Agrarian Environmental Rhetoric: a Theoretical Conceptualization

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Agrarian Environmental Rhetoric: A Theoretical Conceptualization

Ross Singer Saginaw Valley State University ~ [email protected]

Jeff Motter University of Colorado Boulder ~ [email protected]

Abstract

This study develops the heuristic concept of agrarian environmental rhetoric and its topoi of practice, place, and solidarity. Guided by a telos of a more sustainable, just, and democratic world, the concept informs theoretical and critical inquiry at the symbolic intersections of food, agriculture, and environment.

Key words: agrarianism; food and environment; place; myth; sustainable agriculture

Across academic disciplines, agrarianism has been a rather obscure term. Studies of agriculture, environment, food, politics, and rural culture have given agrarianism multiple related meanings. Across these meanings, the concept of agrarianism tends to demarcate more than agricultural issues and includes positive value judgments about agriculture, as well as those who cultivate the land (Hilde & Thompson, 2000; Montmarquet, 1989). At times, scholars use agrarianism to refer to a guiding or normative philosophy for a “good society” built on agricultural communities (e.g., Berry, 1977; Thompson, 2010; Wirzba, 2003). Others recognize agrarianism as having a long philosophical history but focus on examining how agrarianism symbolically functions through cultural narratives and imagery. Work in this area considers how agrarianism manifests mythically through culture, often through subtle, brief, simple, romantic, and ideologically vague forms. Some manifestations of agrarianism in this mythic sense are found in social movements (Bouton, 1985; Mooney & Hunt, 1996), film (Retzinger, 2002; Singer, 2011), literature (Inge, 1969; Marx, 2000; Smith, 1950; Thompson, 2010), agricultural trade journals (Johnstone, 1940; Walter, 1995), political policymaking and campaign discourses (Browne, Skees, Swanson, Thompson, & Unnevehr, 1992; Dorsey, 1995; Hofstadter, 1955; Kelsey, 1994; Peterson, 1986), public perceptions (Buttel & Flinn, 1975), and even in farmers’ accounts of their own identities (Harter, 2004; Peterson, 1991; Singer & de Souza, 1983).

Despite standing as one of the oldest and most influential traditions of environmental place- making in Western culture, agrarianism has received little attention from scholars of environmental communication and rhetoric. The few existing studies in these areas that engage the term—by Tarla Rai Peterson (1986; 1990; 1991), Leroy Dorsey (1995) Jean Retzinger (2002), and Ross Singer (2011), conceptualize it primarily through the writings of Thomas Jefferson and refer to it as “agrarian myth” or “yeoman myth.” Borrowing the term from Michael McGuire (1977), Peterson (1991) situates agrarian myth as a “working myth”—“a story of a hero superior in kind to us who nonetheless is a real person acting in a real social setting” (p. 13). The other noted studies also conceptualize the farmer as a “real” mythic agent. Peterson (1986) contends that for farmers, agrarian myth may be self-defeating and justify the crisis mentality idea of the farmer as noble victim. During the 1930s Dust Bowl, agricultural conservationists exonerated farmers of any responsibility for the disaster, instead pointing to climatic conditions. In more recent conservation studies, agrarian myth often merge with other industry-sanctioned myths such as that of the American frontier to create paradoxical self-images among farmers—self-images that hinder the adoption of conservation practices (Peterson, 1991).

Like Peterson (1986; 1990; 1991) and Dorsey (1995), Retzinger (2002) and Singer (2011) demonstrate that agrarian myth is an evolving and contextually adapted narrative, shaped to fit new times, needs, and motives. In her study of several Hollywood films, Retzinger (2002) observes that given today’s largely (sub)urban population, media play a key role “temporarily bridging the gap between the city and the country” (p. 46). Retzinger identifies a persistent focus on individual character attributes of the farmer, rather than on specific agricultural and environmental practices. The resulting, revised myth incorporates technology and feminism, but largely leaves the traditional agrarian myth intact. Films’ emphasis on some agrarian attributes over others, such as simplicity and honesty, also tended to produce oversimplified and sometimes negative representations of “bumpkins” and “rednecks.” This simplified message extends to emphasize the experience of the farmer’s struggles rather than the source of plight, including political economic structures.

Dorsey’s (1995) study of an adapted version of the Jeffersonian “yeoman myth” in President Theodore Roosevelt’s early twentieth century conservation discourse also finds that the myth may contain perceptions of rural agricultural issues and limit long-term social change. However, Dorsey also observes that this myth was central to Roosevelt’s short-term political success in the achievement of important environmental legislation. In his study of the South Central Farmers in urban Los Angeles, Singer (2011), too, shows how agrarian myth may be contextually adapted in ways that constrain and enable change. Despite the tragic ending of the SCF’s story, agrarian myth provided a formidable democratic, spiritual, familial, and inspirational basis for local community and political mobilization.

Although these studies and several of the common meanings of agrarianism surveyed at the outset cluster around the notion of agrarianism as myth, there is also a distinct, second clustering around the notion of agrarianism as a historical and philosophical tradition consisting of normative ideals for the good society. The work of contemporary writers such as Paul Thompson, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Frederick Kirschenmann exemplifies this second meaning of the term. Agrarianism-as-philosophy shares with agrarianism-as-myth romantic assumptions, appeals, arguments, and visions that are rooted in the past but extend to the future. In the American context, the symbolism of the land going back to the first European settlers helped create a romantic idea of cultivating the land. Indeed, agrarianism closely resonates with notions of the sacred tied to the Puritans’ “Promised Land” (Hilde & Thompson, 2000) and going back to Ancient Greece and Rome, farming had been recognized among Europeans as one of the most exceptional

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 4 of 20 occupations (Hanson, 1999; Montmarquet, 1989). In the American colonial era, popular media expounded upon and exaggerated the moral character of the farmer-hero as a natural caretaker of nature and community (Johnstone, 1940). Regardless of specific cultivation or husbandry methods used, “the farmer” is a figure who remains largely beyond reproach. After all, who would question the honesty, integrity, and interests of the farmer? Agrarian appeals often tacitly command moral legitimation, even as they may be clouded by visual imagery and ideological ambiguity. Their imagery of simplicity, nature, and the virtuous farmer’s struggle against overwhelming forces (weather, markets) are among the attributes making agrarianism mythic. Understanding the various symbolic and material implications of agrarianism as cultural myth begins with recognition that it may be enabling and constraining agency for positive social change within the agriculture, food and environment relation. Although myth oversimplifies and may distort the causes and remedies of important problems, it may also inspire and give meaning, provide social glue for collective action, and remind us of the wisdom of timeless virtues.

Although myth links agrarian philosophy with more informal cultural articulations of agrarianism, it is important that scholars not limit the idea of agrarianism to only mythic narrative or romantic trope. The conceptualization and application of agrarianism-as-myth has tended to underscore the myth in “agrarian myth” in ways that inadvertently foreclose the broader and deeper meanings of “agrarian” and “agrarianism.” In other words, to limit “agrarian” to a modifier may circumvent recognition of it as a living tradition (neo-agrarianism) and evolving normative philosophy of sustainability relevant to the future. Given that past studies of agrarianism reflect it as both a philosophical and cultural idea, agrarianism ought to be conceptualized as a rhetorical idea. We propose that rich possibilities for cultivating a rhetoric of agrarianism manifest at this intersection. It is here that agrarianism stands as a distinctive and heuristic theoretical concept for scholars of environmental communication and rhetoric.

The task of theorizing agrarian rhetoric is important for several reasons. At a very general level, agrarian rhetoric provides environmental rhetoric scholars with one means of tying the past to the future, and for contemplating rural-urban eco-cultural dynamics. Agrarian rhetoric ties together rhetorical practices inflecting meaning from and upon land and nature, cultivation and husbandry, and local community and individual practice. The concept provides a rich connecting point between food and the environment, where historical ideals and myth regarding rural agricultural living shape and are shaped by experience. It expands our lenses not only historically,

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 5 of 20 but also in terms of the breadth of topics and questions that may be posed about food, agriculture, and the environment.

Further scholarly engagement with how a rhetoric of agrarianism continues to configure agrarian ideals remains crucial for cultivating a critical and theoretically informed sensibility for symbolic interventions about the use of words, images, and actions about agriculture, food, and environment. Consistent with Robert Cox’s (2007) well-known ethical vision for environmental communication scholarship, we advocate for giving close attention to the precariousness of agrarian rhetoric in relation to a contextually sensitive and shifting telos of a more sustainable, just, and democratic world. Our purpose in this essay is to explore the breadth and depth of agrarianism, and to unearth its rhetorical dimensions and functions. Extending our past work (Motter & Singer, 2012; Singer, 2011), we define agrarianism as a philosophically-infused, historically shifting, and malleable discursive formation that reproduces perceptions of the exceptional moral status of agriculture, its people, policies, places, values, methods, and history.

Adding direction to our call for scholars to conceptually “thicken” agrarianism as a rhetorical concept (Motter & Singer, 2012), this essay elaborates upon what we have identified as three defining topoi of American agrarianism: solidarity, place, and (ethical farming) practice. For each topos, we offer an interlude that demonstrates the utility of the topos for the close reading of texts. Together, these interlude applications present three different ways of reading the same text, as guided by the three agrarian topoi. The interludes highlight how the relative (im)balance of emphasis and specificity, as well as inconsistencies of meaning across these three topoi within the same rhetorical text reveal agrarianism’s precarious functions, and inform the act of critique. Here, we extend our point that the mythic functions of agrarianism are both enabling and constraining for social change. We propose that the sustainable telos of agrarian environmental rhetoric provides a basis for a critique of, at minimum, ecological imbalance and at worst, environmental devastation.

For our purposes here, the interludes presented for each topos examine Dodge Ram’s Super Bowl commercial “God Made a Farmer,” which became famous for its voice-over of an address presented by radio personality Paul Harvey at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention. With over 18 million YouTube views and many opinion articles, videos, and even memorabilia created in response to it, the roughly two-minute commercial stands as one of the most widely experienced and discussed pieces of American agrarian rhetoric in recent history. Still, as a single

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 6 of 20 text, the advertisement is brought in only for demonstration, and we are not suggesting that it is representative or exemplary of all or most agrarian environmental rhetoric.

Topoi of American Agrarianism

American agrarian topoi represent defining commonplace themes and conventions of appeal, argument, and function. Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal situates farming practices as the source of citizens’ rootedness to a place from which solidarity could grow. The agrarian ideal served a new nation by connecting farmers to a specific place, their land, while their interests in that place created solidarity with their community. These topoi reflect the mythos and experience of those who tended the land and used it as a heuristic for living. They collectively provide a conceptual map of agrarianism as a flexible formation of discursive practices, as well as how it precariously enables and constrains social change in agriculture, the food system, and beyond.

Place

Place is the topos most intimately connected to the Latin root agrarius, ‘‘pertaining to the land.’’ (Freyfogle, 2001, p. xiii). The topos of place signals the rootedness of farmers with the land, a kind of belonging explained through one’s physical relationship with the dirt and one’s community. Yet, in America, land has always had a special meaning for those who came to occupy it. “Land as sacred” has been a significant theme since the first colonists arrived. Roderick Frazier Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (2001) traces early conceptions of nature for the earliest settlers, particularly the dimensions of land as a sacred place that invokes fear, nostalgia, and serenity. Henry Nash Smith’s (1950) Virgin Land outlines how the land as sacred compelled nineteenth- century immigrants to settle the West and believe in the superiority of this land over others. Leo Marx’s (2000) Machine in the Garden suggests a special relationship between God and human beings who occupied America during the twentieth-century. This divine/human relationship constitutes a New Eden and advances a political vision of an exceptional nation because of the land’s sacredness (Cherry, 1998). The land constitutes an exceptional nation and agrarians embody the political and environmental promise that place promotes.

The land as sacred holds environmental and political implications that inculcate particular traits in agrarians. These traits contain both environmental and political dimensions, namely independence, self-sufficiency, responsibility, and stewardship. Environmentally, place begins with

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 7 of 20 the perceived sacredness of land and agrarians’ responsibility to act as stewards for future generations. Politically, this topos focuses on land as the ground of a nation and agrarians as citizen-stewards responsible to a nation. Place as political relies on a freehold concept in which agrarians possess the land and are connected with the nation through property ownership (Eisinger, 1947). The environmental and political implications of sacred land root agrarians to place through property ownership and environmental responsibility, exemplified in Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal.

Jefferson’s (1984/1785) agrarian ideal celebrated the fertility of the land and the virtuosity of its people as the foundation upon which an exceptional nation could grow. He believed that, as a young nation, “we have now lands enough to employ an infinite number of people in their cultivation” (p. 818). Jefferson suggested that America could be the first nation made-up entirely of agrarians who possessed sacred favor and were God’s instruments on earth. For Jefferson agrarians were “the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country & wedded to its liberty & interests by the most lasting bond” (p. 818). The centrality of agrarians as environmental and political agents marked the relationship between agrarians and place as one definitive of national purpose as the caretakers of the nation’s most valuable resource, land.

Rootedness to a place environmentally as stewards is rootedness to a nation politically as citizens. Agrarian life was sacred because it was tied to US mission as a New Eden where God’s mission could be manifested on earth (Marx, 2000). Place marks the political importance of agrarians as citizens who are freehold farmers. Chester E. Eisinger describes, “A man who owns his land in freehold owns that land outright. He is under obligation to no one in working it; he may dispose of the produce he wins from it or of the land itself in any manner he chooses” (1947, p. 44). While agrarians are rooted in the land, they remain independent in their ability for self- determination. The place gives the ability for independence and a political structure secures agrarians’ rights to remain. Independence became a key virtue because it enabled agrarians’ political position as democratic participants, not peasants (Motter, 2015). Agrarians live from the land as politically independent and economically self-reliant. They are rooted to place in a community of agrarians who have the ability to govern locally and live responsibly with the land.

Agrarians’ environmental relationship to land has changed with the dominance of industrial agriculture. This relationship has shifted from environmental to economic stewards charged with

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 8 of 20 producing food for the world while reaping financial rewards. Presently, agrarian imagery appropriated by industrial agriculture actors may position the environment as a pristine landscape, or as the precious possession of an intergenerational farming or ranching family, or as known and nurtured most intimately and virtuously by “the farmer.” This imagery often obfuscates wide differences in the methods and through which farmers engage the land, while co-opting its culturally generalized appeal. In these cases, romanticism obscures specificities that make agrarianism environmentally virtuous as a normative vision (Thompson, 2010). Although small-scale agrarian agriculture and large-scale industrial agriculture are both imbued with romantic elements, the crucial difference between the two is that industrial agriculture proffers a Western Enlightenment notion of man over nature and a linear attitude of control as a result. Unlike in the place-based and cyclical, ecological view found in the rhetoric of small-scale agrarianism, the land is not only a stock of natural resources, but in a global society, a homogenous and infinite space (Escobar, 2001). Although all agricultural forms are inherently manipulative and exploitive of the environment to some degree, they vary in their relative crudeness.

As a cultural sensibility grounded on the idea of embeddness in place, agrarian rhetoric collapses the Western nature-culture dualism (Hilde & Thompson, 2000). Contemporary neo- agrarians, most notably Wendell Berry, draw from writers such as the Henry David Thoreau and the Twelve Southerners a deep belief in nature as our main source of inner meaning, virtue, and unhurried, simple leisure. Place is pedagogical and poetic, biologically alive and rhythmic, it stands as our main source of well-being, where roots for health, moral character, family, and community solidarity grow. Place is to be performed as well as appreciated for its essential goodness. As Berry (1977) writes, unfortunately, today’s industrialized agriculture is “a disaster both agricultural and cultural: the generalization of the relationship between people and land” (p. 33); it is the “exploiter,” whereas the old tradition of agrarianism is the “nurturer.” Berry sees agrarianism today as not simply a futile or romantic reaction to global capitalism, but rather a locally sensitive tradition of “care” and storehouse of potential for reclaiming a sustainable cycle of life and sustenance.

Interlude

The Dodge Ram television advertisement “God Made a Farmer” points to the sacred, environmental, and political dimensions of place. Place notes the sacredness of land and the spiritual connection agrarians feel with the natural environment. Narrator Paul Harvey’s opening line, juxtaposed with images of a cow on a snow covered field, a country church at sunset, and a

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 9 of 20 farmhouse in the middle of perfectly sowed field, declares, “And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said I need a caretaker. So God made a farmer.” Placing the farmer as uniquely created to perform this task gives the farmer a special place among all human beings because of their relationship with the earth and God. The sacredness of this relationship manifests itself as the farmer “sits up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die and dry his eyes,” while at the same time is “strong enough to rustle a calf, yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild.” The farmer is caretaker of land, animals, and family, made possible only because “God made a farmer.”

