Wednesday
I’m shaken today, having just learned that an old friend has died. I vividly remember my last conversation with Judy Rhodes, who was my wife’s high school senior English teacher and a formative influence on her. We would look up Judy and her husband Steve whenever we visited Julia’s Iowa relatives.
Judy had severe allergies, which in retrospect may have had some connection with the kidney and brain cancer that broke out suddenly this past year and killed her. I vividly remember her talking about how Monsanto herbicides have polluted all of the state’s drinking water and her difficulty with finding non-contaminated fruits, vegetables, and meat. (Jane Smiley talks about farmers polluting the water table in A Thousand Acres.) Judy would have liked the book I’m currently reading, Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, which takes an axe to current farming practices.
The protagonist is a former agricultural journalist who has gone back to his roots and started farming, just as his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did (we learn about them all in the book). Andy’s lightbulb moment occurs when he is writing a Scientific Farming feature on a successful farmer. What he sees so appalls him that he falls out with his editor and quits rather than write the piece.
The farmer, Andy notes,
was the fulfillment of the dreams of his more progressive professors. On all the two thousand acres there was not a fence, not an animal, not a woodlot, not a tree, not a garden. The whole place was planted in corn, right up to the walls of the two or three unused barns that were still standing. Meikelberger owned a herd of machines. His grain bins covered acres. He had an office like a bank president’s. The office was a carpeted room at the back of the house, expensively and tastefully furnished, as was the rest of the house, as far as Andy saw it. It was a brick ranch house with ten rooms and a garage, each room a page from House Beautiful, and it was deserted.
As he interviews Meikelberger, Andy discovers all is not well. Meikelberger is deeply in debt, and the stresses of his job have led to severe ulcer problems. Nevertheless, the farmer ignores all warning signals and pushes on:
[T]here was nothing, simply nothing at all, that Meikelberger allowed to stand in his way: not a neighbor or a tree or even his own body. Meikelberger’s ambition had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying Meikelberger, as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him.
Shortly after the interview, Andy chances upon an Amish farmer and sees farming from a different perspective. The man has only 80 acres but, as he points out, it’s enough to take care of everyone living on it. When Andy is invited to share supper, he notes a dramatic contrast between the man’s house and Meikelberger’s:
It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in the condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude. As they ate, they talked, making themselves known to each other.
Remembering has special import for my wife, who grew up on a small Iowa farm. Unfortunately, her father, who once dreamed of going to college and who had a reverence for learning, was victimized by the scientific farming mentality. He listened seriously when agricultural professors preached that
bigger was better and biggest was best; that people coming into a place to use it need ask only what they wanted, not what was there; that whatever in humanity or nature failed before the advance of this mechanical ambition deserved to fail; and that the answers were in the universities and the corporate and government offices, not in the land or the people.
Because of ag professors, Lawrence didn’t collect his pig and cattle manure—petroleum-based chemical fertilizers were all the rage—and he built a special hog confinement shed. Most seriously, he expanded the farm at just the moment when both land and petroleum prices were at their height (the late 1970s), after which they plummeted, causing a full blown depression in America’s heartland. Because Lawrence died of a heart attack around that time, he didn’t see the family lose the farm.
Julia contrasts him with a cousin of hers who went the natural route, not confining the hogs but letting them roam free, as her family had when she was growing up. As a result, this cousin now sells to specialty markets at premium prices, and his farm, though small, is still thriving forty years later. Julia’s brother, on the other hand, had to give up his dream of farming and instead went to college and became a nurse (so that he could stay in the area and live in the family home). He has, however, held on to a few acres, which is under a government conservation program. He plants wild oats and various clovers to provide a habitat for pheasants and other birds, thereby staying in touch with the land. It’s not, however, what he envisioned.
We don’t know for certain that the stresses of big agriculture killed Julia’s father or that polluted water and food led to Judy’s cancer. If they were characters in a Berry novel, however, those factors would loom large.