Independent Lens

In my boyhood, Henry County, Kentucky, was almost entirely a farming county, farmed by families who lived not only upon them, but within and from them.

narrator

For over four decades, Wendell Berry has been the voice of rural America and a champion for a way of life that is quickly disappearing. The point of industrialism has been the replacement of people with machinery. Filmmaker Laura Dunn took an intimate look inside a community on the edge of extinction. It's either expand or get out. The profit per acre is so small and getting smaller all the time. It's kind of a vicious cycle. It seems like something we can't get out of. When the traditional people disappear, the traditional values will disappear. How could they survive? "Look

and See

Wendell Berry's Kentucky," now, only on "Independent Lens."

inspiring pop music

and See

I feel like that rural America is third world. It's all designated as a sacrifice area, and the people who profit from it and the people who are living from it complacently feel entitled to it. This lady from "The New York Times" asked me if I would write an op-ed piece. I said no, I wasn't interested in doing it. And she said, "Why?" And I said, "Because there isn't room "in an op-ed piece to develop the case, "and nobody knows what I'm talking about because the media don't report it." I said, "I'll come and talk to your editors "about why they ought to send a team of reporters out into the rural landscapes to see what's going on there."

stirring orchestral music

and See

The people at the Library of Congress must be getting used to cataloging newly-arrived books from the writer Wendell Berry. He has more than 30 books on the shelves there now.

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"country life, Kentucky, poetry." Mr. Berry has published his selected poems dating back to 1964. Wendell Berry and his wife Tanya have lived for many years on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He spent two years at Stanford, in California, on a writing fellowship, taught for two years in New York City, returned to Kentucky to teach, bought a small farmhouse as a summer place, then decided that was to be home. It would be a life of working the land and writing. From his desk, Wendell Berry can see the fields and the Kentucky River. It is a view through a window that he's written poems about. I put that window in with the feeling that it would be awfully interesting to look out through it. It's a large window with 40 panes, so it's a graph. And what you see beyond it is the natural world, which doesn't behave like the figures that normally occur within a graph. It's not an--not entirely an intelligible graph. In a sense, what I've done all my life is hold up an artifact that you can, so to speak, see through against the world. Then length of vision from that place is a limitation in me, not in the place. You can see all the way to the stars from almost any place you are. To live in a place and have your vision confined by it would be a mistake. But to live in a place and try to understand it as a standpoint from which to see and to see from there as far as you can is a proper challenge, I think. The limits of a camera is that it's always looking through a frame.

children laughing

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There's certain things that you can't show, that living eyes can see. To determine where to set that lens, where it's gonna look from, requires imagination. Things that my parents thought were important for us to notice, they told us to notice. "Look at this, see that it's good, and don't forget." Whatever field we were in, whatever walk we took, we were told to look and see. "What is that tree? "What is this grass? "That field was plowed incorrectly. "Why is that? What should've been done? "That man is a great farmer. "See what he does. "That is beautiful. "Look and see that it's beautiful. That's ugly. That's a scar. Look and see that." Well, a really good farmer has a really formidable intelligence. It's as artistic an intelligence as it is scientific...or more, because he deals with the kind of structural problems that novelists deal with. "What comes first? What do I have to do before I can get to this?" I love farming. You know, from my earliest memories, I just thought it was... you know, there was nothing else. How could you want to be anything else than this? It was definitely a handmade art. That was hard work, and in those pictures, I was 15 and wanted to be pretty more than I wanted to work hard, but those were great days. I can remember, vividly, those days. We needed each other, and there's no way around it. Regardless of what you thought, you know, of your religion or your politics, the fact remained that we needed each other to get that crop in and get it to market. And we knew it, and it was beautiful. There is a kind of idealism that seems to be native to farming. Farmers begin every year with a vision of perfection, and every year, in the course of the seasons and the work, this vision is relentlessly whittled down to a real result by human frailty and fallibility, by the mortality of creatures, by pests and diseases, by the weather. The crop year is a long struggle, ended invariably not by the desired perfection, but by the need to accept something less than perfection as the best that could be done. But that changed during my growing up. We witnessed the change when it went from being an art to an industry and, you know, saw the industrialization of farming. Unless there is some profit in food, there will be no food for people. I think we've learned that lesson in recent months. I hope we've learned that lesson in recent months. Now the story we take out is that if you want to eat well down the road, and if you want your sons and your grandsons to eat well 10 and 20 and 30 years hence, we're gonna put a little profit out there. We're gonna make this industry pay, and the way you make it economically attractive is to regain respectability for a very simple six-letter word. It's spelled...P-R-O-F-I-T. It's just that simple, gentlemen, and the welfare of America rests on it. Thank you very much.

applause

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The machine was actually designed by some people up at the University of Kentucky, and Philip Morris tobacco company actually funded the project to try to help some farmers with some mechanization. I remember the remarks I made when I seen the machine. I told Mark I was gonna do all the cutting with it just so I'd get to sit in the air-conditioned cab. -

laughs

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But after I seen all the troubles with it, I don't want nothing to do with it.

both laugh

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So, uh... it's an amazing machine, and it has come a long ways. We used to take each stalk, and we'd split it and stick it over--each stalk was split and put over a stick and then picked up, just like we do now. Well, this machine does thresh a lot quicker and lots easier. I'm talking about modern, scientific, technological agriculture. It's big business, to be sure... the one that has applied change, the one that has applied technology, the one that's using capital, the one that has increased its efficiency. When I first come here, we raised about, oh, about 15 acres of tobacco. Something like that, yeah. Now, then, we've gone to 194.

machine rumbling

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We started raising grain. We raised a-- we got about 650 acres of soybeans this year, about 650 acres of corn. Well, of course it's always the money stress. It's always the amount of loans we have to take out to get the crops in the ground. We, of course, have the machinery debt, the land debt. It's just so much more than it used to be. The input costs keep going up and up. The fertilize costs... The price of the products we sell don't go up-- doesn't go up very much, so that's part of the problem, and then the price of equipment keeps getting more expensive every year. And the margins were so small. This really gets at the problem. You were handling lots of money. The profit per acre was so small and getting smaller all the time, that you had to--the remedy was to farm more acres.

restless string music

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It's kind of a vicious cycle. You have to get more acres to pay for what you got, but then in a year or two, you have to get more equipment to raise the acres you're raising, and it just seems like something we can't get out of, so that's part of the issues that's come up, why we're having to expand. It seems like it's either... It's either expand or get out. When you increase the scale, you have to rely more and more on chemicals and on technology... the fungicides and the growth retardants and the nitrates-- those heavy chemicals.

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rotors whirring

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We are productive because we've got a modern agriculture, because our output per man has gone up, because we do the job with fewer and fewer people. We were an agrarian nation. It took 45% of us on the land, when I was born, to feed the rest of us. We've moved to about 4% on the land now. All of us live better because of it, including those remaining on the land live better because of it. They're in the commercial stream now. So it was just an awful situation. It was just not what I had in mind at all. It was what I-- it was not my small-farm dream that I had as a youth, and I had to farm extensively and borrow lots of money, and... Well, my line of credit is very high. I'm not gonna say how much 'cause it's...

laughs

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It's extremely--it's very big. It's more than I ever even thought about, and it seems like each year it gets bigger, but it just--ten years ago, I would've never dreamed it would've cost what it does to put a crop out now. So, it's just crazy, what it costs, and sometimes it gets a little hard to sleep at night, toward the end of the year when the crops are all in the ground, all the money's spent, and we just need a good crop to repay the banks back, and sometimes it gets a little... it makes a person very anxious, I would say. To add insult to injury, to not only see yourself failing financially, but to not be able to understand why. I mean, it's not because we're not working hard. We're working, probably, too hard.

laughs

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You know, and it's not because we're not cutting corners. We're cutting all the corners. We're cutting the corners off, you know.

laughs

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It's the lack of imagination that my father talks about. It's not really looking at what's happening. It's not really counting the cost. It's some kind of dream or ideal that is false. It serves an economy that is false, and it works against nature, so it's not in any way sustainable, and it's made slaves out of a lot of people. I will never get out of debt this way. My land and myself will be worse off than we started, and I have just enriched Philip Morris, I mean, is all I did.