What is particularly striking about this commercial is that all farmers are given every trait necessary to be a caretaker. The land is primary and those traits necessary to stewardship, including deep care for the land and its non-human inhabitants, have been imbued into the farmer’s character. After all, “God made a farmer” just the way he or she is, erasing the political independence that had been a central virtue of agrarians historically. The sacredness of that place comes from a divine source and farmers are simply God’s instruments on earth “strong enough” yet “gentle enough” to do all the work necessary to provide food for the world. The spiritual relationship farmers feel is a sacred pull that compels them to care for the land and everything in it. Consequently, this commercial constructs farmers as divinely created in order to serve a special purpose on earth that benefits humanity. With the final image of a Dodge Ram truck with farm buildings in the background, text eases on the screen: “To the farmer in all of us.” The implication is clear: we are farmers, divinely created for a special purpose to care for the earth and all of its inhabitants. And a Dodge Ram truck will make it so.

Solidarity

Due to the romantic quality of much of contemporary agrarian rhetoric, symbolic emphasis on individual virtue and the experience of nature tends to obscure the historical idea of agrarianism as solidarity (Danbom, 1991; Johnstone, 1940; Montmarquet, 1989; Retzinger, 2002). Historically, the rural agricultural community’s deep bond with its way of life, its memories tied to its geographical place, and its concern for its own well-being have provided the basis for several forms of solidarity. Actualizing on familial, local, regional, and national levels, agrarian solidarity can be conceptualized along the lines of solidarity as harmony and solidarity as defense. In addition to the agrarian emphasis on familial solidarity in the form of working to properly maintain and pass down the land (Berry, 2002a), everyday neighborly interactions, hospitality, and lending a helping hand are also

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 10 of 20 part of it (Cauley, 1935). Solidarity also consists of interdependent economic and political action, such as forming a local or regional cooperative farmer organization or petitioning lawmakers. These actions attempt to preserve community harmony and adaptively defend agrarian traditions and interests into the future. In contrast to the more mundane solidarity of everyday life in a small rural town in which a farming family helps out another to harvest the wheat before the rain, overtly political agrarian solidarity has on many occasions been impassioned and melodramatic. Perhaps most notably, the waning “agrarian democracy” of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America generated a formidable populist challenge to the rise of urban and corporate power (Bissett, 1999; Burkholder, 1984; McConnell, 1953).

In its various forms, rhetoric of agrarian solidarity is constitutive of culture and identity, and instrumental to the pursuit of particular agricultural interests. This is not to suggest that American agrarianism has been guided by a uniform justification and narrative vision of solidarity. Like the agrarian topoi of place and practice, visions of solidarity have emerged across a flexible discursive formation and through various frames. Patrick H. Mooney and Scott A. Hunt (1996) identify three ideological “master frames” in U.S. agrarian mobilizations going back to the colonial era. The “agrarian fundamentalist” frame advocates for agriculture’s exceptional status by stressing that all other economic activities depend on agriculture. This frame stresses that agriculture provides sustenance to the city and increasing commercialization (and urbanization) prompts greater city dependence on rural agriculture for trade. However, mobilizations practicing agrarian fundamentalist rhetoric also tend to recognize that with respect to inputs and services, farmers and ranchers are also dependent on the city; “city dwellers face boom and bust along with farmers” (p. 183). This frame may identify conflicting or exploitive relationships between farmers and certain townspeople, but is sometimes used in ways that emphasize agricultural virtue in a general sense, without differentiating between types of farms (e.g., small-scale organic, large-scale industrial, etc.) or ideological identifications. The second, “competitive capitalism” agrarian frame projects a vision of solidarity based on both governmental intervention as well as populist, anti-monopolistic, grassroots measures such as collective bargaining. This frame prefers neither corporate capitalism nor the ‘invisible hand” of the free market. The third frame is the “producer agrarian frame,” which in its purest form contends that only direct producers (farmers, ranchers, etc.) are justly entitled to the rewards of agricultural harvest. Here, there is a strong emphasis on non-exploitive economic relations.

