Volume 43, Number 12 · July 11, 1996
Some Versions of Pastoral
By Bill McKibben
Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Modern Agriculture
by Craig Canine
Knopf, 300 pp., $25.00
Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea
by Victor Davis Hanson
Free Press, 289 pp., $23.00
Another Turn of the Crank
by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 109 pp., $18.00
The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma
by Paul R. Ehrlich, by Anne H. Ehrlich, by Gretchen C. Daily
Grosset/Putnam, 364 pp., $30.00
Growing food was once the consuming professional interest of most Americans; 95 percent of the population, for instance, were farmers at the time of the Revolution. But that interest has long since become a specialty, even a subspecialty. Though farmers still accounted for a third of Americans as late as 1910, this proportion had dropped to one in ten by 1955, and since then, according to Victor Davis Hanson, not a month has passed in which the number of farms in this country has not fallen; by the 1980s, two thousand family farms a week were failing. Today not quite one American in a hundred engages in farming. It's hard to know for sure—in 1993, the Census Bureau announced that farmers were no longer 'statistically significant' and hence could not be counted.
Review, 4199 words
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