[Free Beacon] In 1909, the U.S. Bureau of Soils announced, "The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up." The claim was astonishingly bold—that nothing farmers did could affect the underlying health of their land.A growing wave of young conservatives, however, are pushing back on this way of thinking. Drawing on disparate influences like Wendell Berry, James C. Scott, Patrick Deneen, and Wallace Stegner, they argue that both big government and big corporations have squeezed small farms almost into oblivion, stripping American land of nutrients and health in the hunt for profit. By subsidizing monocrops such as corn and soy, we have weakened rural food security and economic resilience.
Grace Olmstead is one such thinker. Her new book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, functions both as an investigation into the policy tools that have crushed small farms and a memoir about the effect these policies had on rural communities, many of which are aging rapidly. The young in these communities see little opportunity to build a full life for themselves in places where their parents and grandparents now struggle to break even.
Olmstead speaks from personal experience: Her grandparents farmed a small plot in rural Idaho, but she has since moved to Virginia. She wrestles openly with the tension of moving away from home while calling for more commitment to the places we’ve been given.
Uprooted argues that there are values other than efficiency and low consumer prices worth defending—among them the vibrancy and self-sufficiency of rural communities, and their consistent care for the land. "Care" is a touchstone for Olmstead. "Our world is preserved through the work of maintenance and caregiving," she says. "The work of those who tend the very young and very old, who steward soil, plants, and animals, or who maintain the integrity of our infrastructure. They are the ones who fight back entropy and death, who preserve and protect life and health. They are most often devalued and underpaid."
And yet "the work they do is indispensable to the ongoing health of our society and ecology. Without maintainers and caregivers, everything starts to fall apart."