James Rebanks: There Are No Winners in American Farming

In an excerpt from his new book, the British farmer explores what he calls “the devastation industrialized agriculture has wrought on our landscapes and foodscapes,” and argues that “the global challenge of how we live sustainably on this planet is really a local challenge.”

We had traveled to the heart of American farming country to stay with an old friend in Kentucky. It was winter and it felt like it might never end. We were made welcome in the white clapboard farmhouse that was full of books. We ate good simple food and talked about our families and our farms. But as hard as we tried to be cheerful, it felt as if we had stumbled into someone else’s grief. There was a sense of impending doom about the coming election results. This had once been a thriving landscape of small-and medium-sized farms. Now, it felt like a landscape littered with ghosts and relics.

Our friend drove us around the county in his white pickup truck, with his sheepdog in the back and his red toolbox and wrenches in the footwell. He told us about his people, past and present, and introduced us to farmers who were holding on. They all told us the same thing: America had chosen industrial farming and abandoned its small family farms, and this was the result—a landscape and a community that were falling apart. They showed us fields of oilseed rape that were full of weeds because they were now resistant to the pesticides that had been overused. They spoke of mountains ripped open for minerals, and rivers polluted, and farming people leaving the land or holding on in hidden poverty. And the worse it all got, the more people seemed to gravitate to charlatans with their grand promises and ready-made scapegoats to focus all their anger on. I felt I had landed in a future that didn’t work, and the people I met sensed my unease. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” they told me.

Leave a Comment