Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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PLOWBOY: But you let the possibilities grow and mature slowly instead of trying to do everything at once.

BERRY: That's right, and then you start to make it real. Then you begin to make mistakes too, because that's part of it. I don't know the trees I've set out here and had to dig up because something we didn't foresee happened. But that's part of what you mean by organic. We could have gotten a landscape architect to come here and put this place together — and then we could have lived here like inmates. But we're living here the way we live inside our skin; it fits us and as we change it changes.

PLOWBOY: And yet some experts would call this hillside farm "marginal land".

BERRY: Land like this — and there's a lot of it on both sides of the river here — seems to me to be important because of what it tells us about the limitations of our agriculture. This land is not suited for agribusiness or even the highly mechanized family farm. Much of it was abandoned because of bad farming methods, and it stays that way because our economy won't permit the kind of farming it requires. But cared for in the right way, it has a tremendous agricultural potential and is extremely responsive land. An Italian or an Oriental peasant would see abundance here and would achieve abundance.

PLOWBOY: Then why aren't such labor-intensive methods being used?

BERRY: It has to do partly with the kind of work most people will do anymore. I think we're developing a society now whose dominant effort is to get out of work. It's probably a measure of our decadence that we can talk about a "work ethic". Work isn't an ethic, work's a necessity.

The agricultural experts have a dream and every now and then you see a magazine article that projects it. Here's a farmer sitting up in a glass-enclosed tower, with a console of buttons and instruments in front of him. He's clean, he doesn't have any dust or sweat on him. There are no bugs crawling down his neck or chaff falling down the collar of his white shirt. Out there in the field are all these menial machines, scurrying about doing his bidding. He's our ideal of a good man, too good to work.

But everybody who's ever worked with machines know they're the most frustrating things going. At certain times not appointed by any expert those robots are going to stop. And it's going to be in the middle of a hot humid July day, and that farmer's going to have to leave his air-conditioned cubicle and go out there and crawl under the machinery in the dirt and grease, and sweat and fume and curse and get it running again.

PLOWBOY: On the other hand, an Oriental farmer — at least those described by F.H. King in Farmers of Forty Centuries— takes the time to really care for his land, and can get much more productivity from it.

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