Earl Spencer's Farm

Wendell Berry's essay, "Solving for Pattern," has three parts. The first part was covered in my first two posts, "Bad Solutions" and "Good Solutions." Berry begins the second part of his essay as follows:

It would be next to useless, of course, to talk about the possibility of good solutions if none existed in proof and in practice. A part of our work at The New Farm has been to locate and understand those farmers whose work is competently responsive to the requirements of health. Representative of these farmers, and among them remarkable for the thoroughness of his intelligence, is Earl F. Spencer, who has a 250-acre dairy farm near Palatine Bride, New York.

Wendell Berry describes how Earl Spencer's plan was to gradually grow his herd to 120 cows, but in 1972, when he had 70 cows, bad weather forced him to make a choice: He either had to buy half of his yearly feed supply, or sell half of his herd. Berry continues:

He chose to sell half his herd – a very unconventional choice, which in itself required a lot of independent intelligence. But character and intelligence of an even more respectable order were involved in the next step, which was to understand that the initial decision implied a profound change in the pattern of the farm and of his life and assumptions as a farmer. With his herd now reduced by half, he saw that before the sale he had been overstocked, and had been abusing his land. On his 120 acres of tillable land, he had been growing 60 acres of corn and 60 acres of alfalfa. On most of his fields, he was growing corn three years in succession. The consequences of this he now saw as symptoms, and saw that they were serious: heavy dependence on purchased supplies, deteriorating soil structure, declining quantities of organic matter, increasing erosion, yield reductions despite continued large applications of fertilizer. In addition, because of his heavy feeding of concentrates, his cows were having serious digestive and other health problems.

In the following short paragraph, Wendell Berry states the crux of the matter, which is balance: Balance between the needs of the farmer, and the biological needs of the farm itself; as well as balance between financial success and the biological needs of the farm, his family, his community, and the broader ecology.

He began to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the creatures and the land he was dealing with, and to ask if he could not bring about some sort of balance between their needs and his own. His conclusion was that “to be in balance with nature is to be successful.” His farm, he says, had been going in a “dead run”; now he would slow it to a “walk.”

Berry lists many of the specific changes that Earl Spencer made on his farm, including (a) a plan to phase out his use of purchased fertilizers, coupled with a plan to increase and improve his use of manure, (b) a plan to better preserve the cropland, using more frequent rotation and better timing, and (d) a plan to reduce dependence on grain, and increase the use of roughage as feed. Berry concludes the example as follows:

The most tangible results are that the costs of production have been “dramatically” reduced, and that per cow production has increased by 1500 to 2000 pounds. But the health of the whole farm has improved. There is a moral satisfaction in this, of which Earl Spencer is fully aware. But he is also aware that the satisfaction is not purely moral, for the good results are also practical and economic: “We have half the animals we had before and are feeding half as much grain to those remaining, so we now need to plant corn only two years in a row. Less corn means less plowing, less fuel for growing and harvesting, and less wear on the most expensive equipment.” Veterinary bills have been reduced also. And in 1981, if the schedule holds, he will buy no commercial fertilizer at all.

The title of Wendell Berry's essay is "Solving for Pattern," which also happens to be the title of this blog. It's important that, here at the outset, we get real clear about what this phrase actually means. In order to do so, I would like to reproduce a key paragraph from Berry's essay that appeared in my second post, "Good Solutions:"

Perhaps it is not until health is set down as the aim that we come in sight of the third kind of solution: that which causes a ramifying series of solutions – as when meat animals are fed on the farm where the feed is raised, and where the feed is raised to be fed to the animals that are on the farm. Even so rudimentary a description implies a concern for pattern, for quality, which necessarily complicates the concern for production. The farmer has put plants and animals into a relationship of mutual dependence, and must perforce be concerned for balance or symmetry, a reciprocating connection in the pattern of the farm that is biological, not industrial, and that involves solutions to problems of fertility, soil husbandry, economics, sanitation - the whole complex of problems whose proper solutions add up to health: the health of the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of farm family and farm community, all involved in the same
internested, interlocking pattern – or pattern of patterns.

This paragraph reflects the central meaning of what Berry intends by the phrase "Solving for Pattern," which is the meaning that I will adopt for this blog. Notice how balance and connection are central to his meaning. Earl Spencer's transformation of his farm is meant to illustrate this meaning, in one particular domain of application.

I will use Earl Spencer's story in a later post to introduce Activity Theory, but first will move on to the third part of Wendell Berry's essay in my next blog post, "Standards for Good Solutions." I am aware that dairy farms are not the primary interest for most readers of this blog, but it is important that we glean every last drop of wisdom from Berry's essay, before moving on to examples and principles that may have more direct application to our work. "Solving for Pattern" will be the foundation for everything that follows.

Note to Readers

I would very much like to build in the opportunity for you to pose questions that you may have regarding this blog. The only way I can see to do that is for you to email me (d.cross@tcu.edu), and then I can respond as part of the "Solving for Pattern" blog. Nate Silver does with his popular "Silver Bulletin" newsletter, and it seems like a best practice.