“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

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley: