Historian Victor Davis Hanson contemplates the state of agrarian life in America with trepidation.
America was created by rural people. Perhaps 95 percent of its citizens were farmers when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Now, despite all the talk of a "rural renaissance," fewer than 1 percent are -- even as we are awash in food and next year will become a net food importer for the first time in our history.Posted by Alan at March 10, 2005 05:23 PMIndustrialization, mechanization and suburbanization did away with the agrarian culture of the traditional family farm. The latest "-zation" comes as globalization. Almost every acre of our farmland -- because of instant communications, easy transportation and free trade -- is in competition with its counterpart abroad.
So here we are in 2005 with most traditional farmers gone and our cropland either vertically integrated or subsidized by commuting part-timers. Are there any dangers in our post-modern agriculture?
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[T]here is an insidious cultural cost to the end of agrarianism that we hardly appreciate. The family on its own land, using craft to work with nature, was a model practical steward of the environment.
Anyone who loses a crop to rain or hail hours before harvest can offer a needed tragic perspective to an increasingly therapeutic society. Public shame, not easy private guilt, was the agrarians' benchmark -- and why not, when they were rooted for life among wide-eyed neighbors?
Words meant little if not backed by action -- as if anyone cared to listen to grand talk of profits to come from an orchard never quite planted. In short, sober American farmers were a calming antidote to almost everything that makes us uneasy with popular culture, from gangsta rap and Martha Stewart to Enron and the hyped trial of Scott Peterson.
No, we will not starve without these crusty farmers, but we will sure miss them.