To add to Mooney and Hunt’s (1996) genealogy, historical conditions the noted framings of agrarian solidarity originate in agrarian political philosophies of the U.S. and Europe, as well as opposing philosophies (Govan, 1964). During the American colonial period frames of agrarian political solidarity were variations on the theme of “aristocratic agrarianism.” Here, land ownership and cultivation, in addition to close scientific study of nature was deemed virtuous (Montmarquet, 1989). Jefferson’s agrarian democratic frame and John Taylor’s agrarian republican frame were two leading aristocratic agrarianisms. For Jefferson, economic and political power ought to be dispersed. Jefferson at first envisioned a society of small-holding, middle class, albeit yeoman, farmers and later tempered his idealism with a vision of small farms in harmony with small manufacturing, comprising a largely self-sufficient nation (p. 90). Observing the virtually unlimited land of this new nation, Jefferson saw the opportunity for a family farming agricultural economy to employ most of the nation’s citizens. Conversely, In Taylor’s agrarian republican frame, liberty justly and inevitably resulted in an unequal social order. Taylor’s agrarian vision was therefore hierarchical. The liberty of the individual is secured through the freedom and relative power of relatively few, who are strong enough to prevent encroachments on centralized authority. This crucial political group was a landed aristocracy. Today, Jefferson’s vision of agrarian solidarity is often associated with a Northern regional agrarianism and Taylor’s with Southern regionalism (Montmarquet, 1989).

Philosophical foundations of the topos of solidarity in the writings of Jefferson and Taylor, earlier European writings, and later U.S. agrarian mobilizations subtly pervade contemporary agrarian rhetoric. The topos of solidarity appears in advocacy for organic agriculture, food sovereignty and justice, farmer markets, community supported agriculture, local grocery cooperatives, fair trade, farmworker rights, Farm Bills, and everyday appeals to support family farms and the farmer. One of the challenges facing the cultivation of normative but contextually-sensitive and flexible rhetoric of agrarian solidarity is that it is subject to the same romanticism, commercialism, and idealism as the agrarian topoi of practice and place. While agrarian rhetoric may be inspiring, unifying, and prompt critical engagement with injustices, some framings of solidarity minimize or dramatize actual struggle, or sources and solutions to it. Other agrarian rhetoric may idealize movement virtue, overstate unity and efficacy, place the farmer or family farm as beyond reproach, or position solidarity in purely commercial, consumerist, or anti-commercial terms. To take a closer look at this precarious dynamics and shed further light on agrarian solidarity as a critical and theoretical heuristic, we move to our second interlude.

Interlude

If one views the topos of place as agrarians’ relationship with land, the topos of solidarity emphasizes their relationship with other human beings. Agrarian relations among human beings, as described above, extend from the economic and political to the everyday and social. As we look to the commercial “God Made a Farmer” to understand the present outlook of agrarian solidarity expressed by a corporate entity pursuing an economic relationship with others, it becomes clear that three levels of solidarity exist. What is most interesting, however, is how the commercial erases political solidarity beyond a rustic image of an American flag displayed through a barn window. Instead, the primary expression of solidarity is through family, local community, and economic outlets.

Images of a local church, a local farmer’s market, a family praying before dinner, and a father and son rehearse a familiar narrative about rural life: the idyllic sense of belonging and spiritual solidarity that comes from a close-knit rural community. An image of the American flag is juxtaposed with Harvey saying, “God said I need somebody to get up before dawn and milk cows and work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. So, God made a farmer.” Local solidarity requires civic engagement focused on the needs of others. The image of the family praying reflects, as Harvey says, God’s need for “Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing.” The image of a father sitting at the head of the table confirms the patriarchal image assumed to be indicative of gender relationships in an old-fashioned rural America. All of the farmers shown in the ad are men. The commercial reinforces the presumption of an apolitical and “traditional” rural people who live together in peace and harmony.

Economic agrarian solidarity is contemporary relationship between farmers and corporations. Five images of various Dodge Ram trucks are featured in conjunction with four images of Case tractors. Dodge and Case are both owned by Fiat, creating an image of farmers as economic agents who both produce and consume. Yet, the ad portrays the farmer’s economic consumption as tied only to the virtue of producing agricultural goods for the benefit of all, not needless consumerism. By reducing the economic consumption to those tools necessary to do the work of farming, this portrayal appeals to non-exploitive economic relations. Yet, what is most striking is the predominance of the agrarian fundamentalist frame in the structure of the commercial itself. The farmer as an exemplary figure upon which all others depend is evident in the rhetorical

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 13 of 20 framing of farmers as a special creation. Solidarity between agrarians and other human beings is easy if one has a perspective that they are an exceptional creation of God, while others are not. Economic solidarity manifests itself through both non-exploitive relationships and a fundamentalist superiority of others’ dependence.

