Romance and Tragedy: Talking with Marty Strange
Marty Strange has been active in rural affairs all of his working life, ever since he left New England to work as a VISTA volunteer in the Platte Valley of Nebraska. "I got fired from that job," he says, but he went on to head the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, and has since became one of the forces behind how we think about and talk about the health and stability of rural communities. Strange has now returned to New England and is focusing his attention rural education and how it is affected by policy. An author, speaker, organizer, and activist, he has given plenty of talks, some of them described as "less than welcome," to sustainable agriculture groups around the country.
We ask Strange to describe the current state of sustainability, and he flatly declines. "It just isn’t useful," he says, explaining that definitions are in second position behind results. "I’m an insufferable incrementalist," he says. "I think we progress one farmer at a time. I’m afraid that isn’t very visionary, but I do think that’s how things really happen: We don’t need to define what sustainability is so much as we need to work at developing a system that lets us get closer to it. We simply have too far to go to define our goals precisely.
"I tell people, ‘Don’t fret that what we are dong is less than perfect or that it lacks purity.’ Impurities are a part of it, and if you work too hard at making precise and exclusive definitions, you distance yourself from the very thing you are trying to achieve."
This can be a disconcerting message for some, but Strange points out that in the end it is winning that matters. "There are people who would rather be pure than win; or, put another way, they prefer to lose on their own terms. But if you don’t win, then you don’t have to take any responsibility, and you don’t have to deal with people with different values. You can be righteous and not get anywhere."
This does not mean that vision has no place in our conversations about sustainability in agriculture—"We need both"—but that the desire to define too much is limiting. "The idea behind it is to contain," says Strange, "and to narrow the arena. I don’t think we can afford to do that if we want to win. In this case, the game is won or lost on farms, and it depends on profit, viability, and the farm ethic."
As an example, Strange talks about the use of anhydrous ammonia, which is cheap and makes corn grow. "But it’s also a poison—it’s bad for the soil, the air, and the water. It’s a bad product, and it’s also, in the end, bad for business, and farmers know that. Sustainable agriculture is actively fueled by what farmers know and what they are willing to learn from experience, and this is the difference between corporate farms and family farms. Corporate farms avoid risk; family farms are entrepreneurial. You get lots of noise, lots of innovation, and lots of indigenous knowledge, and it’s knowledge based on the experience of someone who has put everything on the line. A small farmer understands about failure, hardship, and risk."
Inside the farm ethic is the opportunity for making real progress, even during times, like now, when the future of family farming is precarious. But one of the dangers to farmers, not often recognized, rises obliquely from a kind of elitism: "We are moving toward a dual food system in this country," he says, "where there is pure and perfect food available to the rich and cheap food for everybody else. Inequality like this is the enemy of sustainability. Airlifting organic food from California to New York is not sustainable, and one of the challenges is making good food the ordinary food of choice for ordinary people."
This is why Strange feels cautiously hopeful about the model behind community supported agriculture. "A CSA elevates the status of the buyer, and it brings responsibility and participation into play. I suppose it could be corrupted—you could have a mega-CSA that breaks the bond between the producer and the consumer—but it gets the consumer invested in good practices and connected to the source."
Responsibility and connectiveness, it seems, are the chief assets of rural culture, and Strange advances the idea that these are sturdy, if endangered, virtues. "Some organic production is about consumer preference and elitism," he says, "and not really about soil health." But soil health makes a final appeal to the farmer because he must make a living, and because she must support a family—responsibility and connectiveness again.
"I’m sometimes bothered by some attitudes I run into among conservation and land-trust advocates," he says, "where there’s a feeling that farms should be saved because farms are pretty. These folks mean well, and I support what they are doing, but they are writing a romance about the family farm." Instead of romance, Strange sees the family farm as an ongoing Greek tragedy, in which land values make transferring the farm between generations an economic agony. "The land becomes coveted by the culture," he says, "and when a farm family must choose between saving the farm for one heir or breaking it up so each heir gets their inheritance, the land implicitly becomes the enemy of either the farm or the family because of its escalating non-agricultural value. This makes for heroism and tragedy. There’s nothing pretty about that."
Is he is pessimistic as he lets himself sound? "I don’t think I am pessimistic," he says. "I love the family farm enough to criticize it. It’s a human institution and naturally flawed." His "insufferable incrementalism" provides the momentum he needs, along with a belief that farming can truly change—one farm at a time.
The Back Story
For more about Marty Strange’s thoughts on the family farm, readers may want to get a copy of his Family Farming: A New Economic Vision, which explores the role of American farm policy, particularly the policies of federal commodity programs, in undermining the institution. Published in 1989, it is available from the Center for Rural Affairs at www.cfra.org.
On a more lyrical note, Strange has also written Whittler’s Songs, which he describes as a "memoir between the lines," that follows the development of the Center for Rural Affairs from a personal perspective. The collection of essays is graced by a forward from Paul Olson, professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Also available from the Center for Rural Affairs.
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