Pajj[|20 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1982 rdinary Excellence A TALK BY WENDELL BERRY Poet-farmer Wendell Berry is perhaps best known to RAIN readers through his books. The Unsettling of America (see RAIN IV:3,14) I and The Gift of Good Land (RAIN VIII: 5,17). He is also the author of some two dozen other books of essays, poetry and fiction. Berry has long has been an eloquent spokesman for the concept of sustainable agriculture, and a recurring theme in his writings has been the needfor us to root our attitudes toward farming and the land in values that are timeless: thrift, diversity, ecological harmony and appropriateness of scale. On a recent visit to Portland, Berry joined an informal gathering of farmers, community gardeners, food activists and others in the home of RAIN staffer Laura Stuchinsky. During a wide-ranging (and fascinating) discussion he shared the following thoughts on what it means to farm intelligently. — John Ferrell I was at a meeting that Wes Jackson sponsored a while back, and he had one of his neighbors come who is an organic farmer, John Vogelsburg. He's one of those organic farmers you like to see because he's an organic farmer who never switched. He's doing it that way because it makes sense to do it that way. He said a thing I can't forget. He said, "The farmer today doesn't use his own head. He uses his head to advertise products." He was talking about those caps from the agribusiness corporations. You'd think that people would understand that advertising space can be sold, and would get a modest income for rental of their foreheads, but they actually buy the caps! That got me started thinking about the atmosphere of off-the-farm advice that now surrounds farmers. It's a sort of advertising world surrounding the farmer, which implies that farmers' problems are simple and are readily solvable by this or that device or substance that can be bought. There's never the least implication that these substances or devices might not work or that they might not fit local conditions or personal economies. We know that agricultural journalism generally goes along with this and the agricultural extension service generally goes along with it, never recommending solutions that don't cost money, and never implying that you need more brains to farm than you need to take advice — which is not too many brains! And we all understand, I think, how this fits in with the much older convention of denigration of farmers as clowns or hicks or yokels. And we know what people have paid to escape that category. All this makes you wonder what it's like when a farmer uses his head (or hers). I was on an Amish farm recently that struck me as a really good one. The farmer is a Belgian horse breeder who, I suppose, is right at the top of the line. I don't know any higher star in Belgian horse breeding. My son and I were up there and we looked first at his place and then at his nephew's place and we must have seen 75 or 80 horses one after another — good ones. He knew bloodlines way back and he knew what was behind those bloodlines. He knew the horses, how their faces were marked, what color they were, how they were made, what their good points were. But unlike the hobby breeders that you find among the non-Amish, he was always telling you how-the horses worked. He had about a dozen brood mares and he was working every one of them. He had harness for them, he had jobs for them. And of course people who work brood mares have high conception rates and a high percentage of live foals because the mares are tough and well-conditioned and not excessively fat. They do a good job as breeding animals. He had another thing there that interested me. He had a new 336 John Deere hay baler that, because of the religious restrictions that the Amish work under, he couldn't pull with a tractor. He'd taken a bullwheel off of an old John Deere com binder and put it on one side of the baler and he'd found a machine shop that would help him work out the gear ratios and put a chain drive from the bullwheel up to the flywheel on the baler. He worked out a clutch or ratchet so that when the baler stopped, the flywheel and the baler mechanism would continue on its own momentum. He was pulling that with a forecart and eight horses. Those horses could pull the baler and a wagon loaded with one hundred 55 pound bales. It was an elegant, simple piece of engineering. The worry about pulling hay balers with horses has always been the push and shove that the plunger would communicate to the horses' collars. The clutch on the flywheel eliminates that. It worked like a top! I've never seen anything that pleased me any more. The farmer said there are some disadvantages to it. If the ground is really soft, for instance, the bullwheel will tend to scoot. On the other hand, he'd eliminated the oil business from the business of baling with a pickup baler — and had eliminated hundreds of working parts. About the quality of his farming, I need only tell you that he showed me his oat field that he'd just taken a crop from, and the stand of alfalfa coming under it was excellent. That, of course, is one of the places to look if you want to know what kind of farming is going on and the
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