Ted commented that:
> the hidden input (in organic agriculture), that is very expensive, is
management...This management input is knowledge/experience based and I do
not see the talent being developed today to shoulder the management load .....
To which Dale responded:
>This phenomenon of underestimating the cost of management is pretty common.
>Being a techie at heart, I have always had some disdain for management. As
>I made the transition from academic research to the seed industry, it became
>clear to me that managing complex systems is no small feat, and that complex
>management strategies usually fail because of human factors. As a
>researcher I tend to view the farmers role in primarily technical terms, but
>I am realizing that farming is mainly managing a business. It is rare for
>someone to be so multi-talented that they can do it all (although some
>brilliant farmers come close!).
>
>
Farming is mainly managing a business, hmmm, well...that is part of
farming. We have to watch our language or it will box us in. Farming is
not just technology nor is it just business, nor is it just a combination
of the two. It is really a culture, including technical and business
skills but, primarily, it is a way of life. It cannot be learned from
scratch in one generation, although in can be lost in that time. To
characterized the articulation of knowledge, skill and committment it takes
to be a farmers as "management, the hidden , expensive input" is to distort
reality with the language of technocracy.
No one has said it better than Wendell Berry:
"A competent farmer is his own boss. He has learned the disciplines
necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation,
loyalty to his place, pride in his work. His workadays require the use of
long experience and practiced judgment, for the failures of which he knows
that he will suffer. His days do not begin and end by rule, but in response
to necessity, interest and obligation."
Dale rightly points to the potential positive role of the crop advisor in
supporting farmers' complex tasks. The problem is, of course, our current
crop advisors, even those paid with public money, are essentially
furthering the agendas of chemical and seed companies, not those of farmers
and consumers.
It is these advisors who are responsible for what Ann Clark describes:
>Farmers, with apologies to those of you who are farmers, generally do what
they are told. In this case, farmers have been told - through a variety of
policy, entitlement, incentive, and regulatory vehicles, let along agbiz
and peer pressures - to specialize. And so they have. This doesn't mean
they have to stay that way, and I would suggest, that many farmers would do
things quite differently if freed from the constraints of ill-conceived
government ag policies.
>
Berry describes what happens when farming is reduced to mere "technology
and management". Contract hog and poultry growers or large scale monocrop
grain growers and many others, who, seduced by crop advisors and forced
into submission by wrong-headed policies, have become industrial workers on
their own land, no longer a farmer but, as Berry describes:
"...a specialized subordinate, dependent upon the authority and judgment of
other people. His disciplines are no longer implicit in his own experience,
assumptions and values, but are imposed from the outside. For a complex
responsibility he has substituted a simple dutifulness, The strict
competences of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of
attitude and know-how necessary to life on the farm, which have been in the
making in the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the
knowledge of some fragmentary task..."
Organic agriculture is about the defense of farming as a way of life. If it
were just about not poisoning our soil and food, it wouldn't have caught
the imagination of farmers.
In an uncharacteristic lapsus Ann says:
>Conventional yields reflect billions of taxpayers dollars spent annually
to research and refine technologies in support of high yield,
capital-intensive, power-concentrating agriculture. Organic yields reflect
the initiative and experience of what, a few scattered hippies and farmer
wanna-bees? Like, come on man, - what if they *could* achieve as much per
acre as a real farmer? What would that say about all the glorious yield
>increases *we* have accomplished? Yeesh! Perhaps that is why researchers
who publish evidence that organic yields (or milk) are comparable to
conventional yields are subjected to such withering scorn, ridicule, and
abuse - from their own colleagues.
>
Yes Ann, but here your apologies must go to organic farmers, around the
world. No "hippy" or "farmer wanna-be" ever made it through the winter
unless he was lucky enough to learn from a real farmer. And it is those
real farmers who made organic agriculture, through generations of "complex
responsibility and formal mastery", ie of farming as a lifeway. (They also
learn from "techies" and academics, in fact, would like to learn more.)
It is to real farmers, not to hippies, that we owe the fact that the
organic option lies open to us today. Real farmers are responsible for what
you, Ann Clark, see so clearly:
>I foresee a vast increase in demand for organic produce in the immediate
future - and I mean within 1-5 yars - which we will be wholly unable to
satisfy. You are quite right in pointing out that organic farming, or
ecological farming in general, is not something one can pick up and run
with. I am convinced it is a site-specific experiential type of process
that does not lend itself to generalization - even if we in academia had
the knowledge to teach it, which we don't.. Broad principles, yes, but
down-in-the-dirt day-to-day practice, no. And time is needed to earn the
insights needed to make organic
>farming run, both agronomically and economically. I am convinced that
failure to nurture this industry right now - and I mean now, 1999 - will
mean a real missed opportunity for quantum leaps in - yes, dare I say it -
the wholescale introduction of organic farming into the agricultural
landscape of North America.
>
Who will nurture organic agriculture? All of us, of course, even hippies,
but mainly, farmers. Real farmers. We must care for our farmers (whether
they currently practice "organic" or not), we must help defend their
lifeway from reduction to technology and business, for they are the only
ones who can care for us and for the earth. This ain't romanticism, folks,
it's the good life.
(quotes from Wendell Berry, "The Unsettling of America" 1977)
Ronald Nigh
Dana, A.C.
Mexico, D.F. & San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas
Tel. y FAX 525-666-73-66 (DF)
529-678-72-15 (Chiapas)
danamex@mail.internet.com.mx
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