Practice

The topos of agrarian practice is grounded in a normative vision of everyday embodied habits and ways of being. One works the land in order to grow the necessary crops for food and fiber, and it is particular modes of cultivation and animal husbandry, not simply living in a rural area or on a farm or ranch, that provides an experiential basis for moral development, character, community, and spiritual connection with the land. Agrarianism as practice marks an existential and performative quality to the agriculture-food-environment relation, and illuminates the ritual actions and interdependence of life processes constitutive of a particular notion of agriculture as culture.

As marked by Mooney and Hunt’s (1996) observations of agrarian fundamentalism in U.S. agrarian movements, mythic articulations of agrarianism may obscure the normative core of the topos of practice in a way that allows for malleable appropriation for any interests self-identified as agricultural. Here, generalized images of “the farmer” may solicit moral legitimation in questionable ways. In its less distorted forms, the topos of practice does not simply mean cultivation of the land or animal husbandry. Throughout U.S. history, agrarian practice has tended to refer to a particular and holistic way of rural agriculture life centered around small-scale, non-corporate, and minimally mechanized farming, with little to no use of chemical inputs. This form of cultivation is based on the idea of many small farms in the single community, which opposed the large farm and corporate agribusiness monopolizing effect and diminishment of rural small towns famously documented by Walter Goldschmidt (1947).

Agrarian rhetoric therefore tends to contest the Western individualist dualism of nature and culture, toward a notion of a nature as a measure of (agri)cultural practice (Hilde & Thompson, 2000, p. 5; Jackson, 2011). Thompson (2010) identifies key differences between how agricultural practice functions across its “industrial” and “agrarian” forms. He writes that industrial agriculture see “agriculture as just another sector in the industrial economy,’’ whereas the agrarian vision views ‘‘agriculture as performing a social function above and beyond its capacity to produce food and fiber’’ (p. 30). While the industrial vision reduces the relationship between farmer and land as one

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 14 of 20 of commodity production at the lowest possible price for the greatest number of people, an agrarian vision promotes practices centered on the well-being of the particular place one inhabits, as well as the well-roundedness of the people and families living there.

Only from this perspective on practice is one able to conceive of agricultural living as a generalist rather than specialist practice, more than an economics and occupational means to ends, more than food as a consumer product, and more than the provision of sustenance (Berry, 2002b). Here, there is a spiritual basis of the topos of practice that contests the secular thinking of urban capitalism and its cult of specialization and dehumanization. On this spiritual basis, Allen Tate writes that the modern American “half-religion of work” cannot see the whole picture; the other half- religion that completes the “whole horse.” From the view of categories and abstraction, nothing works; it can see only “that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horsepowered machine” (Twelve Southerners, 1930, p. 169). Generalist and well-rounded agrarian living in small-scale farming communities is therefore consistent with but also broader than the contemporary project of organic and natural foods agriculture, as well as other “alternative” agricultural movements for locavorism, slow food, and food sovereignty and justice. Agrarianism’s historical advocacy of decentralized social systems and economies manifests in these causes. Although distributed land ownership—private property—has long been an important theme in American agrarianism, these prominent examples show agrarianism manifesting traditional principles in novel and changing forms.

Agrarian notions of practice therefore stress quality over or in balance with quantity, holistic thinking over specialization and isolation, and rethinking the meaning of effectiveness and efficiency. Honest hard work, relative self-sufficiency, non-specialization, household production (contra the notion of the household as a purely consumptive domain), anti-materialism, and care for the earth capture a quintessentially agrarian notion of normative practice. Agrarian sustainable agriculture advocates are often not anti-science and technology, but instead are highly skeptical of the effects of the alliance between applied science and corporate interests that gave rise to large- scale industrial agriculture (Jackson, 2011). For agrarians, good land and model communities begin with a broader appreciation for how they fit within broader ecological systems. As an embodied agricultural ecological sensibility, agrarian practice is sensitive to how organic agriculture helps maintain the biodiversity and interdependence of woods, streams, and non-human species.

Today, advocacy for agrarian practices continues to challenge industrial agricultural methods

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 15 of 20 as exploitive and unsustainable, though often with a suburban and urban consumer audience in mind. Rhetorical scholars stand to play a role in this project, in part by linking the study of food with agrarianism vis-à-vis history, cultural myth, agriculture, farmers, ranchers, farm labor, rural- urban politics, and the environment. Like Victor Davis Hanson (1999), we suspect that the contemporary scholarly neglect of agrarianism is due in part to a tacit urban and suburban bias in the academy. Today’s gradual elimination of family farming and the farmer in the food production system coupled with the precipitous growth of urbanization further distances agrarian tenets and experience from the American experience. However, there are signs of hope on the horizon. Recent growth of public discussion, education, and social movements focused on the consequences of industrial agriculture and the need for a sustainable approach to the food-environment relation provides opportunities for positive social change and the renewal of interest in agrarianism.

