• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals. In 1965, U.S. farmers used 335 million pounds of pesticides. In 1989 they used 806 million pounds. Less than ten years after that, it was 985 million. That’s three and a half pounds of chemicals for every person in the country, at a cost of $8 billion. Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

So, how are the bugs holding out? Just fine. In 1948, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of all their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

Biologists point out that conventional agriculture is engaged in an evolutionary arms race, and losing it. How can we salvage this conflict? Organic agriculture, which allows insect predator populations to retain a healthy presence in our fields, breaks the cycle.

* * *

STEVEN L. HOPP

David and Elsie were raised by farmers and are doing the same for another generation. Throughout the afternoon their children, in-laws, and grandchildren flowed in and out of the yard and house, the adults consulting about shared work, the barefoot kids sharing a long game of cousins and summer. Now we stopped in to meet the son and daughter-in-law whose house stood just beyond David’s cornfield. As we stayed into evening, conversation on the porch debated the most productive pasture-grass rotations for cattle; out in the yard it was mostly about whose turn it was for the tire swing.

Many months later when I described this visit to a friend, he asked acerbically, “What, not even a mosquito to bother heaven?” (He also mentioned the name Andy Griffith.) Probably there were mosquitoes. I don’t remember. I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? Urban people may be allowed success, satisfaction, and consequence, all at once. Members of David and Elsie’s extended family share work they love, and impressive productivity. They are by no means affluent, but seem comfortable with their material lot, and more importantly—for farmers—are not torn by debt or drained by long commutes to off-the-farm jobs. They work long hours, but value a life that allows them to sit down to a midday lunch with family, or stand outside the barn after the evening milking and watch swallows come in to roost.

They belong to a surprisingly healthy community of similar small farms. Undoubtedly, some people in the neighborhood have their ludicrous grudges, their problem children, their disputed fencelines; they are human. But they are prospering modestly by growing food. At a vegetable auction in town, farmers sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and regional grocery chains. Nothing travels very far. The farmers fare well on the prices, and buyers are pleased with the variety and quality, starting with bedding plants in May, proceeding through all the vegetables, ending with October pumpkins and apples. The nearby food co-op sells locally made cheeses, affordably priced. The hardware store sells pressure canners and well-made tools, not mechanical singing fish.

It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn’t, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere. The success of this one seemed to hinge on many things, including steady work, material thrift, flexibility, modest expectations, and careful avoidance of debt—but not including miracles, as far as I could see. Unless, of course, we live in a country where those qualities have slipped from our paddock of everyday virtues, over to the side of “miracle.” I couldn’t say.

It was dark by the time we headed back through the cornfield to Elsie and David’s house. At low speeds our car runs solely on battery, so it’s spookily quiet, as if the engine had died but