Loosing the Farm, a University of Chicago class on agriculture in the age of globalization, took our class to two farms in the Chicago suburbs. They were radically different. One was part of the Green Earth Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to healthy and sustainable living, and the other was a medium scale industrial cereal farm. These two farms varied in size: one was small and one was large. They varied in amount of capital used: one used very little and one used a lot. They varied in their business models: one was community supported and one was the purview of a sole proprietor. And, they varied in their over-arching philosophies: one was dedicated to producing the right type of food in the right type of way, and the other was dedicated to producing food efficiently. Both farms, and the representative farmers we spoke with, engaged with the information networks surrounding agricultural science in order to formulate how to structure their respective businesses. Both farmers explicitly invoked the expert guidance of scientists, but they did so to completely different results. How and why did they do this? It’s the result of these two farmers, Steve and Mike, having completely disparate conceptions of agricultural science.
It can’t be said that the community sponsored vegetable farm didn’t try to operate efficiently—its organizers certainly engaged in scientific management—but efficiency was not this farm’s guiding principle, and this influenced the amount and types of capital it chose to employ and the scale on which it decided to employ it. Steve, the representative farmer from the CSA farm, walked us through rows of irrigated plants, he talked about the farm’s plans to expand the amount of land in production, and he explained plans to extend the farm’s growing season with green house production in late falls and early springs. All of these things enumerated how the Green Earth Institute perpetually attempts to create vegetables in a rational manner that most efficiently uses what resources the farm has and can have. They do this to increase yields, and in order to increase profits the same as any other agricultural business does. So why doesn’t Steve have three or more tractors like Mike does on the industrial corn and soybean farm we visited later? Why doesn’t he use chemical fertilizers and use capital to streamline his long-term overhead while increasing yields? All things equal, there is only one definition of efficiency. Taylorist and Fordist models of scientific management detail the specialization of tasks within specific operations as to increase overall utility in production. Mike, on his big farm, uses tractors and combines to orchestrate specific and differentiated tasks; Steve uses many more farm hands but does the same thing. Both operate under the same idea of what efficiency is, but they have made different decisions as to how to achieve that efficiency. Their decisions to make their farms so wildly different must have been influenced then by something else: the relative personally organizing strengths of their, and particularly Steve’s, philosophies towards agriculture must have done it. Steve’s plan for the right food produced by the right means will make no one working for him rich, but yet he still has many more people on the pay role. Why? It has to do with the socially mustering capabilities of his, above mentioned, philosophy.
The average farm hand on the CSA farm we visited was making $8.75 per hour. Farming is arduous, dirty, and must conform to weather and the ever setting and rising sun – these people are being paid just above minimum wage for very hard work. Why do they do it? Why does the local park district mow Steve’s lawns in exchange for housing their tractors? Why did a landscape architect design and donate a pond to the farm? This architect still has a sign up advertising how one may get in touch with the pond’s designer so one may pursue having something similar, but he still donated his time so that his firm and the Green Earth Institute may symbiotically advance each other. Why do so many people choose to cooperate with this small business while Mike—whose products feed many more people and are dispersed much more widely—works alone? Both farms dispense their products to consumers through distribution networks. But the distribution chain that links Mike’s soybeans to consumers is much longer than the one linking Steve’s vegetables to the market, and it requires many more people. But unlike Steve’s production system, each of the people handling Mike’s cereals are separate and differentiated legal and economic actors. The interests of the grain elevator are separate from Mike’s interests unlike how the many people who are working with Steve’s CSA farm have at least some level of common interest in the persistence of the Green Earth Institute. The impersonal economic interests of the industrial farm are partially replaced by a voluntary soft economy that supports the CSA farm. This happens in large part because of the philosophy behind the enterprise – that of creating the ‘right’ food in the ‘right’ way. This voluntary soft economy self-appropriates itself because each of the beneficiaries involved see themselves as helping a beneficial industry. One that serves them as well as others.
The idea that this is a beneficial industry is borne of Steve’s philosophy that he is doing something ‘right’ and correct. The Green Earth Institute is engaging in a philosophy of the right. The CSA farm is promoting sustainability, the long term goal of producing food in a manner that isn’t biologically detrimental to the earth and the things living on it – including people. Steve’s farm marries the long term goal of sustainability with the short term goal of producing food that not only is beneficial but one that cannot without any doubt be unbeneficial to us either. His organic farm then produces food that has no chemical residues at all. It includes nothing that could have detrimental effects to consumers today, tomorrow, or ever in the future. This creates short-term physical and fiscal incentives to engage in agricultural practices that are in line with a far-sighted mode of production. Steve and his customers get to enjoy food that is physically unimpeachable while Green Earth Institute gets to charge slightly more for its products due to the rigor of the production process and the increasing demand for the type of products it produces. The conceived dualistic benefits of what the Green Earth Institute are engaging in allow it to legally file as a non-profit and, even without legal legitimation as a social benefactor, mobilize people around the idea that this ‘must’ be the mode of our future.
The philosophy of the right, as applied to Steve’s farm and the pre-established fact that Steve bases his farm’s actions on the findings of agricultural scientists, insists that science is promoting the ‘right’ thing. But Mike also talked about agricultural scientists and extension agents promoting rigorously tested data that influenced how he structured his farm. He uses fertilizers and pesticides though. How can science rigorously dictate that both of these farmers are behaving rationally and in line with expert advice? Steve’s philosophy of the right, in light that science is producing contradictory conclusions, insists that there is a ‘right’ correct science. This view point does not disaggregate science as the possibly contradictory results of different scientists that pursued their findings through equally rigorous methods. Instead it suggests a ‘proper’ trajectory for agricultural science that is very much in tune with the contemporary moment, and that creates modes of production that are in line with the earth’s natural processes of growth.
Mike's farm and modes of production were part of similar notion of ‘right’ from the past. This previous philosophy saw capital expansion, high yields, and production-human efficiency as its highest ideals. It too was also originally conceived of and espoused for its benefits and human promise. It birthed high-modern agriculture, and scientists and popular culture embraced it as the proper direction for the production of food in the 20th century, in state after state, until it covered the globe. But that group ideal has faded as the façade of promise has been chipped at by actuality. Efficiency alone no is no longer romantic. The detriments of fertilizer runoff, and the environmentally sapping effects of monoculture have damaged the mobilizing effects of this previous philosophy of the right. It no longer engenders group action and idealization, and its romance has been reduced to individual levels. Mike got into agriculture because he likes tractors and big machines – because he likes the ‘toys.’
The current philosophy of the right, the idea that ‘right’ science is infallible and is plotting a trajectory for what should be done, then is not the only one of its kind but rather a periodic iteration of something that has happened at least once before in the 20th century. In contrast to Steve, Mike—a human edifice to a previous philosophy of the right—sees science as fallible but corrective. Like with detrimental fertilizers, scientists will develop something new and prune what products of theirs have costs that out weight their benefits. Steve did not seem to think the same way about agricultural science and these two farms were radically different because of it.
These two farms are physically very different. Beyond even the geographical determinations of the two classes of crop—how cereals necessitate larger amounts of land than vegetables in order to be economically viable—the inputs on these two farms, the things controlled by humans, are also very different. That said, these tow farms are similar in that they are part of similar, if not repeating, normative appreciations. They are each the products of how different people appreciate science and its trajectories – and how they conceive that it should do one thing or another.
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