Death in the Farm Community

We don’t mean those words of the title in an elegiac, metaphorical sense, though there is an element of that in what we will be discussing.  It is in reference rather to a hard, empirical truth, that deaths are rising in farm communities, and specifically a certain kind of death:  from cancer.

 
News stories about exploding cancer rates in agricultural areas are beginning to pile up.  Here is an excerpt from the latest, reporting on Missouri farming counties:
 

‘Nestled in Missouri’s Bootheel is the small town of Kennett, the Dunklin County seat. With just over 10,000 residents, it’s a close-knit community where good-natured teasing is a common show of affection.
 

‘Once a sprawling swampland, it has since been transformed into an expanse of flat, fertile fields where agriculture stands as the backbone of the region’s economy.
 

‘Kennett’s houses don’t get much taller than one story, and as visitors stroll down the main street, they’re welcomed by a mix of restaurants, boutiques and a cozy hair salon.
 

‘These buildings are dwarfed in size by a silent, boarded-up hospital, its vacancy a remembrance of what the community has lost.
 

‘It’s the kind of community where if something tragic happens, everyone finds out.
 

‘Bobbi Bibbs found this out the hard way. She discovered she had cancer in her colon in December 2023, which then metastasized to her liver, making it a stage four diagnosis.
 

‘Bibbs isn’t alone. Dunklin County is among the 10 counties with the highest rates of that type of cancer in the state.’
 

The reason for this is now coming to light, mainly, the heavy use of toxic agricultural chemicals.  The news story continues:
 

‘In Dunklin County, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of crops — and most of that land is blanketed by pesticides.
 

‘Estimates suggest that thousands of kilograms of pesticides are sprayed over Missouri cropland each year. In some places, wastewater sludge containing “forever chemicals” — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — is applied on farmland as fertilizer.
 

‘Multiple scientific studies have explored a connection between pesticide use and cancer, pointing to a silent public health crisis hitting rural communities particularly hard.
 

‘The University of Missouri, in partnership with Investigate Midwest, conducted a county-by-county analysis of cancer rates and pesticide use, using the most recently available data for pesticides that are repeatedly cited in research as likely to be associated with cancer risk.
 

‘The six counties with the highest use of these pesticides per square mile are all located in the Bootheel, including Dunklin. Four of those counties are in the top 15 for overall cancer rates in Missouri. All counties with the highest rates of cancer are rural.’
 

If we cast a wider net and look at all the States, the data appear to confirm that those with the heaviest use of agri-chemical pesticides and herbicides have the highest cancer rates.  Many of them are Southern States.
 

This is an existential threat to the Southern identity.  Agriculture is one of the most defining marks of Dixie’s culture.  Pecans, rice, corn, black-eyed peas, okra, mayhaws, peaches – the list could go on much further.  Without the fruits of the land, the South would be a much different place.  And if our farmers are too sick to bring forth those fruits, then a central part of Southern culture will die with them.
 

This is not all by accident.  The giant agribusiness cartels want centralized control of the food supply; monopolies in their hands secure them the largest possible profits.  Independent farmers, on the other hand, using heirloom seeds, non-toxic pest control, and fertilizer from livestock manure and other natural sources, are their death knell.  The goal of the cartels is to make the farmers dependent on them for all their inputs.  Patented, genetically modified crop seeds were a big step to securing monopoly control of agriculture.  Along with the patented plants came all the chemicals like glyphosate/Roundup that were to be used together with them, which had to be bought from the same cartels.
 

This industrial model of agriculture is largely what is practiced here at the South today, and it is this which has destroyed the traditional family farm, and ruined the health of farming communities and of the wider environment of which they are a part.
 

​But this model is alien to our people.  Dixie’s approach to farming is quite the opposite of it:  It is based on the idea of the independence of the farming family and on increasing the health of people and land and animals.  John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, wrote some wonderful lines articulating the Southern vision of agriculture in his book Arator (first published in 1814).  Reading only a few passages from his book offers strong inspiration to reject the present model and reacquire the Southern agricultural ethos.  On improving the land, he writes:

‘The most abundant sources for artificial manure in the most exhausted district of our country, are the offal of Indian corn, the straw of small grain and the dung of animals. We find in the two first proofs of the value of dry vegetables as a manure. If these few means for fertilizing the country, were skilfully used, they would of themselves suffice to change its state from sterility to fruitfulness. But they are so egregiously neglected or mismanaged, that we hardly reap a tythe of their value.


‘There is no farinacious plant which furnishes so rich and so plentiful a crop as the Indian corn. It yields food in abundance for man, beast and land. By the litter of Indian corn, and of small grain, and by penning cattle, managed with only an inferior degree of skill in union with inclosing, I will venture to affirm, that a farm may in ten years be made to double its produce, and in twenty to quadruple it; the ratio of its increased value is of course still greater.


‘There is no other secret in the business than that none of these manures be wasted. The agriculturist who expects to reap good crops from neglecting his manures, is equally a fanatick, with the religionist who expects heaven from neglecting his morals’ (pgs. 87-8, from the online PDF version).

​
​The Dixian way of agriculture not only improves man and his environment physically, but it also improves him spiritually:

​‘Liberality in supplying its labourers with the comforts of life, is the best sponsor for the prosperity of agriculture, and the practice of almost every moral virtue is amply remunerated in this world, whilst it is also the best surety for attaining the blessings of the next. Poetry in allowing more virtue to agriculture, than to any other profession, has abandoned her privilege of fiction, and yielded to the natural moral effect of the absence of temptation. The same fact is commemorated by religion, upon an occasion the most solemn, within the scope of the human imagination. At the awful day of judgment, the discrimination of the good from the wicked, is not made by the criterion of sects or of dogmas, but by one which constitutes the daily employment and the great end of agriculture. The judge upon this occasion has by anticipation pronounced, that to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give drink to the thirsty, are the passports to future happiness; and the divine intelligence which selected an agricultural state as a paradise for its first favorites, has here again prescribed the agricultural virtues as the means for the admission of their posterity into heaven’ (pgs. 241-2).

​These and other passages show the old Southern model of agriculture to be superior to the modern industrial model, bestowing health and plenty and virtue in abundance. But the latter still holds out a grave temptation to contemporary Dixians, the desire for work without effort.


This has been mankind’s temptation since the Fall, to find some way of undoing the effects of his sin in Eden in defiance of what God requires of him. The Lord proclaimed it, that we should labor in the sweat of our brow all the days of our life (Genesis 3:17-19), but mankind, at the instigation of the devil and his demons, tries to annul the curse via the magic of technology. Paul Kingsnorth captures this brilliantly in a passage from his novel Alexandria:

---

‘All this work says Man
Breakin
Buildin
Burnin
Writin
As I break I am me self broken
Where is me ease?


‘ . . . Then Man remembrin Sir Pent
And way of broken world


‘Magik says Man
Is what I need


‘Man then takin Water from Sea
Cloud from Sky
Grit from Clay
Man rubbin hands over fyr
Singin old words
Man makin magik from ghasts and bones
Man strikin altar with sword
Rings bell in darkness


‘Now says Man
Now I have strength of hunnerd and hunnerd
Now me ease will be as it was
Now World shall be as it should
For Machine is come’


(Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2020, pgs. 59-60).

But again, this is base, black-hearted defiance.  The Lord Jesus was particularly clear on this.  It is not worldly ease and self-indulgence that will undo the curse of the Fall, but self-denial:  ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it’ (St Mark’s Gospel 8:34-5).

 
Church history confirms the truth of this.  Those who denied themselves for Christ’s sake regained what the Church Fathers call the ‘aroma of Paradise’ – holy men and women to whose bidding the creation listened, like it once did for Adam before the dreadful Fall: dead plants become alive again and fruitful, the elements obey their directions, and animals become tame and friendly around them.


 
If we follow the wide path of magi-technical industrialism, which includes modern agriculture, with its smooth, greased path of ease and comfort, the door to Paradise will be closed. But if we put forth effort, walking the narrow path, as the Lord commanded, it will be open to us (St Matthew’s Gospel 7:13-14).  The latter is normative here at the South, the ‘hard pastoral’ vision described by Mel Bradford and other Southern Agrarian writers.

 
The narrow path seems to be in the Southern future, one way or the other. If we stay on the easy industrial path, all of our factory farms are going to fail for lack of healthy farmers to operate them, by necessity making us a people of small, independent farming homesteads again.

 
It would be prudent, therefore, for us to begin the transition voluntarily. Chris Smaje, in his book A Small Farm Future, though marred in some places with shibboleths like carbon dioxide causes catastrophic climate change (research actually shows that CO2 concentrations rise in response to rising temperatures, not the other way around) – his book shows that it is possible for a family to live a good life by intensively farming only a few acres of land.
 

Christian, agrarian voices guided Dixie well in the past.  We must heed them once again if there is to be much hope for a pleasant future.