New Agrarians: Local Innovators
by Susan Witt
“New Agrarians: Local Innovators”
was written in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the
publication of Wendell Berry’s classic work, The Unsettling
of America. It is one of a series of essays in the new book
The Essential Agrarian Reader: Cultivating Culture, Community,
and the Land, edited by Norman Wirzba and published by the
University of Kentucky Press, 2003.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publishing of Wendell
Berry's The Unsettling of America presents an opportunity
to consider the nature and promise of Agrarianism in these
changing times.
The events of September 2001 have helped end the lingering
enchantment with the monoculture of the global economy.
The consequences of our dependence on the products of a
relatively few international corporations are now more visible,
including the concentration of ownership of the means of
production The consumption patterns of a small number of
countries account for most of the depletion of the Earth’s
natural resources. Environmental degradation occurs out
of sight of the end consumer, and so the responsibility
for restoration goes unheeded.
Instead of addressing the conditions of poverty, the global
economy has only exaggerated the intolerable discrepancies
in income and distribution of goods around the world. The
poor are even further impoverished when, following the promise
of available jobs, they are enticed into the enclosed compounds
of corporate factories with the accompanying loss of the
social fabric that had nourished them. The cultural life
and traditional skills of the village are left behind—skills
that if cultivated could provide the basis for a richer
local economy in which the production of the basic necessities
of food, clothing, energy, and shelter could better be met.
These glaring discrepancies breed resentments and hostilities,
creating volatile conditions that are used to justify increasingly
powerful and dangerous forces of repression.
But quietly and surely around the world, new attention
is being focused on the renewal of village economies. In
village after village, leaders are appearing whose roots
run deep in their local community. They do not need outside
consultants to show them the natural riches and human skills
available to shape new patterns of local production and
local trade. They are using their imagination to craft new
local institutions to support this renewal. It is these
villagers, both rural and urban, who are the new Agrarians,
creating the basis for a new peace while champions of the
global economy are risking the lives of us all by fostering
the conditions for a new war.
What are the characteristics of these new Agrarians and
their village economies? In his book Why the Village Movement?
Gandhian economist J. C. Kumarappa addresses the women of
the villages with these thoughts: You, my sisters, perhaps
it is your husbands who earn the money for your family,
but it is you who are determining how that money is spent;
in so doing you are deciding the fate of your village. You
may choose to buy the beautiful silk made in France or Belgium,
or you may choose the khadi cloth made by your sister and
your neighbor. When you choose the khadi cloth, you are
investing in more than cloth—you are investing in
your neighbor, her children, and your village. As you watch
the children walking to school in the morning, fed by the
earnings of their mother, you realize that you and they
are woven together through the cloth. You and your village
are richer in proportion to the number of stories that unite
you.
Across North America, in region after region, citizens
are banding together in their role as consumers to work
with producers, sharing the risk of production costs in
order to help shape the kind of vital local economy that
incorporates social and ecological objectives. I believe
that the future of Agrarianism lies with these regionally
based producer/consumer associations.
In 1986 in my own Jug End Road neighborhood of the Berkshires
region of western Massachusetts, Robyn Van En founded the
first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project in the
United States at her Indian Line Farm. In a CSA, consumers
guarantee the yearly production costs of the farmer through
a shareholder fee. Working in collaboration with shareholders,
the farmer determines an annual operating budget. Ideally,
the budget is then divided by the number of shareholders
to determine the cost per share. CSA members pay in advance
so that funds are available to the farmer during the growing
season. In return they receive a weekly share of the harvest
and the security of a local source of organically raised
vegetables. Because of Robyn's initiative there are now
over a thousand CSA farms around the country.
CSAs provide an excellent model for consumers sharing
the risk of yearly production costs with the farmer. Yet
the question remains: how can young farmers gain affordable
access to land in the first place? Again Indian Line Farm
provided a model. When Robyn's farm came up for sale following
her untimely death in 1997, the sale price was too high
for entering farmers. A farm income alone could not carry
mortgage payments and still maintain responsible farm practices.