laughs

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In the time, the late '70s, when Daddy debated Earl Butz... I think he felt like we were losing precious things so quickly, and he was scared himself, scared for the people he loved, and I can remember that I thought he was lonely. Now, Mr. Butz has given you a lot of quantitative arguments. Let me just take a few of them. We may never meet, because he's arguing from quantities, and I'm arguing from values.

somber music

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As I see it, the farmer standing in his field is not isolated... as simply a component of a production machine. He stands where lots of lines cross... Cultural lines. The traditional farmer-- that is, the farmer who was first independent, who first fed himself off his farm, and then fed other people... who farmed with his family and passed the land on down to people who knew it and had the best reason to take care of it... that farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values-- our values. Independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberty, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood... values that decline as that farmer is replaced by a technologist... whose only standard is profit. They have very clearly and markedly declined-- look around you, and you'll see-- as the urban industrial values have replaced the old agricultural ones. How long do you stay when you come? Eight months? Eight months, seven month, six month. Sacrifice, you said. They miss you. Do you have children? Oh, you miss them. - S.

dark percussive music

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30,000? - 30,000, 30,000. We used to hire a lot of high school kids or school kids out of school. They used to come around here in car-- in carloads, wanting to work, but in the last several years, you don't even see a one nowhere. Why not? What are they doing? Nothing. - Nothing. That's right, nothing. - Computer games, maybe. I don't know. -

laughs

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I think when the traditional people disappear, the traditional values will disappear. How could they survive? I was driving a truck at seven years old. -

laughs

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A Model T? No, it was an old Ford truck.

laughs

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Dad had it. I remember that he had it. I sat on a wash pan, just to--so I could see out of the windshield, ride it down through the field.

somber piano music

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But these values are not native to--just to farms, to small farms. They're native to all small enterprises. And again, by policy, we've wiped these people out. I'm assuming that we have the same values. When I say traditional values, everybody knows what I'm talking about. Democracy... follow the Hebrew-Christian traditions of neighborliness... kindness, and so on. So I don't think that you can love those old values... and love what has come to be American agriculture at the same time.

applause

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And I know that some of the rural institutions are under pressure. I know the old country church is under pressure. I know that's true, but our challenge is not to yield before the nostalgia of yesteryear. Our challenge is not to turn the clock back. Our challenge is not to go back to more inefficient ways. Our challenge is not to put more people back on the land and therefore decrease the efficiency of American agriculture. Our challenge is to adapt to the changing situation in which we find ourselves. I've often thought that if I live long enough-- and I guess I have lived long enough. I ought to get that rule out someday. But I'm going to adopt Butz's law of economics. It's a very simple one. Adapt or die. It's a harsh one, but those who cling to the moldering past are the ones who die.

cows mooing

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Well, I guess my name's Curtis Combs. I'm a dairy farmer over in Jericho. I farm with my dad and my uncle. I guess kind of the main thing that got me started is just that I grew up on it. I always wanted to dairy farm. My mom kind of tried to sway me another way, so I went to college and then come home, went to milking cows, so... that didn't...didn't work too well on her part. So, why? Is it--was it an economic opportunity, or is there more to it than that? Oh, I think it was just, you know, the passion. It's something I always wanted to do. You know, my mom always told me that I needed to go somewhere, to get a job off the farm, so I went to milk cows for my neighbor for three or four years, and then...

all laugh

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And then I went off to college, so I think that was the big thing. It's just farming is what I wanted to do. Whether I made $100 or a $1 billion, I was... I was gonna farm. Uh-uh, that--that reminds me that when I was fencing, I always would be like, "I'd rather make a dollar farming than $10 fencing," and I don't know why.

laughs

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It's just the way it is. Because you're crazy. - Yeah.

laughter

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My name's Andy Zaring, and I farm in Port Royal. I did not go to college. I did very good to get through high school.

