Wendell Berry’s Water Intelligence

In the shadow of wooded hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers is Lanes Landing, the 125-acre farm where Wendell Berry tended the land and published the most trenchant appeals in American letters to tame the damage from industrial agriculture. 

“No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can, for long, disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature, eroded, wasted, or degraded soils, damaged or destroyed ecosystems, extinction of biodiversity species,” he wrote. “Whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up – thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness.”

A man who plowed with draft horses and wrote with pencils on yellow legal pads, Berry died on August 31, at age 92, in Port Royal, Kentucky. He had spent half a century there composing classic poems, lyrical essays, and landmark books that illustrate and attack the depredations of contemporary industrialized farm practices. Water pollution was but one argument in the wholesale indictment.

He wasn’t the first writer to view the ever-larger scale of mechanization in agriculture as an affront to human and ecological safety. In 1940, in An Agricultural Testament, a foundational book that launched the modern organic farming movement, Sir Albert Howard wrote, “Mother Earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste.”

Berry just explained it better than anybody else. He understood that embracing efficiency, ever-higher crop yields, and confining farm animals in factory feeding operations was a system that antagonized principles of nature instead of working with them. The consequence, he wrote, would be massive pollution, depopulated rural regions, rampant human sickness, and destabilizing economic chaos. 

Though farm interests and their political allies viewed his ideas as a path to starvation, Berry’s critique proved prescient beyond measure. The current condition of the U.S. Corn Belt states is a case in point for what Berry called agriculture’s “prodigal extravagance and assumed limitlessness.” 

Corn Belt Peril

Producing most of the nation’s corn crop on farms spanning thousands of acres has eliminated hundreds of thousands of farms and emptied towns across the rural Midwest. Corn Belt states have the starkest county-level population decline in the nation, concentrated exactly where corn and soybean monocultures are most intensive – western Iowa, much of Illinois, Nebraska, and Kansas. 

As Circle of Blue has shown in our “Toxic Terrain” project, cultivating corn and confining livestock and poultry in mammoth feeding operations produces a stunning amount of water pollution, which is linked to the region’s rising cancer incidence. 

And now the entire big-farm enterprise is pitched at the edge of financial collapse. Some 40 percent of the corn crop is grown to produce ethanol for vehicle fuel. Gaining that level of supply over the last generation raised the value of farmland to dizzying heights. In some areas of Iowa, for instance, farmland has changed hands for $30,000 an acre.

But the principles of supply and demand are moving into sharp conflict. Economic incentives, principally from the federal government, provide farmers with powerful reasons to increase the size of America’s super-surplus of corn. Electrified transportation, though, is steadily driving down demand for ethanol. That, in turn, is reducing market prices for corn, which would put downward pressure on land values. A collapse in land prices – an existential threat in farm country – could be approaching. 

Though Berry never articulated these specific details of the dire condition of American agriculture, he anticipated the broad outlines of a farming system that replaces what he called “kindly care” for land and water and communities with one based on “extraction and exploitation.” 

Berry’s Landmark Critique

In 1977, the Sierra Club published The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the book that made him famous. In its pages, Berry connected the loss of farmland, the rise of agribusiness, severe soil erosion, and soil and water pollution as multiple symptoms of the same disease — the displacement of small farming communities by an agriculture dominated by toxic chemicals and machines dedicated to attaining ever more hazardous measures of efficiency, yield, and profit. 

The Unsettling of America was clear, powerful, and prescient. It warned about the scale of industrial agriculture’s reliance on fossil fuels, chemical inputs, and the soil-depleting monoculture that made it structurally precarious. He predicted the system’s failure due to soil exhaustion, water contamination, and the hollowing-out of the rural labor and knowledge base agriculture depends on. In other words, Berry anticipated industrial agriculture would become, as it now is, one of the most perilous industrial enterprises in the country. 

“All over this country, good farmland lies abandoned, and grows up to bush; other farmland, badly plowed for greed’s sake, washes itself away in mud,” he wrote. “Farmers and farmhands, displaced, become urban poor.”

Later, in a separate essay, Berry refined the critique. “The modern urban‐industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth,” he wrote. “At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit‐making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment.” 

I Was There

Even though I was raised mowing my family’s front lawn in a suburb of New York City, Berry’s classic book about agriculture sustainability caught my attention as a college student in the late 1970s. Eleven years after it was published, I spent the afternoon at Lanes Landing with Berry and his wife Tanya to write an article for The New York Times that focused on his rejection of water-polluting, community-wrecking industrial farming. 

Berry was in his mid-50s at the time – lean and weathered – and dressed plainly in a jacket, long sleeve shirt, jeans, and boots like a man who worked the land. I remember his Kentucky accent,  – deliberate and warm. He spent much of the time talking about his agrarian philosophy, inspired by Christian scripture, to return to a system of agriculture centered on the profound moral responsibility to care for — rather than exploit — water, land, and rural people. “A good farmer,” he told me, “belongs to a farm, to a family, to a community and to a way of life, each of which is supported by the other.”

That interview in 1988 came at the close of a treacherous decade in American agriculture. While prosperity enlivened cities on both coasts, a hard economic wind driven by farm foreclosures swept 300,000 farms from the nation’s interior. 

Berry and Jackson – Giants of Sustainable Farming

One of the signal events in Berry’s life was meeting Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist two years younger who founded The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, with whom he developed one of his closest friendships. They shared similar judgments about the myriad perils of contemporary farm practices. Jackson was busy inventing an ecologically safer system of crop production to turn wild perennial grasses into food crops that mimicked the genetic diversity and resilience of a landscape he knew intimately: the unbroken Kansas prairie. The Land Institute was developing entirely new varieties of food grains and production techniques that did not require annual planting, yet healed eroded farmland, eliminated pesticides, and sharply reduced the need for fertilizers.

Over the decades Berry and Jackson shared their views at conferences, in academic settings, on broadcast interviews, and at the annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute, held every September. Arguably their most brash idea to influence U.S. crop production and policy came in 2009 when Berry and Jackson proposed a 50-year Farm Bill “to restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.” 

Their plan focused on substantially reducing farm-related pollution and bringing crop production closer to demand. That meant freeing farm animals from livestock factories and putting them back in pastures. And redirecting the massive federal investment in growing surplus corn and other crops to developing perennial grains capable of actually building soil health and being cultivated with much less water and no chemicals. “The industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams,” they wrote.

Wendell Berry devoted his life to reining in the depredations of contemporary crop and livestock production and developing smaller- scale farm practices that protect water, preserve land, and assure the vitality of rural communities. 

While those goals were attacked as radical by farm interests through much of Berry’s life, they now hold their own as visionary. “A proper economy would not exploit, siphon away, and finally destroy the life of the land and the people,”  he said in a Prairie Festival speech in 2010. “A proper economy, instead, would recognize value in any given place, everything that is good in it and worth conserving.” 

Lead image: Wendell Berry and His Wife Tanya. Credit: Ann Thompson, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0