It was the cost of the land that put purchase price out
of reach. This problem is typical of regions close to urban
areas or deemed valuable for vacation homes. The market
value of the land reflects the demand for house sites, frequently
second-home sites, rather than the social benefit of maintaining
a local farm. High purchase costs of the land and the pressure
of mortgage payments on that purchase can drive a farmer
to employ unwise farm practices and production methods beyond
what is ecologically suitable for the land. If the citizens
of the Southern Berkshires wanted Indian Line to remain
an active farm producing vegetables for local sale, they
would have to partner with the farmer to purchase the farm.
The community, working through the Community Land Trust
in the Southern Berkshires and The Berkshire Taconic Landscape
Program of The Nature Conservancy, made a one-time donation
to purchase the land. The Community Land Trust holds title
to the land, and The Nature Conservancy holds a conservation
restriction. This has enabled two young farmers, Elizabeth
Keen and Alexander Thorp, to purchase the buildings and
enter into a ninety-nine-year lease on the land, the use
of which is determined by a detailed land use plan.
The individuals who donated to the project needed the
incentive of knowing that the Community Land Trust and The
Nature Conservancy would not be coming back next year to
the donors to refinance the same farm—that this one
donation would keep the farm actively farmed and affordable
for future farmers. Ownership, after all, is only a bundle
of rights. It was simply a question of what rights the donors,
working through the two non-profits, wanted to retain in
return for their role in purchasing the land; put another
way, how many rights would the farmers require to preserve
the incentive to farm with all their heart and strength?
The Nature Conservancy used the legal tool of a conservation
restriction to protect the ecological quality of the land
for future generations. The Community Land Trust used the
legal tool of a lease to ensure that community objectives
are maintained. The lease has the following requirements:
* The buildings are to remain owner occupied. They cannot
become rental property or vacation homes for city people.
* The land must in fact be farmed. The lease requires
a minimum yearly commercial crop production over and above
household use; however, the lease does not specify what
kind of crops should be grown. This is the private affair
of the farmer, based on his/her evaluation of local markets.
* At resale the buildings must remain affordable to the
next farmer. The lease requires the leaseholder to offer
all buildings and other improvements back to the community
land trust for resale. The price can be no more than the
current replacement cost of the buildings, adjusted for
deterioration.
* The farmer is to employ organic practices and meet the
conditions of a land use plan developed to respect the specific
ecology of the site.
All other ownership rights belong to the farmer, including
the ability to pass on the farm to heirs through the transfer
of the lease.
The lease arrangement does not guarantee that the farmer
will farm well. Such skills are cultural and acquired over
many years; however, by taking away the burden of land debt,
the community land trust does give farmers the opportunity
to ply their craft under more favorable circumstances. As
land prices continue to rise in regions surrounding cities,
it will be ever more important for citizens to utilize such
enabling methods to ensure a local food supply.
The basic achievement of the community land trust legal
documentation is to separate the value of the land from
the value of buildings and other improvements on the land
(fences, soil fertility, perennial stock, etc.). Land, a
limited natural resource, is removed from the market and
held in trust by the democratically structured, regional
non-profit. The value created from labor applied to the
land (agricultural crops, buildings, etc.) is securely the
private equity of the person creating the value (the farmer)
and is exchangeable in the marketplace.
The private, non-profit community land trust is thus a
flexible tool for a community to determine its own goals
for land use and distribution. As a result of the success
of the Indian Line Farm model, several conservation land
trusts in the Berkshires and nearby Connecticut are in the
process of initiating their own community land trusts in
order to have a complex of legal tools at hand with which
to protect not only open farmland but the affordability
of homes and farm buildings for the future farmers working
the land.
Affordable access to land for homes, small businesses,
and local production is key to vibrant local economies.
During the next two decades we will see community activists
ever more engaged in land reform issues. One important model
for this reform is the work of Vinoba Bhave, the trusted
associate of Gandhi. In the 1950s Vinoba walked from village
to village in India seeking a way to alleviate the widening
social disparities he saw. Wherever he went, crowds gathered
to listen to their beloved spiritual leader. Vinoba asked
boldly, “Those of you with more land than you need,
would you not give your excess to my brothers and sisters
who have no land to build their homes or cultivate their
crops?” Moved by the man and his appeal, wealthy villagers
deeded their land to Vinoba so that he could reconvey it
to the landless.
In this way the Bhoodan, or Land Gift, movement was born.
