CorporationismvsIndependent Patriarchal Units-----Selection #6From The Harvestby Liberty Hyde Bailey

Dateline: 8 February 2014

When reading a book, it is my habit to underline or bracket pertinent passages and jot comments on the pages. I did this with Liberty Hyde Bailey’s book, The Harvest, when I read it a couple years back. The paragraph below is bracketed in my book, and next to it I wrote... “Wow!” 

Of course no man knows what will be the farming of the future. We need not try to foretell. 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. Farm workers will then be operatives, and we shall extend the capital-and-labor problems into a new and limitless field. 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.

—Liberty Hyde Bailey

   The Harvest of The Year To The Tiller of The Soil (1927)

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Maybe it’s just me, but I had to carefully re-read that paragraph a few times to get a more solid grip on what Bailey was saying.

The combination of farming, families, failed social schemes, the corporate takeover of all areas of life and culture (including government), and the impossibility of a continuing democracy, in one paragraph, is a lot to consider. Are these things all connected? 

Well, they surely are connected, and Bailey’s understanding of the importance of independent families (“separate patriarchal units”), living on the land, as a bulwark of freedom, makes this man one of the most prescient social commentators of his time. 

Bailey continues...

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This idea of corporationizing agriculture rests on the fallacious doctrine that we must have cheap food. The nearer the production approaches a surfeit or surplus the better it will be, under this conception, for the privileged and the industries. This is an ancient and hoary attitude toward farming, to the effect that the farmer must produce very cheaply in order that the town and industry may prosper; it runs through most of our thinking. Yet the farmer is entitled to as high a scale of living and to as much leisure as any other man. He should not be asked to receive a smaller part of the national earnings than other persons of equal ability and industry, particularly as he carries the obligation to maintain the productivity of the earth.

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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. 

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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 To The Tiller of The Soil (1927)

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Corporationism over farming has not only come into existence since 1927, it has prevailed, and family farms as  "separate patriarchal units of importance" are almost extinct.

However, I think Bailey was correct in thinking that, "after a trial," there will surely be a swing back to "separate independent family life."  

This swing back is part of the agrarian movement that we are now seeing. It is an agrarian reformation, or renaissance. It is currently in its infancy but it will, of necessity, become something much larger and more significant in the years ahead. And "patriarchal units" (traditional families) are fundamental to this reformation.