If what I read sometime back is correct – and by sometime back I mean months ago, not years or decades ago – supposedly half of the human population is still fed by animal and human powered agriculture. I have no idea of the accuracy of that assessment, but the reality is that tractors aren’t a universal part of agriculture. To many farmers in North America where many would have a machinery yard as big or bigger than many of the smallest farms in the world, it may be hard to believe that if not half, that at least much of the world’s sustenance comes by way of animal and human powered agriculture. To many farmers in North America it may be hard to fathom how families could possibly make a living off such small plots of land, but the reality is that many farm families do indeed eke out a living off small plots of land, feeding themselves and the local and/or global market.
Someone recently loaned me his copy of Richard Manning’s 2004 book, [Against the Grain]. It is not a pleasant book to read and there is much I disagree with, but the author lets the reader know early on that, “This is a book not just about agriculture but about the dehumanization that occurred with agriculture.” In the end I cannot disagree.
At one point near the end of the book the author tells of interrupting his train trip to meet Fred Kirschenmann at his farm. That North Dakota farmer has spoken on the Island at least three times and has been mentioned in this column on several occasions. As well, I suggested that the reader go on the internet and access the document “Questions We Aren’t Asking in Agriculture”, which was a presentation he made to an agricultural class at Iowa State University, when he was still the Director of the Leopold Center.
Kirschenmann’s speech stated in part that, “The Iowa State Legislature created the Leopold Center to be an agent for change---to be instrumental in the development of a resilient agriculture for the state of Iowa that is consistent with the philosophy of Aldo Leopold. // Many of the questions I will be asking us to consider tonight are, in fact, similar in character to some that Leopold asked himself. Early in his life Leopold was convinced, as most of us are, that science and technology could solve most of our problems---including those facing conservation. Later he warned that we needed to be wary of "salvation by machine," (1933) and that without a compelling land ethic that was ecologically grounded, we wouldn't make much progress, long term, toward our ecological, social or our economic goals. (1949)”
Whereas most of his neighbours grow wheat and some also grow corn and soybeans, Kirschenmann on his 3,000 acre farm raises, “oats, wheat, rye, barley, millet, buckwheat, alfalfa, flax, sweet clover, lentils, and sunflowers.” And he also raises beef cattle which he sells at “an organic premium market.”
Manning’s book mentions that North Dakota’s ag officials looked into the difference in sources of income for sustainable and the conventional agriculture there and found that the primary source of income for both groups there was crop sales, with the second source for the sustainable group being livestock sales and second for the conventional being government payments.
Evidently without government subsidies – by whatever name or acronym – most North Dakota farmers would be eking out a living there, if they would be farming at all. Elsewhere in the same book, Manning made it clear that most of the government payments end up feeding the corporations that farm the farmers.
The phrase “that farm the farmers” wasn’t in the book but for far too long there have been too many and too much of manipulating the minds of the farmers as well as the other consumers, and all the while pretending that we live in an age of progress and are on the high road, when all the while agriculture is less and less resilient and more and more controlled, and we are losing more and more farmers when what is needed is more farmers.
Back in the December issue of Acres U.S.A. in its first year forty years ago Charles (Chuck) Walters Jr. asked in headline form, “Will It Be, ‘A policeman on Farms?’” There’s certainly fewer farmers now than then, as well as more regulators and inspectors, some armed and with more power given them than the police. Will it come to having as many “police” as farmers as Walters questioned back then? The rules, regulations and paperwork are quite a dis-incentive at a time when we need many more farmers, not less.
Very near the close of Manning’s writing about meeting Fred Kirschenmann and his wife Carolyn, he wrote that Kirschenmann declared that “the best thing that can happen to a farmer like him is the proliferation of brew pubs, a movement that has spread even to towns like Fargo. He can contract with the micro-brewery to raise brewing grains, sell them at a premium, and then sit with his neighbors on a Saturday night in a place where people make good beer. That is how markets build community instead of destroying it. We once came together over food, before it came from commodities.”

Over good beer or good food or both, people could sit with neighbours – while keeping neighbours from around the world in mind – and ask why agriculture and the world are the way they are, and what it would take to make the world resilient and fair to all.
A form of agriculture in which hardly any sons and daughters follow in their parents footsteps may not trouble those ruling from ivory towers and believe in “salvation by machine” but it does trouble many who are connected to reality.
In his speech to the aforementioned ag class, Fred Kirschenmann stated at one point, “Now, many in our society would argue that while the environmental problems noted above are indeed critical, the declining farm numbers are not. As one federal government official put it when I asked her about the declining farm population some years ago ‘If two or three farmers can produce all the food and fiber we need to meet our domestic and export requirements, who cares? In fact, if robots can do it who cares?’”
That government official evidently hasn’t a clue about real world agriculture, and to use a modern phrase, “real time” agriculture. If agriculture and the soil are to be saved it won’t come by way of salvation by machine or by farmers making themselves more and more slaves to a system of agriculture that makes them slaves. As Manning related in his book, “A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporations to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.”
Although addressing broader issues than just agriculture, Wendell Berry pointed out in his essay “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” that, “The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘accessing’ what we now call ‘information’ – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
Despite the propaganda to the contrary, agriculture isn’t an industry just like any other industry. Agriculture is the main means by which humanity is fed, and in the end a proper rethinking of education can help not only young people, but older farmers and other consumers of  food realize that the environment is our life support system, and that if the children and grandchildren of the world today are to be fed and fed well, agriculture needs be guided, not misguided by short-sighted selfish means but by hope for all. And Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the wholistic needs of body, mind and soul very well when he declared, “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”