Solving for Pattern

Solving for Pattern by Wendell Berry

“Solving for Pattern” argues that industrial agriculture often creates destructive “solutions”: methods that increase production while damaging soil, animals, watersheds, farm economies, rural communities, and ultimately human health. This dilemma is presented as part of a broader modern pattern in which systems meant to provide security or cure problems instead produce new and worsening harms. One bad kind of solution shifts its consequences beyond the concern of the experts who devised it. Large cattle feed lots, for example, may create factory-like efficiency but also cause animal illness, drug dependence, manure disposal problems, soil-fertility losses, polluted watersheds, cash-grain monocultures, erosion, compaction, pests, dependence on purchased technology and credit, and rural depopulation. Another bad solution intensifies the very problem it addresses, as when larger tractors are used to correct soil compaction and make compaction worse, requiring still larger tractors. Such methods chiefly benefit suppliers of fuel and equipment. The essay insists that food production cannot be treated as an isolated technical or economic problem. Farming is a relationship among soil, plants, animals, and people, and a genuine solution must be ecologically, agriculturally, and culturally healthful. Health becomes the standard for a third kind of solution: one that produces further solutions. A farm where feed is raised for animals kept on that same farm establishes a biological pattern of mutual dependence, connecting fertility, husbandry, sanitation, economy, family, and community. Earl F. Spencer’s dairy farm near Palatine Bridge, New York, exemplifies this approach. Following a conventional plan, Spencer had expanded to seventy cows, depended heavily on commercial fertilizer, grew corn repeatedly on the same fields, bought increasing supplies, and faced declining soil quality, erosion, reduced yields, and health problems in his cows. When wet weather cut his harvest by about half in 1972, he chose to sell half his herd rather than buy half a year’s feed. Recognizing that his land had been overstocked and abused, he changed the farm’s whole pattern, resolving to slow its “dead run” to a “walk” and to bring his needs into balance with nature. Spencer adopted a long-term plan to eliminate purchased fertilizer, built a manure pit to use manure better, improved crop rotation and timing, reduced grain while increasing roughage, and bred cows for more efficient roughage conversion. His production costs and veterinary bills fell, while per-cow production rose. With fewer animals and less grain, he needed less corn, plowing, fuel, and equipment wear. His success demonstrates that moral satisfaction, practical effectiveness, and economic soundness can coincide when the health of the entire farm improves. The essay then offers standards for judging good solutions. They accept limits and use what is nearby; respect the discipline of agriculture instead of submitting farming to technology or economics; improve balance and quality throughout a pattern; solve several problems without generating others; and make a farm fertile, productive, healthful, conservative, beautiful, and pleasant to live on. They distinguish biological order from mechanical order, maintain wide margins and alternatives, ask “How much is enough?”, avoid needless expense and exploitation, and arise from the direct work and responsibility of people who know a particular place. A healthy farm must remain within the scale of a farmer’s attentive understanding. Its true capital includes the farmer’s body and mind, whose management and labor work together with the farm as one organism. In this sense, an organic farm is not merely one that permits or forbids certain materials; it imitates a natural system through integrity, independence, and beneficial dependence. Like a forest that “manures itself,” it avoids importing or exporting excessive fertility. Because no part of an organism can be improved by destroying another, soil cannot be sacrificed for crops, plants for animals, or animals for people. Nor can a farm be healthy while it damages the larger watershed, air, community, and ecosystem containing it. Organic human works are not natural, but they can imitate natural patterns through memory, observation, insight, imagination, reverence, devotion, fidelity, and especially restraint: the willingness to live within limits, reject novelty for its own sake, resist greed and pride, and refuse to pass unresolved consequences on to others.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Essay, Agricultural Nonfiction, Environmental Nonfiction · 4,178 words

First lines

OUR DILEMMA in agriculture now is that the industrial methods that have so spectacularly solved some of the problems of food production have been accompanied by "side effects" so damaging as to threaten the survival of farming. Perhaps the best clue to the nature and the gravity of this dilemma is that it is not limited to agriculture. My immediate concern here is with the irony of agricultural methods that destroy, first, the health of the soil and, finally, the health of human communities. But I could just as easily be talking about sanitation systems that pollute, school systems that graduate illiterate students, medical cures that cause disease, or nuclear armaments that explode in the midst of the people they are meant to protect. This is a kind of surprise that is characteristic of our time: the cure proves incurable; security results in the evacuation of a neighborhood or a town. It is only when it is understood that our agricultural dilemma is characteristic not of our agriculture but of our time that we can begin to understand why these surprises happen, and to work out standards of judgment that may prevent them.

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essays · environmentalism · sustainable agriculture · rural life · conservation · ecology · farming · land stewardship · agrarianism · industrialization critique · local communities · traditional knowledge

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