If you drive through most rural areas in our country, you’re likely to see some old, abandoned farmsteads, lying broken like great bones in the mottled landscape. The houses are grayed and weathered, with shattered windows that give way only to darkness, the whole structure leaning out of kilter as though setting itself against a brisk wind.

The wind that swept through and left the shells of so many old farmsteads in its wake was, at least in part, big agriculture.

In the 1950s, agricultural experts began pushing the mantra, “get big or get out.” In other words, scale up the size of your farming operation or drop out entirely. This inaugurated a kind of race to the top, with each farmer desperately trying to grab more land and equipment to stay viable and to meet increasingly stringent sanitation requirements.

Those who couldn’t keep up had to shut down their operations. And so, as time wore on, more and more of the land was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

Fewer people now cultivate the land than in times past—and many of them aren’t “people,” properly speaking, but rather agricultural corporations—which means fewer people have reason (or ability) to live on the land. Thus the hollowed-out houses and old farmsteads. A big corporation buying up thousands of acres in Iowa, for example, has no need of the houses and barns that used to be attached to the fields, and so the homesteads are often left to rot.

The intense pressure on farmers to scale up has caused a hyperfocus on efficiency, particularly efficiency of scale. So farms have become less diversified. Large farms are often monocultures, growing huge tracts of a single crop (usually corn or soybeans). Subsistence farming, with a diversified collection of plants and animals, is no longer the norm.

Indeed, one of the ironies of our current system is that the average farmer, for all his vast amounts of land, couldn’t feed himself a decent meal from his own property because it’s all a single crop, and often a crop that will require high levels of processing and fragmentation before it will become properly edible.

One of the negative effects of this focus on scale and efficiency is how it changes the character of the farmer. The great agricultural writer Wendell Berry explains in his classic book on this subject The Unsettling of America, “The best farming requires a farmer—a husbandman, a nurturer—not a technician or a businessman.” But Big Ag tends to engender the latter, not the former. Berry writes:

The concentration of the farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands … is thus a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance. It forces profound revolution in the farmer’s mind: once his investment in land and machines is large enough, he must forsake the values of husbandry and assume those of finance and technology … he is caught up in the drift of energy and interest away from the land.

It is not possible for a man running some 1,000 acres to have an intimate, nurturing relationship with it. The scale is no longer a human scale. What used to be a matter of the careful observation and cultivation of a variety of plants and animals using inherited local lore and generational experience with a sense of pride and responsibility becomes an industrialized, largescale business enterprise more akin to a factory than a farm. Needless to say, this transformation in the psychology of farmers deeply impacts the psychology—and even the very existence—of rural communities.

Berry points out, “A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safe-guards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.” But Big Ag allows little room for such slow-paced “inefficiencies” as familiarity with the land and human intelligence of the earth. This loss of a spirit of husbandry radiates from the farm to the rural town; all of it becomes more neglected with time.

Further, due to the giant agro-corporations, fewer people can make a living in the country, and so younger generations have moved en masse to the cities. The reality of human life is that culture and community can only grow where there are people, and people must go where there are economic means of sustaining themselves. Today, that’s largely the cities.

In another piece of writing, “The Work of Local Culture,” Berry observes, “The children go to the cities, for reasons imposed by the external economy, and they do not return; eventually the parents die and the family land … is sold to a stranger. By now it has happened millions of times.” This is the great “unsettling” of the American countryside Berry refers to in the title of his most well-known book. Rural culture has been devasted. In an analogous manner, many natural ecosystems have been similarly damaged by chemical runoff and loss of habitat. Big Ag does not, as a rule, work in conjunction with nature.

This is not to say, of course, that Big Ag has no advantages. Indeed, the high-tech, high-efficiency, industrial model of farming certainly produces large yields. It may be that without these large yields, it would be impossible to feed our planet’s growing population.

In an article for National Geographic entitled “A Five Step Plan to Feed the World,” Jonathan Foley takes a balanced and nuanced approach to the dichotomy between Big Ag and the resurgent forms of small, diversified, and organic farms:

Those who favor conventional agriculture talk about how modern mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and improved genetics can increase yields to help meet demand. And they’re right. Meanwhile proponents of local and organic farms counter that the world’s small farmers could increase yields plenty—and help themselves out of poverty—by adopting techniques that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They’re right too.

Foley goes on to eschew an “either/or” approach in favor of a “both/and.” He says we need both types of farming to meet challenges of a growing population and need for food. Along with the farming techniques themselves, he says, we could greatly increase our ability to feed the world by reducing waste, altering our diets, and improving distribution.

Maybe some form of synthesis is possible in the realm of rural culture, too. Ironically, the technological age may offer a path toward regeneration. I explained above how economic factors have forced people from the countryside into the cities since they could no longer make a living on the land. But today, with the internet and the growing popularity of remote work, it is possible to hold a high-paying city job while living in the country. Of course, at the same time, part of the strength and even necessity of rural community in the past came from shared work in the fields and the constant intercourse of local buying and selling.

If modern country-dwellers wish to revive rural culture, they will need to make a special effort to get out in the local community and create reasons for people to come together when the economic incentives are not there.

Further, a combination of commuting or remote work with hobby farming can begin to resuscitate a connection to the land and local lore—and even provide a justification for building community because even a task as small as picking apples from the trees in your backyard and pressing them into cider can be done more efficiently with a group of helpers. The homesteading renaissance may be an indication that some form of restoration of culture and agriculture is already underway.

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