BOOK REVIEW: Farming in the Dark

Where are our priorities, and are we there yet, asks farmer, researcher and educator Rhonda Janke of her fellow believers in her discussion about the future of sustainable agriculture.

By Genevieve Slocum, with Greg Bowman

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Through personal interviews with farmers, consumers and researchers, Rhonda Janke maps the course of the sustainability movement over the last 25 years—its victories, tragedies, inspirations and metamorphoses. Through their voices, we learn about the frustrations, visions, and barriers to success for this complex and unruly quest for an agriculture that works.

The author, a former research director at The Rodale Institute, is a farmer and associate professor of alternative crops at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. She specializes in soil and water quality, medicinal herbs and alternative crops sustainable cropping systems.

Janke sets out to address a fundamental question she has about this movement’s journey: “Can we create sustainable agriculture within the context of a society that is itself probably unsustainable?”

She unearths many reasons why sustainability, as a parallel movement to a large, centralized, corporate (and, she argues, undemocratic) system, may never fully make it into the mainstream sensibility. She outlines how she feels we, as consumers and farmers alike, are still very much “in the dark,” writing:

My inspiration was initially all the farmers who also had to have a day job to pay the bills, obtain health insurance, etc. and are literally farming with the headlights on the tractors, and using flashlights to feed the livestock.

What is wrong with sustainable agriculture? Why is everyone I know, even the sustainable agriculture and organic farmers, farming at night, and having to support their farm and family with ‘the day job?’ Why hasn’t sustainable agriculture addressed this problem?

It seems that direct marketing, niche marketing and all the latest innovations make longer hours for the farmers, but they still have trouble making a living.

What's the point, really?

We have yet to address the social and economic ends of sustainability, maintains Janke with many of her interviewees. Viewing sustainability as merely an environmental issue can make us forget the human and economic casualties of our food system. For example, why do prices for most farm products remain stagnant, while the rest of our economy (particularly our health care system) is a study in skyrocketing costs?

Janke finds the well-spoken, well-educated, yet realistic members of the movement. Many came from a liberal arts educational background unrelated to agriculture, yet drew their inspiration from their broad-based, interdisciplinary outlooks. They speak eloquently about their experiences from both practical and theoretical perspectives. They are idealists and visionaries, but also pragmatists, often moving effortlessly from technical farmer-speak to politics to informed environmentalism.

She admits her sample is hardly representative, even of sustainable farmers, but she finds speakers who are able to eloquently capture and debate the attitudes within the movement (and even question whether it is a movement).

Her subjects celebrate the milestones of expanding sustainable markets and awareness but say yes, we have a long way to go. They also lament the lack of profitability in farming, its changing demographics (the aging farm population is particularly less likely to take risks and make fundamental shifts), the economic and information barriers to entry for beginning farmers, and the paucity of research and outreach with true public benefit and populist allegiance emerging from land grants, among other historic complaints of the movement.

Even organics

They wonder if sustainable ag, once oriented to oppose the “establishment,” is now on its way to becoming the establishment—or being co-opted by it—rather than invoking the true paradigm shift it sought. Most of her subjects felt that sustainability was not a simple formula that could be uniformly transplanted from one farm to another.

The voices in Farming in the Dark suggest that even organics, which has successfully battled its way to achieve a unified national standard—which has done a great deal to bolster its credibility—is seeing the notion of sustainability ebb from its original holistic intent. The tension between USDA certified organic and true sustainability was therefore a concern for the majority of those interviewed.

Several of Janke’s sources remain optimistic about the power of the country’s ever-self-renewing grassroots food movement. One said:

I wouldn’t put that much emphasis on corporate control. First, I don’t think they do it that well. It’s a central system of control, it is difficult to achieve, slow to change and if they don’t take care of people’s needs; they are subject to radical change and attack. I think that people finding common interest isn’t necessarily inhibited by a strong presence of corporate interest.

Janke’s goal was to extract the voices, emotions and logic of the farmers themselves, to recognize them as leading players in our political economy, and in our very survival, believing that “public perception of farmers needs to change if they are ever to be treated as the professionals that they are.”

“What I don’t want to do is contribute an academic treatise on sustainable agriculture, describing farmers, but not really listening to farmers.”

The many-stranded, first-person narrative she weaves forces us to see sustainable agriculture not as a set of policy problems, but as deeply personal lived reality, straight from the hearts of those immersed in their daily struggles. Some educate the “how to,” some raise awareness on the “why to,” and others coax a livelihood from the soil—too often in the dark, yet drawn to press on for what yet might be.

These voices tell the stories that are the lifeblood of any movement—and it is a movement, however chaotic, conflicted and unformed. They testify to a continuing multi-generational quest for deep sustainability in an agricultural economy that is still addicted to oil, commodity power and the forlorn hope that humans can out-maneuver nature instead of understanding how to survive, humanely, within its complex systems.

Genevieve Slocum, a former communications intern at the Rodale Institute, is pursuing a master’s degree in environmental policy at Columbia University. Greg Bowman is communications manager at the Institute.