diversity.
3 The wish, the felt need, to have and to belong to a place of one’s own as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. (The freed slaves who pled for “forty acres and a mule” were more urgently and practically agrarian than the “Twelve [white] Southerners.”)
4 From that to a persuasion in favor of economic democracy, a preference for enough over too much.
5 Fear and contempt of waste of every kind and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion. Waste is understood as human folly, an insult to nature, a sin against the given world and its life.
6 From that to a preference for saving rather than spending as the basis of the economy of a household or a government.
7 An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy, so as to live so far as possible from one’s place.
8 An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.
9 A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life in place, which is to say the need for the survival of local culture and thus of the safekeeping of local memory and local nature.
10 Respect for work and (as self-respect) for good work. This implies an understanding of one’s life’s work as a vocation and a privilege, as opposed to a “job” and a vacation.
11 A lively suspicion of anything new. This contradicts the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity. It is not inherently cranky or unreasonable.
Those qualities describe a person distinctly of a kind. All of them, I am sure, were never fully and evenly present in any one person, any more than all the talents and virtues of an art would be fully and evenly present in one musician or one carpenter, but I am sure also that all of them are related and that in any several of agrarian farmers all of them would be present, recognized, and clearly spoken.
They do not of course describe a perfect human being. It certainly is possible, as the young professor of “ecocriticism” perceived, for agrarians to be racists. If that association were necessary or inescapable, then as a writer and advocate I would have been out of work all my life. But it seems to me, on the contrary, that the principles of community and neighborliness, inherent in agrarianism, contradict the principles of racism, just as the Declaration of Independence, written during slavery by a slave owner, contains an unqualified precept against slavery.
As several of the writings in this book testify, my knowledge of agrarianism and my respect for it have been confirmed by my reading, but they came to me by instruction and example from my own elders when I was a boy and a young man. It has become ever plainer to me that the great unchosen privilege of my life was the survival of a predominantly agricultural economy and an agrarian culture in my home country throughout my childhood, on into the 1970s, and continuing past then in some persons and households.
The reasons for this survival all seem peculiar to my region: a mostly sloping countryside, much divided by drains and streams, and thus, except in the bottomlands, impossible to divide into large, easily tillable fields, and so congenial to fairly small farms; a way of farming highly diverse in both crops and livestock; the long-standing economy and culture of tobacco, a crop traditionally grown in small acreages, requiring work for virtually the whole year, and dependent upon an extraordinary amount of skilled handwork; and, finally, our regional version of the federal tobacco program, the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which, by combining price supports with production control, assured a fair market value for a staple crop. For these reasons, the farms here were worked almost entirely by hand and by teams of mules and horses until the end of World War II. After that the tractors came, and the industrialization of farming began.
Suspicion of the new, of change, and a lively resistance thereto continued here until the end of the war. When daylight saving time was introduced as a part of “the war effort,” the country people here just about unanimously refused to change their clocks. They balked, and with a principled passion. I remember the younger of my grandfathers, my mother’s father (1881–1965), saying, “I would rather be a Republican than change my time.” And I remember the fierce and somewhat heartbroken resentment of my father’s father (1864–1946) against the coming of the tractors, which he lived barely long enough to see. He said the heavy rolling of their wheels would compact the soil. He was right about that, but I know he had also in mind the lightness over the ground of a good-moving team of mules, which had been his heart’s love all his life. I think that agrarianism had, and where it survives it still has, a sort of summary existence as a feeling—an instinct, an excitement, a passion, a tenderness—for the living earth and its creatures.
After the war, the old resistance fell away. The old agrarianism could not survive, in the community and its economy, the coming and the ongoing development of the new “scientific” industrial agriculture. The problem that this book confronts is that agrarianism, though obviously defeatable by industrial technologies and cheap petroleum, is nonetheless necessary to the good health of the land and the people, and the forces that defeated it have not replaced it.
III
My native country, in which I have lived nearly all of my life, is ten or fifteen miles south of the Ohio River. By so substantial a margin I missed being a Yankee and an inheritor of Yankee virtues. I am a Kentuckian, a border-stater, which, to many people, means southerner. There are important historical and other differences between Kentucky and the South, but insofar as I am not a Yankee and am descended in part from slave owners, I am too handily classifiable as southern to protest, and so be it.
Anybody subjected to so broad a classification, however, will know how useless it is to the necessarily particular life’s work of self-knowledge and local accountability. And there are the expectable liabilities. Though liberals do not have prejudices, they do sometimes deal in categorical judgments that they know to be absolutely just and true. A southern white man will learn about this without much research. That I am a southern agrarian white man accounts in part, I am very sure, for the “ecocritical” verdict that I am at least suspectably a deliberately racist southern agrarian white man.
Beyond that, and for a good many years, I have been classified in reviews of my books and in assortments of interesting facts as a “tobacco farmer.” This comes apparently from some “site” on the Internet. According to the same source, I also grow wheat. So reliably informed, even some people who have visited this farm apparently assume that in a nook or hollow well out of sight among the slopes and the woods I have a tobacco patch and a field of wheat. So far, I have not received any blame for my implication in wheat-production—which in circumstances common enough, and especially in mine, would be sufficiently blamable. But the revelation that I am a tobacco farmer typically is accompanied by the suggestion I am, as such, an immoral man, and that my writings on agriculture are therefore to be held under suspicion, if not doubted altogether.
And so I know very well that the entitlement of everybody to “alternative facts” was not invented by apologists for Donald Trump. Perhaps I am now entitled to “equal time” to present my own alternative facts to the alternative facts mentioned above. This I need to do because tobacco and the federal tobacco program are prominent themes of this book.
I live in what has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing counties in Kentucky, which has been one of the most prominent tobacco-producing states. Members of my family have been involved in growing tobacco and in various aspects of the tobacco economy as far back as I know anything about them. My father and my brother were actively involved in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. As I grew up, I played and then worked in tobacco crops (along with the other enterprises of our then highly diverse farming) on family and neighboring farms. Later, after my wife and children and I settled on our own small farm near Port Royal, I worked for thirty-some years, mainly at “setting” and “cutting,” in the tobacco crops of my neighbors with whom I swapped work. But it has happened that I have never grown a tobacco crop of my own. During some of our early years here, when we were glad to have the money, I leased our “base” (the right, belonging to our place, to grow a small amount of tobacco) to neighbors. Later I swapped it for the use, not often, of