Interlude

The “God Made a Farmer” advertisement announces that the farmer is God’s “caretaker” and proceeds to develop a mythic narrative around that claim solely focused on demonstrating the farmer’s selflessness, spirituality, self-sufficiency, stewardship, and physical courage. The viewer learns that God’s farmer is the ideal agrarian; he is an independent but community-minded generalist, and not a specialist. This farmer “can shape an ax handle, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire make a harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps.” As shown by various visual images of the farmer’s masculine laboring body as well as a close-up image of the farmer’s worn hands and nails, the work of God’s farmer is honest and models physical courage. Harvey elaborates on these virtues as he describes the farmer putting in “his forty hour week by Tuesday noon” and who would “plow deep and straight...and not cut corners.”

Yet, viewers really learn little about the specificities of the farmer’s practices, and more about general tasks of the farmer; that is, the farmer as “Somebody to seed and weed, feed and breed...and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk.” As Debbie Dougherty (2011) argues, today one farmer lives a very different daily existence from the next. In the age of mega-farms and niche markets, the farmer may be more of a desk-bound strategic business leader than someone who spends a great deal of time engaging in physical labor. In other words, not all farmers share the same relationship with the land, and this relationship is directly shaped by practices.

The “God Made a Farmer” ad is ambivalent and ambiguous about materially consequential differences between farmers’ practices. To create the appeal of a generalized image of the farmer, Dodge Ram relies on a common industrial agriculture trope that conjoins Jeffersonian agrarian myth with the ideology, technologies, and methods of industrial utilitarianism (e.g., Harter, 2004; Peterson, 1986, 1990; 1991; Walter, 1995). The function of the topos of agrarian practice in this ad is therefore consistent with an agrarian fundamentalist frame that emphasizes virtue in a general sense, without addressing the presence or absence of virtue across different types of practices (Mooney & Hunt, 1996). The commercial shows the farmer planting crops with a large modern tractor, harvesting wheat with a modern, industrial-scale combine, and driving a new V8 Dodge Ram pickup truck. Yet, this farmer also operates a small antique tractor, works with horses and his hands, and gently “splints the broken leg of a meadowlark.” From the view of a sustainable, just, and democratic agrarian telos, some practices collide with others; some model care and stewardship, whereas others are of an economic utilitarian and industrial exploitive sort that under the close guidance of corporate agribusiness, have aided the historical, cultural, economic, and environmental demise of small farms and farm towns.

Toward a Rhetoric of Agrarianism

This study has developed the heuristic concept of agrarian environmental rhetoric through its defining topoi of practice, place, and solidarity. Guided by a shifting telos for a more sustainable, just, and democratic world, agrarian environmental rhetoric informs theoretical and critical inquiry at the symbolic intersections of food, agriculture and environment. In addition to offering a rationale for close attention to this concept and providing a guide for making sense of historical meanings of agrarianism as a rhetorical concept, the study has offered interlude applications that highlight kinds of insights that our theoretical conceptualization might render. In the commercial advertising example offered, agrarian rhetoric enabled identification, authentication, as well as emotional appeal with a brand by way of the symbol of the American farmer. As noted, however, the ways by which the ad rhetorical configured the topoi in relation to each other distorted the moral telos of agrarianism and foreclosed democratic engagement with issues plaguing rural communities, the food system and the environment.

Collectively, the topoi developed in this essay attest to agrarianism as an important formation within a broader collection of American narratives, myths, images, visions, and argument frames on the human-environment relation. In relation to what Christine L. Oravec (1996) calls the

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 17 of 20 public imagination’s guiding notion of nature-as-sublime—the romantically natural, pristine, simple, authentic, unproblematic, and awe-inspiring—agrarianism has clearly operated as a “touchstone” for shaping perceptions, discourses, and actions regarding the environmental and cultural status of agriculture. For this reason as well as the rapid growth of public concern about the food system in recent years, we encourage scholars of environmental rhetoric to retrieve this touchstone concept from obscurity and further contemplate its theoretical and critical use toward a forward-looking telos of sustainability, justice, and democracy.

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