Deep Disagreement in U.S. Agriculture: Making Sense of Policy Conflict by Christopher Hamlin

Author:Christopher Hamlin [Hamlin, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Agriculture & Food, Science, Life Sciences, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9780429715778
Google: 3d6iDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52906943
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2019-04-11T08:04:05+00:00

Walters—Holders of Knowledge

The question of the utility and integrity of the farmer’s traditional knowledge is a central one in contemporary agricultural controversy. For Berry the best knowledge is farmers’ knowledge. Walters, on the other hand, sees most people, including most farmers, as not astute enough or as insufficiently attuned to nature to practice ecologically sound agriculture on their own. That farmers have enthusiastically embraced oil-based agriculture shows how little they understand: farmers “may still remember that nature created life, but they think the test tube and the fossil fuel factory have vacated nature’s rhythm of life and death” (AP: xiii). They have forgotten how to read the landscape and “some want to know little more than what the labels say” (AP: 109). Farmers’ knowledge of nature manifests itself only when they complain about the weather, yet with a little effort they could take intelligent charge of all manner of other natural processes and increase their productivity enormously:

In the coffee shops farmers like to talk about drought, about too much water, a pastime known as the blame the weather syndrome. Fertility, tilth, soil physics, all would be better topics…. Farmers probably would turn to such topics if someone led the way” (AP: 229).

Thus, far from embodying the accumulated folk wisdom that has sustained rural people since time immemorial most of America’s farmers are as dull as the rest of the population.

Walters is also critical of alternative agriculturalists who fail to appreciate the scientific bases of eco-agriculture. These are “organic folks” and their beliefs (about composting, for example) are “folklore,” a derogatory term in his lexicon. He is glad they have rejected conventional agriculture, but bothered that they have taken up an equally simplistic dogma (AP: 400, 201). They may stumble onto ecological truths, and practices consistent with those truths, but so long as they insist that old ways or natural ways are the way, they will fail, and more importantly, fail to demonstrate to conventional farmers (and to agricultural researchers and policymakers) that ecological forms of agriculture are viable and desirable. (AP: 247, 221, 201, 203; Acres 1/81: 3).

Having rejected conventional agricultural science as corrupt and farmers’ knowledge as inadequate (or, in the case of organic farmers, naive and unsystematic), Walters turns to the consulting firm both as the source of the best knowledge and as the best means of getting it into the hands and heads of farmers. Consultants will recognize truth and deliver disinterested advice to farmers simply because they are free from institutional or ideological biases.

Consultancy figures prominently in Acres. The coauthor of the Acres Primer is C. J. Fenzau of Advanced Ag Associates-West and one of the main markets for the Primer is the clientele of Eco Soil and Water, a Nebraska consulting firm with franchises throughout the high plains (AP: 128-9; Acres 9/82:3). The services consultants offer range from on-farm analyses to seminars on “first principles” (Acres 7/82:24-5). These consultants embody the new eco-agricultural science that Walters sees replacing the simplistic dogma of the land grant universities.

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