laughs

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But I fenced for a living for nine years and all the while, trying to save up enough money to buy a farm. I knew that that's what I wanted to do. Just something I enjoy doing. My dad farmed, and he also did concrete work to pay the bills, basically. Basically the same thing I'm doing. I do some side jobs fencing and whatnot. But I raise produce, tobacco, a little bit of row crops, and that's--I got a few hogs, but that's just dabbling with them and a few cattle. Pretty much just anything I can try to make a dollar on. But you have to remember that those of us who've lived in the country all our lives... they have faced a good deal of talk and thought about how backward they must be, about how, uh, rural people are not... I mean, "You'd-- if you were smarter, "you'd do something besides farm, and you'd do something besides live out here." They call them the sticks, the boondocks. "Nowhere," they call it out here. You hear that over and over again. "Oh, a little nowhere place." My schedule on my tobacco for prices is between $1.70 and $1.80-something this year. In 1979 or 1980 was the best year they ever had for tobacco. People sold tobacco for $2 a pound. So put that in perspective. $2 a pound in 1979, when a pickup truck cost $7,500. The same truck today costs $30,000 or $40,000, and now we're getting the same money, but that's all of agriculture. Those statistics are shocking. The product prices have gone up 300% or 400% since World War II, and the cost of production has gone up over 3,000% on all agriculture products. So many inputs that goes into it and such a very little income in return. If we had just, say, two bad years in a row with no insurance, I'd have to sell everything I got, and I'd be over with. My farm would be done, and I would start from nothing. It's not worth that kind of a chance. So, it's just too risky. -

inhales heavily

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Well, up until recently, there was farming going on on all these farms on my road. They were all working farms, and now I'm the last working farm on this road. We haven't valued farmers or farming, and so consequently, we're losing them. Small farmers, people working the land, living on the land, they love the land, and they're gonna take care of it better. That's the value in it. And they're gonna take care of their resources better. They're gonna take pride in it. They're gonna take pride in their communities. The great cultural failure that we've made here in the United States is to mistake millions of individual small places... With their own character, their own needs and demands and use. We've mistaken them for nowhere. And of course, there is a penalty for that, and of course, we're paying the penalty... In soil erosion, toxicity, polluted rivers, polluted air. It goes on and on. Our economy, at the place where it meets the landscapes, is violent. It's toxic. It's community-destroying. It's family-destroying, and there is no perception of it in the places that matter. Maybe only indifference. Ten years ago in this town, there were two grocery stores. There are now none. There was a hardware store. There is not now. The church I had gone to for 25 years fell completely apart. There was an economy out here. There was community out here. People knew how to take care of themselves. I mean, what we sacrificed for all of the choice we have is to be absolute slaves to the people who want to sell us what we've got to have to survive. There was a lot to fall back on here, and it's gone-- virtually gone-- in not much amount of-- not many years. We all come from divorce now. This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart, and you can't put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do. You take two things that ought to be together, and you put them back together. Two things, not all things. That's the way the work has to go. Wendell is a very honest, careful person, and he believes if you take a vow to do something, that you're gonna do the best you can to do it, and so he did that. I had no clue of what I was getting into, but...

stammers, sighs

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But I've been lucky because of him, because he was the kind of person he was, and he's been lucky with me because I believed in the continuity of the home and the family. It's worked out.

laughs

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It's worked out, but not without a lot of work. But I don't know, you just-- you better pick somebody who's pretty special.

laughs

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That's about...

laughs

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That's about all I can say. The world is also full of people who'd rather pay for something to kill dandelions than to appreciate the dandelions. Well, I'm a dandelion man myself. -

