What Can the History of Sustainable Agriculture Teach Us About Movement Building?
When your very culture is under siege, is it possible to make a new one?
In 1979, when I was still in college, my then-partner and I purchased a five-acre farm on the outskirts of a medium-sized town in northern Indiana. The 1903 white farmhouse sat on the top of a gentle hill, and stretching out below was our small slice of a more than 100-acre marshland that, in the 1880s, had been drained and ditched by Dutch immigrants, the deep, rich, black soil like a photographic template upon which to overlay the dream of self-sustaining vegetable farms they brought with them from their homeland.
This could be a story about the contributions of hardworking immigrants to the fabric of America. Or about the prejudice against difference that, despite our melting-pot indoctrination, has always been a key feature of life in these states (as evidenced by the story we were told soon after purchasing the farm about a crop failure early in the 20th century that threatened the Dutch community with starvation and how their appeal to the city leaders for rescue was denied.) Or maybe about the transformation of the natural environment by land-hungry settler colonists with little concern for the ecosystems they were destroying. What I want to talk about, though, is the short history of sustainable agriculture and how its evolution could be a model for recovering our governance structures, and our very culture, from corruption and greed.
By the time we dug our first potato rows and had built a goat barn from logs we cut in the winter and then floated down the river in the spring floods, it was well known, at least among the so-called educated elite, that the landscape of American farming was a mirage. Yet, five or six decades earlier, the earliest chemical-dependent farmers were already noticing negative impacts to soil health, livestock, and diversity, not to mention their own breathing problems, skin lesions, and early deaths from unfamiliar cancers. While these farmers were being inundated with propaganda from the chemical companies about feeding the world, increasing production, saving time and money, modernizing agriculture, and preserving the family farm, the exact opposite was happening. Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, along with deep plowing and elimination of natural windbreaks, destroyed soil biodiversity, provoked catastrophic erosion, and polluted the food chain, all while killing off species of plants and animals that had thrived in what were once the massive forests and fertile plains of the planet that could now barely support life in any form at all.
By the early 1920s, scientists like Albert Howard and social reformers like Rudolf Steiner were sounding the alarm, though little attention was paid until the combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression brought both economic and environmental disaster to American farms and farmers. Under FDR, the government responded with conservation programs and financial aid, thereby mainstreaming a scientific understanding of farming that continued to motivate federal and state programs, but did little to resist the full transformation of food production into a fossil-fuel-based corporate industry.
The 1940s saw the publication of Howard’s An Agricultural Testament and the establishment of the Rodale Institute’s model organic farm, but it wasn’t until Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962 that the general public really understood the environmental and health impacts of pesticide use; DDT, the chemical that Carson focused on, was banned by the EPA in 1972. Attention to poisoned food waned again until, in 1989, a “60 Minutes” episode described a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council showing the toxic impacts of a chemical called Alar, generally used on apples. Something close to panic ensued (temporarily, though some would say that the apple industry never fully recovered.) Regulations followed and, at about the same time, the U.S.D.A. created the SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program to support farmers and research universities in exploring sustainable agricultural methods.
By the early 1990s, several ideas that had been around for a while came together. First was a two-decades-old environmental movement that could now tie ecological concerns with threats to human health. Next was the disappearance of rural cultures organized around actual farmers who, by then, had either aged out or were mostly replaced by corporations and machines. Feminist and civil rights activism was also shedding critical light onto historic inequality and systemic flaws in food production, which provided a perfect model for understanding the extraction and exploitation inherent to capitalism. A second round, twenty years after the first, of hippie-ish sensibilities was driving a few young people back to the land and motivating them to apply a self-sufficient “entrepreneurial” spirit to local food production, including direct marketing such as Community Supported Agriculture programs and farmers markets, and organic growing practices. Today, of course, corporate concerns dominate the organic food industry but consumers have found that they like shopping at the farmers market on Saturday morning, eating at restaurants that focus on ‘farm to table’ models, supporting local businesses that, they are told, funnel economic benefits back into the community. As both a multi-billion-dollar industry and an integrated feature of modern culture, sustainable - or regenerative farming - isn’t going anywhere.
My own history corresponds somewhat with this chronology. In the late fall of 1983, I met an Amishman named Daniel Yoder who was in the early stages of organizing his neighbors to grow organic produce. Daniel had somehow gotten ahold of a book or pamphlet by one of a handful of Amish and Amish-adjacent farmers who were pushing organic production in response to the pressures of modernization. As Daniel described it, the challenge for Amish farmers was how to manage farms that were often divided among the children of their large families, the plots getting smaller and smaller and providing less and less opportunity for support. At the same time, many Amish farmers, and Daniel in particular, were deeply concerned about the community losing its connection to the land, the exigency (and desire) of younger members to leave farming for cash work in factories, on construction crews, and in trades. The literature Daniel was reading convinced him that organic crops could save Amish farms. Vegetables grown intensively and with the higher returns of organic prices could make those smaller plots profitable while fulfilling the call to stewardship so important to Amish religion and culture.
After learning that we were interested in these same topics and were managing a five-acre organic vegetable farm of our own, Daniel invited us (actually, just my male partner at first) to attend one of their meetings. Over the course of the next couple of years, I became the produce manager of our local food co-op, and the Amish farmers provided the majority of the produce sold there. We wrote our own organic standards, based on state standards from Ohio and California (federal standards were not implemented until 2002), held regular meetings to plan the year’s crops and educate the group about growing and marketing organic produce, and, in 2001, opened a vendor-managed year-round indoor farmers market that is still active to this day.
