance to this sort of domination reminds me of the "mad farmer" in your poetry.

BERRY: Well, it seems to me that many of the things we're asked to call the blessings of progress are actually deforming diseases. But as I said earlier, that's not a thing our time has made it easy to just pop up and say. I suppose the mad farmer is one of the ways I made myself able to say it. I think he's the voice of a force in the world and in ourselves that our current civilization has been put together to deny.

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