“By and large, the most popular way of dealing with American agricultural problems has been to praise American agriculture. For decades we have been wandering in a blizzard of production statistics pouring out of the government, the universities, and the ‘agribusiness’ corporations. No politician’s brag would be complete without a tribute to ‘the American farmer’ who is said to be single-handedly feeding seventy-five or one hundred or God knows how many people. American agriculture is fantastically productive, and by now we all ought to know it.

“That American agriculture is also fantastically expensive is less known, but it is equally undeniable, even though the costs have not yet entered into the official accounting. The costs are in loss of soil, in loss of farms and farmers, in soil and water pollution, in food pollution, in the decay of country towns and communities, and in the increasing vulnerability of the food supply system. The statistics of productivity alone cannot show these costs. We are nevertheless approaching a ‘bottom line’ that is not on our books.

“From an agricultural point of view, a better word than productivity is thrift. It is a better word because it implies a fuller accounting. A thrifty person is undoubtedly a productive one, but thriftiness also implies a proper consideration for the means of production. To be thrifty is to take care of things; it is to thrive — that is, to be healthy by being a part of health. One cannot be thrifty alone; one can only be thrifty insofar as one’s land, crops, animals, place, and community are thriving.

“The great fault of the selective bookkeeping we call ‘the economy’ is that it does not lead to thrift; day by day, we are acting out the plot of a murderous paradox: an ‘economy’ that leads to extravagance. Our great fault as a people is that we do not take care of things. Our economy is such that we say we ‘cannot afford’ to take care of things: Labor is expensive, time is expensive, money is expensive, but materials — the stuff of creation — are so cheap that we cannot afford to take care of them. The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We ‘cannot afford’ to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion.

“A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

“Suppose that, foreseeing the inevitable failure of this sort of production, we see that we must assign a value to continuity. If that happens, then our standard of production will have to change; indeed, it will already have changed, for the standard of productivity alone cannot permit us to see that continuity has a value. The value of continuity is visible only to thrift.”

— from Wendell Berry, “Six Agricultural Fallacies,” in Home Economics (North Point Press, 1990)

Related reading and listening

  • Creation’s goodness and human faithfulness — J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness
  • The destructive logic of short-term thinking — Wendell Berry on the perils of ignoring the nature of Nature
  • Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
  • A theology of eating —
    FROM VOL. 113
    Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Honoring the pigness of pigs —
    FROM VOL. 137
    Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
  • Distributist & sustainable economics — Two interview from 2010: John C. Médaille summarizes how distributist economics differs from both capitalism and socialism. Then Herman Daly discusses the danger of economic theory abstracted from the actual stuff of Creation. (44 minutes)
  • Lilies as analogues for farming — Fred Bahnson on the wisdom of attending to patterns of Creation
  • Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 148 — FEATURED GUESTS: Steven D. Smith, Willem Vanderburg, Jeffrey Bilbro, Emma Mason, Alison Milbank, and Timothy Larsen
  • Post-liberalism of an earlier generation — Allan C. Carlson discusses an anthology of articles from Free America, a magazine published between 1937 and 1947 whose writers believed that political democracy could only survive if coupled with decentralized economic democracy. (26 minutes)
  • Confronting modernity through farming — Jesse Straight, who nurtures the life of Whiffletree Farm in Warrenton, Virginia, talks about how he decided to pursue a vocation as a farmer in an effort to discover a way of life that worked against the characteristic fragmentation so dispiriting in modern culture. (24 minutes)
  • Lessons from quarantine: Making do with tinned fruit — In this audio reprint of “Wendell Berry and Zoom,” Front Porch Republic editor Jeffrey Bilbro reflects on two metaphors that can help put our new-found “dependency” on web-based video conferencing into perspective: tinned fruit and a prosthetic limb. (17 minutes)
  • The inevitability of escalating public animosity — With excerpts from books and lectures by Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, and Wendell Berry, Ken Myers argues that modern political theory has guaranteed increasing levels of public conflict. (19 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
  • Against the machine — How careless use of mechanistic metaphors obscures the mystery of life
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 106 — FEATURED GUESTS: Adam Briggle, John C. Médaille, Christopher Page, Christian Smith, Herman Daly, and Thomas Hibbs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stewart Davenport, William T. Cavanaugh, J. Matthew Bonzo, Michael R. Stevens, Craig Gay, Eugene Peterson, and Barry Hankins
  • A devilish temptation — Wendell Berry explains how the modern Western ideal of the sovereign self enshrines a story of the abandonment of restrictions and restraints in the name of human freedom.
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 91 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Witte, Jr., Hugh Brogan, Daniel Ritchie, Daniel Walker Howe, George McKenna, and Patrick Deneen
  • Re-imagining economic obedience: lessons from Wendell Berry — The order of Creation, says Wendell Berry, is closer to that of a drama than that of a market. That quality should inform how we imagine economic life to be well-ordered.
Tags: