Butz and Berry in debate

I grew up in Hospers, Iowa, on Highland Avenue, three houses from the northern edge of town. Our paved road stopped just beyond Reinders’ house, but a dirt road, bending sharply to the east, continued beyond it. That stretch of dirt connected to a gravel road that led to my friend, Connie Diekevers’ farm, about a quarter mile away.

It was a farm like so many others of its time. Her dad milked some cows, and it was an adventure going into the pasture to see how Connie and her sister, Nola, called “Boss! Boss!” and brought the herd in on a well-worn path. Their dad, Ray Diekevers, also raised some hogs, and I got an eyeful one day as a boar mounted a sow in the pig pen. Being embarrassed about nature’s ways was the true measure of a townie like me.

Ray also grew corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. Their property was ringed on the north and west by a dense grove of deciduous and evergreen trees. An unnamed “crick” ran through the pasture where we sometimes waded to cool off on a hot day. Once I emerged from the muddy water and found a bloodsucker on my toe and imagined all sorts of horror about to befall me. Connie just scraped it off.

Her mom, Hermina Diekevers, raised chickens and sold their eggs. She kept a large garden and canned the produce. She and Ray raised four kids, took vacations, and enjoyed a nice retirement. Their farm was an integrated system. Their life was of a piece.

All of these memories are sticking heavily after having listened to a 1977 audio recording of a debate between then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz and writer, philosopher, and environmentalist Wendell Berry.

Little context survives to explain the reason for the debate, such as who sponsored it, or where it was held. Anyone just listening “cold,” knowing little of either man, might come away thinking that Butz had won.

Butz certainly seemed to think so. He had a well-practiced slickness, too glad-handed by half, and he delighted in belittling Berry’s viewpoints. In other words, Butz was a bully. He was so convinced of his almighty rightness that all he had to do was ask the farmers in the audience how many TVs they owned. Material abundance would demonstrate that planting fencerow to fencerow was not just efficient but profitable.

To be fair, material abundance, particularly after WWII, caught fire in every sector of American life, and Butz knew how to continue capitalizing on that spark. It wasn’t just Butz preaching the gospel of stuff. Media had done an equally efficient job of enticing us to want more goods.

In truth, there was more wealth all around us. My parents’ hardware store benefitted from the farmers’ abundance. In the mid-1970s, I overhead my mom say, with something like embarrassment, that they had had a very good year.

Material wealth is a heady brew. It puts flesh on the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and the Prosperity Gospel. When a person encounters unexpected abundance, one can start believing that they have a divine right to take and own and do with as they will.

Wendell Berry, on the other hand, with his honeyed Kentucky drawl, made a case for an ethics of the land and for the value of relationships. He said he liked working with his neighbors in shared endeavors, and he appreciated how his low-tech farming practices kept him fit without the need of burning fossil fuels to drive to a gym.

He had bought some badly damaged land and slowly brought it back to health. Was it efficient? Not on Butz’ spreadsheet, perhaps, but Berry made the case that farms like his let nothing go to waste, and in the stewardship of the land, such efforts instilled the values of hard work, trustworthiness, and reciprocity in the process.

It would have been interesting to have been in the room with Butz and Berry. The sound quality, especially during the question-and-answer period, was poor, and it was hard to hear the audience.

I came away wondering if Berry had won many people to his side that day, but “winning” was not his goal. He called for a return to the traditional values of democracy, neighborliness, kindness.

Through the years, he persisted in farming, speaking, and writing. His intimacy with the land taught him to take the long view.

That long view seems to be bearing fruit. Today, more people are asking some of the same questions that Berry had been posing for decades. What are we doing with this inheritance of land? Why are we doing it? What is the truest and deepest value of our actions?

Berry’s basic assumption was that there’s more to the discussion of agriculture than just agriculture. “You can’t disconnect one part of a society from all the other parts and just look at the results in that alone.”

We see a slow turning, a reckoning with Butz’ “go big or get out” farming mentality and what it has wrought. Our communities were decimated by Big Ag’s push for efficiency, and farmers lost their autonomy in the bargain.

We are hungry for something better.

In 1977, farmers’ markets were largely unheard of in the Midwest. Now, they are a way of life, even in small towns. People want their food to be healthy and to taste good, so if they can afford it, they buy locally.

You can even buy meat that is not raised on a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation or CAFO, as is the case on Whippoorwill Creek Farm near Lovilia, Iowa. Beth Hoffman¹ and her husband, John Hogeland, tend his family’s land and raise animals.

They want to do what is “good for the planet, the animals, and your family” by providing nutritious food.

Such goodness will cost you, of course, and you might have to drive 30 miles to get it, but our choices cost us, either way. We are paying for decades of “efficiency” with fouled water and rising cancer rates. We have had enough.

I haven’t been back to Connie Diekevers’ farm since I was in high school. I imagine it looks and operates very differently now, just as our towns and social institutions look and operate very differently, too.

There has been an awful lot of talk about values in the current administration, but values are not something you can legislate or paste on like eyelashes. Values, as Wendell Berry has been telling us for decades, come from connection with the land and our obligations to each other.

It’s a tall order, for sure, but people have begun rising to the challenge.

¹Beth Hoffman is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. She has a podcast called “At the Iowa Farm Table” on Substack. She’s also written a terrific book, “Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America.”

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.