But soon Vinoba saw that the poor, who did not have the
money to buy tools to work the land and seeds to sow it,
simply sold the land back to the wealthy. They then wandered
into the even greater poverty of the cities; therefore,
Vinoba changed the Bhoodan movement to the Gramdan, or Village
Gift, movement. The land was given to the village, and villagers
were given use rights. They were not tempted to trade the
land for quick money. If they left the land, it was redistributed
to those who could use it.
The Gramdan movement was introduced to this country by
Robert Swann, founding President of the E. F. Schumacher
Society. A carpenter by trade, he used his skills during
the civil rights movement of the 1960s to help rebuild bombed
churches in the rural South. There he met Slater King, the
cousin of Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders.
From them he learned that African-Americans were being prevented
from gaining access to land. It was a pressing problem that
fueled the civil unrest.
Bob worked with Slater King to adopt Vinoba's model. New
Communities in rural Georgia was the first community land
trust in North America, formed to provide access to land
for African-American farmers. There are now more than one
hundred community land trusts around the United States in
both urban and rural communities—started by church
groups, community development corporations, concerned citizens,
conservation groups, and state agencies. As each new initiative
breaks ground in its region, develops a land use plan, provides
a lease, and secures a mortgage, the understanding that
there are alternatives to private land tenure grows.
The Agrarian writers of the 1930s as represented by the
contributors to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and
the Agrarian Tradition, considered private land ownership
a cornerstone of their policies. They wished for a society
characterized by a widespread distribution of usable property.
But the exchange of land, a limited resource, in the marketplace
has led inevitably to speculation in land and the resulting
accumulation of large holdings in fewer and fewer hands.
I would argue that the community land trust model offers
greater opportunity to achieve the Agrarian vision of small
landholders beholden only to the soil and the community
surrounding it. A community land trust is a non-governmental,
citizen-based approach to achieving this vision. It uses
the resources and good will of the local community to gather
parcels of land held in private ownership and transfer them
into public trust. Applying these village-based economic
tools successfully will demand our finest skills as human
beings. It will require imagination, local knowledge, entrepreneurship,
a long-term commitment to place, and strong working relationships
with others—all characteristics of new Agrarians.
In many ways it is easy for us to become passive consumers
of the products of global corporations, in part because
the manufacturing process is invisible. Creating vital local
economies requires our active engagement and tests our convictions.
A community land trust is not a government tool for reallocating
land, it is a citizen-based tool. But it is only as effective
as the will of residents of a region to become involved
in the process. It requires looking beyond home economics
to community economics and understanding that the health
of the community is part and parcel of our own health and
vibrancy—a vision Wendell Berry so beautifully articulated
in The Unsettling of America.
Broad-based democratic access to land is only one aspect
of an agrarian economy. A credit system that favors small
locally owned businesses is also essential. The Self-Help
Association for a Regional Economy (SHARE) in my home region
of the Berkshires provides a model for consumers to share
the risk in the start-up costs of small businesses. The
objective of SHARE is to make productive loans to people
who are unable to secure normal bank financing but who have
the kind of small, locally owned enterprises that produce
quality goods and services for local consumption. SHARE
members open savings accounts at a local participating bank,
and these accounts are used by SHARE to collateralize loans.
This kind of lending requires that the community separate
the functions of banking: the bank makes the loans and handles
the accounting, but the lending decisions—based on
a set of social, ecological, and financial criteria established
by SHARE—are made by the community of depositors.
SHARE has collateralized loans to a goat-cheese producer
for the stainless steel equipment in the milking room, to
a home knitter for a bulk supply of yarn, to the owner of
a working draft-horse team for materials for a barn, to
a kite maker for a quantity of waterproof fabric, and to
a music teacher for a piano. The payback record on SHARE-collateralized
loans has been 100 per cent, both because of their scale
and because of community support for the loan recipients.
SHARE members help maintain this perfect record by recommending
these small businesses to their friends.
The SHARE loan-collateralization program is simple to
operate and easily copied. Similar programs have started
around the United States, using the model created in the
Berkshires. It is the “grandmother principal”
which has made SHARE a success. When people without credit
histories decide to go into business, they frequently turn
to a family member, such as a grandmother, for help. Instead
of lending directly, the grandmother might offer a savings
account as collateral for a bank loan. The SHARE program
simply extends “the circle of grandmothers,”
creating a family based on place.
In Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen
Bank, a widely replicated model for making small loans.