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I met Wendell in college. I had lived all over the country. Finally, when I got done with school, to 22 different schools. I had moved and moved and moved, and I had a really intense desire to have my children be somewhere where they belong, and Wendell needed to be home. He did not need to be in San Francisco or in Europe or in New York or whatever. We'd done all that, and he needed to be home, and, um...I was flexible. I was. Because I didn't belong anywhere in particular, so I took this on with him. And it's not always been perfect. None of it has been perfect, but it's been right. It's been the right thing. I had to learn how to be a farmer. I had to learn how to grow food and can it and freeze it and take care of lots and lots of company and feed a whole lot of people... thanks to the older women who were willing to help me, who already knew what they were doing. They befriended me and helped me learn what I needed to know, and hung on for a long time when I didn't have a clue what I was doing and thought I knew everything. I thought I knew everything, and I thought you couldn't be worth anything if you didn't have an education. Well, that was one of the first things I found out when I got together with Wendell, was he had all these friends up here who were smart as they could be, and they didn't have much of an education, but they were smart, and they were using their minds and their bodies to work, and that was really impressive to me, so it was a good... - Yeah. It was a good lesson for me, and I just had to keep learning. I mean, it's been an amazing experience, and I... I--I love it. Yeah, and people say, "What do you do if you don't have a home?" I say, "Well, you can make a home. "You can make a home. You can be home somewhere, just stay somewhere." And Gary Snyder said, "Just stop somewhere and just be somewhere." I knew I needed to make a change. I spent winters around the wood stove, just reading, reading, reading, reading, reading everything I could get my hands on about alternative farming. That was when this friend gave me the book called "The New Organic Grower." It looked too good to be true, that farmers were making $10,000 an acre, when a good year, you know, you might make $2,000 an acre with a high-value crop like tobacco, which was considered a real high-value crop. So, that's when I decided I would give it a try, and I planted the biggest garden you've ever seen. It was just like a big garden. It was exciting as heck.

chuckling

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It was so exciting. It was so different.

hopeful music

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The point of industrialism has been the replacement of people with machinery and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so that now, we can see both of those goals approaching some kind of fulfillment, some kind of realization.

mellow music

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There is, on the other hand-- and you can find it if you hunt up the people who are working on a scale that's human and humane enough-- people who love doing their work... who do it out of great liking or a great love for it. That's been my privilege as both a caretaker and a user of the place and... and as a writer. I've loved the work. Not necessarily every day, but in general, I've loved doing it. It's been something to look forward to. And I grew up around and under the tutelage of people who loved their work, some who just couldn't wait to get to it. And when you have that... that's beautiful to see. That's just got to come back into people's consciousness, somehow, in this country-- of what's possible. To live a decent life on the land and not be a big, industrialized farm, but be a place where you make your life. I wrote a letter to the Louisville "Courier-Journal," and I said that I'm a tobacco farmer, and I'm willing to grow food. Is there anybody who gives a damn? You know, is there anybody willing to put their money where their mouth is? Hundreds of people-- hundreds of people called, and I'm like, "What in the world is this?"

laughs

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"What have I gotten into now?" I learned later that there was this huge demand. This was Wendell's readership. These people had been reading Wendell for years, and yet there was nobody that they could call-- no farmer they could call and say, "Hey, we'll support you. Heck yeah." And, see, I-- I had never even heard of Wendell at the time. The window has 40 panes, 40 clarities, variously wrinkled, streaked with dried rain, smudged, dusted. The frame is a black grid, beyond which the world flings up the wild graph of its growth. Tree branch. River. Slope of land, the river passing downward. The clouds blowing, usually from the west, the opposite way. The window is a form of consciousness, a pattern of formed sense through which to look into the wild that is a pattern, too, but dark and flowing, bearing along the little shapes of the mind as the river bears a sash of some blinded house. This windy day, on one of the panes, a blown seed caught in cobweb beats and beats. In addition to saving my farm and paying it off and getting out of debt and seeing it improve, I saw my life improve from this hellish, agribusiness nightmare that I had embarked on when I bought this farm... To see how everything is connected... To see that the soil is important... to see that you can farm without chemicals, that that whole thing is just a big lie.

gentle music

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piglets squealing, child laughing

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In my first year of the CSA, one of my customers asked me if I'd heard of Wendell Berry. And I said, "No, of course not." And they gave me a book called "The Unsettling of America." It was like, "Oh, my God, "someone has written the story of my people-- you know, my experience." And that was different-- to have it put into words... that really, you know, were really honest. And also, they...

stammers

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they captured the...the emotion of it. You know, the feeling. The way we felt about it. With re--you know, it was respectful of it. We weren't used to being respected.

