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When Wendell Berry and others criticize contemporary agriculture, their arguments are often dismissed as naïve and grounded in longstanding agrarian myth, rather than engagement with contemporary problems. But Berry's proposals developed in response to a series of learning methods he encountered, and options for advocacy he explored, during the 1960s and 1970s. Agricultural institutions sought to assign more power to institutionalized scientific knowledge, shrinking the role of farmers. Berry sought an alternative definition of knowledge, drawing upon his training as a writer, as well as his experiences with manual farm work and the methods of environmentalist organic growers. He eventually concluded that only a community of farmers could produce and store effective knowledge and insisted that knowledge must be tacit-largely situated in locality, skills, and culture. His ideas had little influence on most people employed in contemporary agriculture. However, those ideas profoundly shape the work of sustainable food advocates, such as Michael Pollan, who like Berry fear reductionism and celebrate the values of traditions.
In the 1980s agriculture in the United States produced impressive yields. Scientific and technological advances appeared likely to continue increasing yields as such innovations had done for most of the century. Land-grant universities and other agricultural institutions expressed little interest in traditional and "alternative" lower-technology options, and funding for research on organic farming and appropriate technology was less than it had been in the 1970s. The small rural communities once considered typical of American farming hardly existed anymore, as the farm crisis of that decade dealt them yet another blow. Yet arguably the most influential chronicler of agriculture during this period continually depicted such a place. He insisted that close interactions between rural neighbors were not just unfortunate casualties of progress, but in fact provided tactics necessary for the future of American agriculture.
Poet, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry has been one of the most read, as well as most divisive, figures in American agriculture in recent decades. He is often recognized as the preeminent recent promoter of an agrarian and eco-friendly vision of agriculture. For most of the past four decades, Berry maintained this influence by writing in praise of the aspect of American farming that has arguably declined the most in the last century-decisions made within rural communities....