Borrowers come as a group to the bank, agreeing to share
financial responsibility. The bank makes only one loan at
a time to a member of the group. The unwritten social contract
among neighbors, rather than a formal bank contract, helps
ensure the loan's repayment. Both SHARE and the Grameen
Bank depend on the availability of savings deposits—the
excess funds of others—to make their loans. This dependence
is a limitation. In her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations,
the regional planner Jane Jacobs offers another approach:
she describes local currency as an elegant tool for providing
credit for regional businesses.
Jacobs views the economy of a region as a living entity
in the process of expanding and contracting, with a local
currency as the appropriate regulator of this ebbing and
flowing. She advocates the creation of import-replacement
businesses so that the goods and services consumed in that
region are produced there. Local currencies can be placed
in circulation through the making of productive loans. Productive
loans are those resulting in new goods available in the
economy in excess of the value of the loan itself, such
as loans to a farmer for seeds in the spring that generate
a bountiful crop of fall vegetables. The interest rate on
loans made through the issue of local currency can be as
little as zero per cent because the issuing community is
not paying interest to a group of depositors such as in
the SHARE program. Reducing financing charges encourages
the development of small local manufacturing enterprises
or renewable-energy generating plants that currently are
not economically competitive. Eventually a community-based
organization issuing local currency could untie its currency
from the federal dollar, establishing a local backing such
as cordwood or a basket of commodities—corn, soy beans,
and wheat, for instance. Then currency would retain a constant
local value related to a natural resource and would make
visible once again the connection between the health of
a local economy and the health of the land.
There are currently twenty-one communities in the United
States and Canada experimenting with local issue of currency,
and the movement is growing as so-called developing countries
learn that they do not need to borrow from the International
Monetary Fund to generate local businesses. They are freeing
themselves from the global economy to focus on their local
economies.
We can start the process in very small ways. Deli Dollars,
issued in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1989, were
a way for customers of a local restaurant to support a popular
business as it prepared to move to a new location. Consumers
purchased Deli Dollars for eight dollars each and then,
after the move was complete, cashed them in for ten dollars’
worth of sandwiches and coffee. The Deli Dollars were dated
over a year's time to spread out the redemption period.
This local scrip, which was transferable, turned up around
town, including in the collection plate of the Congregational
Church because the parishioners knew that Pastor Van ate
breakfast at the Deli.
The concept of these local economic tools is simple: by
sharing in the risk of production and acting creatively,
consumers can ensure that local businesses remain and thrive
in their communities.
As we work in our own communities to bring about healthy
regional economies, we are not working as isolationists,
securing only our own future and our families' futures,
but rather we are working in solidarity with villagers around
the world who are seeking ways to revitalize their own economies.
It is important to share the stories of our successes. A
vigorous local economy for the Buryats in the Olkhon region
on the western shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia, for example,
will certainly look different from a more self-sufficient
Kentucky blue-grass economy, but it will grow out of the
same love of place and community.
The publication of The Unsettling of America awoke us
to the crisis in our rural communities. Wendell Berrry described
how the loss of a way of life rooted in agricultural traditions
led inevitably to cultural loss, multi-dimensional in its
effect. Yet The Unsettling of America is more than a series
of astute observations on the loss of rural life; it is
at the same time a statement of active love for the observed.
This is characteristic of all of Wendell Berry’s work
and defines his greatness: embedded in his observations
is the moral imperative to defend what is being lost. The
Unsettling of America leads us to seek an authentic resettlement
and re-inhabitation of the place we call home.
In The Unsettling of America and the stories, essays,
and poems which followed it, Wendell Berry speaks from his
particular experiences with the people, land, and community
of Henry County, Kentucky. His writing helped spark a new
generation of writers who—instead of leaving their
homes to find their literary voices as expatriates in European
capitals—returned to their roots, their birth cultures,
to explore the process of repatriation. In telling well
the story of each particular community, this new generation
of writers is helping to give voice to those hundred thousand
villagers in thousands of villages around the world. It
is these villagers, both rural and urban, who are defining
a new Agrarianism as they learn through trial and error
to shape their local economies and communities. In this
work they are building the basis for a new peace. Let us
celebrate them and join with them as responsible citizens
working creatively with local producers to fashion the future
of our own neighborhoods and regions. Susan Witt is executive
director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road,
Great Barrington, MA 01230 (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org
