Agriculture, Ethics of

Agricultural ethics as a field is a virtual orphan, the child of three neglectful parents, applied or professional ethics (which would govern the professional ethics of the farmer or agricultural extension worker), business ethics (which would govern the business conduct of farmers and of all who participate in the enterprise of bringing food from seed to supermarket shelf or fast-food outlet), and environmental ethics (which would govern the interactions between farmer and ecosystem). The orphan is truly acknowledged by none of them and at the best of times has not swung securely among them. Let us consider it from all three of its inheritances.

As a branch of professional ethics, agricultural ethics explores the several dimensions of a field of practice, namely, farming or agriculture. In that sense, it is like any other field of occupational ethics—medical ethics, legal ethics, or engineering ethics—which together, with some additions, constitute the field of applied ethics. All fields of occupational ethics address multiple layers of problems: At the personal level, the rules for acceptable conduct on the part of the practitioner (Should a physician refer a patient to an X-ray facility that he or she owns?); at the field level, the policies for optimal practice for the profession as a whole (Should hospital policies prohibiting “futile” treatment overrule families' demands to “do everything” for a dying patient?); at the societal level, the policies for limiting and guiding the practice of the profession for the greater good of the nation and for human society as a whole (What are we going to do about 45 million people with no health insurance?). We may note at this point that the multiple layers addressed by applied ethics are not necessarily congruent.

Agriculture as a profession has the same layers of problems. Should the farmer represent his crop as “organically grown” if he has used hormonal root stimulants to grow them, if the laws defining “organic” simply don't mention such substances? Should the farmer plant, and the law support him in [Page 55]planting, “fencerow to fencerow” even though everyone knows that better environmental practice leaves wildlife corridors between the fields? And at the national level, should we be subsidizing agriculture in a way that encourages, even demands, overproduction and consequent dumping of agricultural products on the world market?

At the business level of agricultural ethics, new sets of problems arise. As soon as we look up from the plow, we notice that the farmer's work, the daily toil in the earth, coaxing it to yield food for the body and fiber for our clothes, has no more independence at all; it is part of a huge enterprise, integrated horizontally and vertically, that supplies the machinery for the huge farms, the seed, the fertilizer, the herbicides that keep down the weeds, the pesticides—or, alternatively, the genetically modified seed that resists the herbicide and has its pesticide bred into it—then buys the crops, processes them, and delivers them to the door of the consumer. This business has not always behaved itself very well, but its underlying ethic, as a business, is more troubling than its occasional brushes with the law. Critics of agriculture argue against “productivism,” or the dominant philosophy in agriculture that holds production as the sole criterion for evaluating its success; it is as if IBM were to measure its success by how many computers it could make, working day and night around the world, regardless of whether or not the world needed those computers. The result of this philosophy is the despised “subsidies”: When the farmer has produced far more than the market can purchase, the taxpayers are required to buy the surplus to keep the farmer from going out of business. Surely a better business philosophy is possible?

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