laughs

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That was different. When Bob asked me to come out here, I said I wouldn't have to prepare a speech, but I largely underestimated the travel time between Kentucky and Spokane. The speech is not filled out. It sort of gives the structure of my thinking about the problems that I have observed in agriculture. I was...asked to talk about labor-intensive microsystems agriculture. That's not my language, and it's not the sort of language that I wish to use because it's the way people speak when they don't want to be understood by most people. I'm not sure what to make of these particular phrases, but they seem to me to suggest merely a methodological or technological approach to agriculture, and part of my approach, or part of my purpose here, is to suggest that any such approach will necessarily be too simple. I should perhaps say something about my qualifications. I'm not a farm expert, and I wasn't educated in an agriculture college. I do come...from a farm community where my people have farmed for five or six generations before me... and where I farm. And I inherit from my father and others' concern for what happens to farmers. In my boyhood, Henry County, Kentucky, was not just a rural county, as it still is. It was almost entirely a farming county. Farms were generally small. They were farmed by families who lived not only upon them, but within and from them. They grew gardens. They produced their own meat, milk, and eggs. They were highly diversified. The main money crop was tobacco, but the farmers also grew corn, wheat, barley, and oats, sorghum and hay for forage. Cattle, hogs, and sheep were all characteristically raised in association on the same farms. There was still a prevalent pride in workmanship, and thrift was still a social ideal. The pride of most people was still in their homes, and their homes looked like it.

gentle music

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This was by no means a perfect society. Its people had often been violent and wasteful in their use of the land and of each other. Its present ills had already taken root in it. But I have spoken of its agricultural economy of a generation ago to suggest that there were also good qualities indigenous to it that might've been cultivated and built upon. But they were not cultivated and built upon, but they were repudiated as the stuff of a hopelessly outmoded, unscientific way of life, as a tragic error on the part of the people themselves, and it is a work of monstrous ignorance and irresponsibility on the part of the experts and politicians who have prescribed, encouraged, and applauded the disintegration of such farming communities all over this country into our allegedly miraculous modern American agriculture. In all this, few people whose testimony would've mattered have seen the connection between the modernization of agricultural techniques and the disintegration of the culture and the communities of farming. What we have called "agricultural progress" has in fact involved the forcible displacement of millions of people. I remember during the '50s, the outrage with which certain of our leaders spoke of the forced removal of the populations of villages in communist countries. I also remember that at the same time in Washington, the word on farming was get big or get out, a policy that is still in effect. The only difference here is in method. The force used by the communists was military. With us, it has been economic, a free market in which the freest were the richest. The attitudes were equally cruel, and I believe that in the long run, the results will be equally damaging, not just to the concerns and values of the human spirit, but to the practical possibilities of survival. A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its destruction invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, and aspiration. It would reveal the human necessities and the human limits. It would clarify our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It would assure that the necessary restraints be observed, that the necessary work be done, and that it be done well. A healthy farm culture can only be based upon familiarity. It can only grow among a people soundly established upon the land. It would nourish and protect the human intelligence of the land that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of that possibility, as we now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden that possibility, we will lose it altogether. And then we will not only invoke calamity, we will deserve it. Several years ago, I argued with a friend of mine that we might make money by going ahead and marketing some inferior lambs. My friend thought about this for a minute, and then he said, "I'm in the business of producing good lambs, and I'm not gonna sell any other kind." He also said that he kept the weeds out of his crops for the same reason that he washed his face. Surely no one would question that the human race has survived by that attitude. It still survives by that attitude, though now it can hardly be said to know it, much less acknowledge it. But this attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education. In more than two decades in universities, I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared, a passion for excellence and order that is characteristically, that may be exclusively, handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. Oh. Say thank you. If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it; if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, then a long time after we are dead, the lives our lives prepare will live there, their houses strongly placed upon the valley's sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows. The river will run clear as we will never know it and over it, birdsong like a canopy. On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields. In their voices, they will hear a music risen out of the ground. Memory native to this valley will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds will be health and wisdom, and in dwelling, light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility. PBS Your Home for Independent Film