This is, of course, a very surface rendering of a much more complicated story – which I plan to share here as part of a longer ‘memoir’ in the very near future – but it represents the point I want to make or, maybe more accurately, questions I’d like to raise. What are the ingredients of grassroots change? Where are the intersections of culture and politics, ‘locations’ where attitudes and behaviors and belief systems are most susceptible? What can we learn from other change models that can help us identify opportunities for movement building now?
The history of sustainable agriculture shows us that change is possible, backlash and resistance notwithstanding. There was a time when you couldn’t say the “o” word (organic) aloud without being accused of radical Communism or hatred for farmers or just irrational idealism. Many traditional farmers are still hostile to organic agriculture and, sadly, it is only due to the siren call of profit that others have come around. And, as long as prices are held high due to the economics of volume and extraction, many consumers will also be understandably suspicious. Sustainable agriculture remains peripheral to a powerful system of corporate industrial food production, but that doesn’t make it irrelevant.
The process of emergent cultural relevance has some features to attend to. The first is knowledge. No new system can thrive for long or make inroads on conflicting worldviews without excellent research and information. As we know from the current misinformation whirlwind, accuracy and complexity are not enough and may even be all the more threatening because of their tendency to challenge comfortable ignorance. At the same time, the fact that autocrats and fascist cheerleaders are so threatened by knowledge, to the point of deporting those who reveal the truth about Israeli genocide, for instance, or demonizing those who document the racism and white supremacy motivating conservative politics, demonstrates its power.
Part of the reason that sustainable agriculture has established a solid basis in the conversation around food systems is because of the depth and quality of research that has supported it. The point, though, isn’t just to win an argument. Lies and threats and loud voices can do that. At the very least, knowledge is integrity. It provides a foundation for collaboration and connection, and a pathway for change. It outlines a shared and provable reality, even if there is bound to be disagreement about methods and strategies, and even goals, which is, as we will see, the second important feature of change.
It’s actually one of the least successful aspects of the sustainable agriculture movement that is the most instructive. Until very recently, organic farmers formed a kind of clique, and the audience for their products was nearly exclusive to a certain elite class. The cost of organic food is still a barrier, but important contributions from critical race theory and urban planning have cast a wider net in our understanding of who organic farming practices and healthy eating “belong to.” Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call this development a coalition, mostly because parallel efforts have remained just that – parallel (segregated is another word for it.) Yet, these dynamics make clear the impact such coalitions might have. Once upon a time, unions had the greatest potential for occupying this role in American culture, collecting seemingly disparate factions under a single umbrella. An effective movement for systemic social change (NOT driven by or beholden to capitalism) would require an even larger and more diverse collaboration, one that shifts attention away from purely economic concerns to cultural and ecological ones as well.
Therein lies the next warning that sustainable agriculture history illuminates. Capitalism will invariably co-opt any efforts toward movement building in several obvious ways. First, by appealing to individualism, the market divides us and places us in competition with one another. While some local organic farmers have been marginally successful at resisting the lure of profit over people, the industry as a whole certainly has not. It is essential that an ‘entrepreneurial’ mentality is subverted right from the start. Second, capitalism applies economic metrics to any enterprise, not only to set individuals against each other but to undermine any efforts that don’t prioritize financial benefit. We see examples every day of all the ways that a ‘product’ orientation minimizes and dilutes the values underlying sustainable agriculture with purely capitalistic intentions. Ironically, any new movement designed to address capitalism itself will need to return to the original meaning of “sustainable” (or some similar explication of values), which was specifically conceived as a way to extricate ourselves from market thinking by expanding the metrics to include social and ecological concerns. Tripartite sustainability demands that ‘economics’ is recognized as a discipline concerned with material well-being, not just profit-making, and that human well-being is intrinsically linked to both the well-being of other humans (social) and that of the planet as a whole (ecological). Any value system driving a movement coalition requires equally as explicit, articulate, and accessible change potential.
As is clear even from this very abbreviated historical overview, sustainable agriculture as a cultural phenomenon has benefited greatly from government support. Without the EPA and the USDA’s numerous agriculture and conservation programs, support for sustainable farming and food resource initiatives would be decades behind where they are now or would not exist at all. Maybe. Or maybe we’d have something better. With the knowledge that that luxury has all but disappeared and is unlikely to return any time soon – it took years and years of research and development for these programs to evolve – might it be possible to identify replacement strategies that could be just as or even more effective in building new structures for movement support? Certainly, many federal financing programs have had flaws both in conception and application. Perhaps a focus on their strengths, which include professional information systems, emphasis on community-based research, needs, and assessments, and conservation and environmental priorities can offer both a template for some best practices and a point of critique and departure.
Movement building and systemic change require difficult and monumental shifts in culture. Can you make culture? Are cultural values and practices even within our control? The history of sustainable agriculture would suggest that the answer is yes. It is possible, as organic farmers have shown us over the last handful of decades, to just take action, to just practice what you care about and find other people who care about it with you, to embrace something as seemingly idealistic as a connection to land and to learn to do something practical and useful and expansively generous with it, like growing food while respecting the land’s integrity as a diverse, natural system. No top-down persuasion was necessary, no obvious products leading to great (or any) wealth were forthcoming.
If politics is about the concentration of power and resources, culture is – or could be – about the sharing and dissemination of those things. What we know about developing new cultural values is that it requires the integration of methods and practices, the cherishing of diversity, high regard for complexity. The things one cares about, the things one celebrates, the things we DO, are the things that end up mattering, materializing.
Growing food in the anthropocene is a radical act. I have to believe that it can also show us how to expand that radicality in the service of pulling our culture back from the brink.