Free Bringing It to the Table by Wendell Berry

selling his labor and that of his team (labor fueled by the farm itself and, therefore, very cheap) rather than buying herbicides. His point was simply that there is a critical difference between buying and selling and that the name of this difference at the year’s end ought to be net gain.
    Similarly, when farmers let themselves be persuaded to buy their food instead of grow it, they become consumers instead of producers
and lose a considerable income from their farms. This is simply to say that there is a domestic economy that is proper to the farming life and that it is different from the domestic economy of the industrial suburbs.
     
    FINALLY, I WANT to say that I have not been talking from speculation but from proof. I have had in mind throughout this essay the one example known to me of an American community of small family farmers who have not only survived but thrived during some very difficult years: I mean the Amish. I do not recommend, of course, that all farmers should become Amish, nor do I want to suggest that the Amish are perfect people or that their way of life is perfect. What I want to recommend are some Amish principles:
    1. They have preserved their families and communities.
    2. They have maintained the practices of neighborhood.
    3. They have maintained the domestic arts of kitchen and garden, household and homestead.
    4. They have limited their use of technology so as not to displace or alienate available human labor or available free sources of power (the sun, wind, water, and so on).
    5. They have limited their farms to a scale that is compatible both with the practice of neighborhood and with the optimum use of low-power technology.
    6. By the practices and limits already mentioned, they have limited their costs.
    7. They have educated their children to live at home and serve their communities.
    8. They esteem farming as both a practical art and a spiritual discipline.
    These principles define a world to be lived in by human beings, not a world to be exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

    NOTES
    1 In conversation.
    2 Robert Heilbroner, “The Art of Work,” Occasional Paper of the Council of Scholars (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984), p. 20.
    3 Eric Gill, A Holy Tradition of Working (Suffolk, England: Golgonooza Press, 1983), p. 61.
    4 Ibid., p. 65.
    5 William Safire, “Make That Six Deadly Sins—A Re-examination Shows Greed to Be a Virtue,” Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), 7 Jan. 1986.
    6 In conversation.
    7 Hatch Act, United States Code, Section 361b.
    8 Marty Strange, “The Economic Structure of a Sustainable Agriculture,” in Meeting the Expectations of the Land , ed. Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Colman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), p. 118.
    9 Ibid., p. 116.

Let the Farm Judge
    (1997)

    T O ME, ONE of the most informative books on agriculture is British Sheep , published by the National Sheep Association of Britain. This book contains photographs and descriptions of sixty-five British sheep breeds and “recognized half-breds.” I have spent a good deal of time looking at the pictures in this book and reading its breed descriptions, for think that it represents one of the great accomplishments of agriculture. It makes a most impressive case for the intelligence and the judgment of British farmers over many centuries.
    What does it mean that an island not much bigger than Kansas or not much more than twice the size of Kentucky should have developed sixty or so breeds of sheep? It means that many thousands of farmers were paying the most discriminating attention, not only to their sheep, but also to the nature of their local landscapes and economies, for a long time. They were responding intelligently to the requirement of local adaptation. The result, when such an effort is carried on by enough intelligent farmers in the same region for a long time, is the development of a distinct breed that fits regional needs. Such local adaptation is