Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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Butz once wrote a piece, you know, for the Department of Agriculture yearbook explaining why we can't have small farms anymore because they're inefficient. This was at the same time that the same department was publishing a magnificent study that showed that when farms get bigger than somewhere between 400 to 1,000 acres-depending on what you're growing-you have to duplicate everything. THEN you have to add an expensive management structure and real efficiency goes downhill from there.

The Department of Agriculture is not alone in this finding, by the way. The World Food Organization, M.I.T., and other groups have made study after study of the situation and none of them can find any real efficiency in large-scale food production.

PLOWBOY: Yet Earl Butz, the current head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, still wants us to duplicate the large farms of the Soviet Union.

HESS: Earl Butz and Nelson Rockefeller and the other collectivists who believe in bigness in everything. And that approach does not work. Big agriculture simply does not work as the Russians have amply demonstrated. But then (soft laugh) the Russians can't do anything right, anyway.

PLOWBOY: You agree with Schumacher, then, that "Small is Beautiful".

HESS: Small-scale organization of all human activities is the inevitable wave of the future.

All our current institutions-government, business, social are like dinosaurs. They've grown and grown until they're so ponderous and unwieldy and bogged down in bureaucratic paper shuffling, they can't even fulfill the simplest tasks. And, like dinosaurs, as long as the climate is favorable, they'll keep on dominating the landscape and keep on growing. But the climate is changing in this country, and changing fast. There's some cold winds blowing out of the north. We don't have unlimited low-cost energy to squander anymore and we can no longer count on an unlimited flow of inexpensive raw materials from backward nations. And most important of all, the American people are wising up. They're demanding an end to things such as pollution and consumer rip-offs.

Now this is only the beginning. When the real crunch comes, the dinosaurs won't be able to adapt they'll die of their own ponderous inertia. And their place will be taken by small-scale organizations made up of people with a sense of individual responsibility, because such organizations and such people will be versatile enough to adapt.

PLOWBOY: I'd like to believe that.

HESS: You don't have to believe it you can already see it taking place all over this country. Our economic system is breaking down so rapidly that people everywhere are starting to rediscover more primitive forms of social organization. Cooperative forms of organization. Food co-ops, action groups, community banks, and taxpayers' revolts are springing up everywhere in both the city and the country.

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