“Do those prophets who would industrialize all production really wish to take the farm out of the family? Factories are essentially alike anywhere. Farms are as diverse as the valleys, hills, and plains. Shall we try to cast all farmers in the same mold?”
— Liberty Hyde Bailey
The Harvest of the Year and the Tiller of the Soil
It’s doubtful that Liberty Hyde Bailey has ever found himself counted amongst the Twentieth century prophets like Orwell, Huxley, or Bradbury. LH Bailey’s predictions were not fantastically obscure and rich with prose. Rather, he was straight forward and frighteningly accurate. He wasn’t some nihilistic philosopher or contemporary celebrity. He was a horticultural researcher, agro-political commentator, farmer, and a persistent god-hating freemason but don't let that detract from his words worth sharing (crooked sticks, right?).
In 1927, LH Bailey predicted the demise of the family farm and the subjugation of the steadfast few to global corporatization and fascist interests. Bailey continues:
“Of course no man knows what will be the farming of the future...But even with all the beautiful social schemes, we have not yet found a substitute for the family. The effort to let the school take the place of the family has failed. It is said that in the future we are to have corporation farms of 5,000 acres and more. Perhaps; this prophecy regards farming only as an industry. If so, the world will be ruled entirely by corporations, agricultural, industrial, commercial, professional, for the corporations would control the government: we shall have a government of corporations rather than of persons...With no separate patriarchal units of importance there will be a benevolent urbanism and democracy, as we now conceive it, will be difficult or impossible.”
By yielding ownership of food production to profit-driven corporations that promised us cheap food and to solicit government subsidies for the farmer’s wages, we’ve displaced ourselves from the family farms, destroyed thousands of years worth of top soil, poisoned our water, exchanged micronutrients and nourishing qualities of our food for synthetic hormones and petroleum byproducts, and pimped out our wives to a man with a corner office (I promise I’ll elaborate on this one soon). Corporatization of the family farm has nearly wiped out the separate and independent patriarchal units native to the American farms, as with much of the native biodiversity.
There is hope yet. Hope that finds itself in a resurgence of agrarianism. Albeit, not the heavily regulated political agrarianism that LH Bailey would have liked, but a strong and righteously rebellious Christian agrarianism. One that is fueled by the gospel and a healthy dose of postmillennialism (you know we’re going to talk about that soon).
“If this corporationism comes into existence, one wonders how long it will last and whether, after trial, there will be a backward swing toward separate independent family life.”
An independent patriarchal unit cannot itself slay a leviathan like a major agricultural corporation whose tentacles lobby against American interests in all levels of government, but they can do something. They can resist the oppression that bears down on their own home. They build culture, raise their own tomatoes and enjoy them in season, kill their own pig, resist tyrannical laws that preclude you from collecting your own rain water or selling chicken eggs. They rear God honoring children free from the indoctrination of government schools, sing psalms heartily (even the one about dashing infants against the rocks), and feast with their neighbors all to the glory of God.
