for power and success. No one else matters but what you want.Berry sums up his point through the example of food as a cultural product that cannot be produced by technology alone. Those agriculturists that think the problems of food production can be solved through technology fail to see the importance of the hard work it takes to make the food. This hard work reinforces the cultural times among farmers and their families. A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, and work, conviviality, reverence, and aspiration. It reveals the needs of human as well as their limits. A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land. It supports and protects a persons knowledge of the earth that no amount possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of those communities of this country. We cannot allow another generation to forget the importance of this culture. If we do, the knowledge that is held will be lost forever.It is by the measure of culture, rather than economics or technology, that we can begin to understand the cost of people moving to the city and its effects on those who stay behind to farm. From a cultural point of view, the movement from the farm to the city involves a radical simplification of mind and of character. there seems to be a rule that we can simplify our minds and our culture only at the cost of an oppressive social and mechanical complexity. We can simplify our society by freeing ourselves from undertaking tasks of great mental and cultural complexity. Farming includes this sort of complexity, both in this character and culture. If you try to simplify either one, you risk destroying them. The best farming requirements a husband, a nurturer, not a technician or businessma...
