In a family photograph from the 1920s, my grandmother and her sister, toddlers with bobbed hair, are sitting in a field encircled by chickens on the farm their mother owned in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. As children, they worked alongside their mother in this field, setting tobacco, planting strawberries, and picking beans for market through the years of the Great Depression. I have fond memories of childhood visits to the farm, where muddy cattle trails ran alongside the Little Elkhorn creek, and where a stunning variety of wildflowers grew—Solomon’s seal, stonecrop, and the quaintly named butter-and-eggs plant, which I collected and pressed in a botanical album. But by the 1980s there was already a decisive consolidation of industrial farming in the United States. With encroaching development, the decline of tobacco, and the rise of big agribusiness, few small family farms in Kentucky like my grandmother’s were sustainable by the close of the Reagan era. In 1996, after the passing of my great-grandmother, aged 101, on the farm she had lived on her entire life, most of that farmland was sold for suburban tract houses. In our private life it was the end of four generations of farmers on that Bluegrass land, and in America it was the definitive end of the great georgic myth of America as an agrarian republic of smallholders.
In America as in Russia, many of us are only a few generations away from working the land and the constant attention to seasonal cycles, weather, fertilizer, and above all, the condition of the soil. The Green Revolution that enabled this demographic shift over the course of the twentieth century did not solve what nineteenth-century Russians called the “soil question” but rather rendered it invisible in many parts of the industrialized world. But the soil question has returned to visibility in recent years, from the growth of community-supported agriculture and the revival of small organic farms to internet discussions about the lack of micronutrients in industrially farmed food. As Wendell Berry writes, “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all…. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”1
This book is a historical study of a distinctive place and time, but it is motivated by a broader desire to understand how people make sense of the hard material realities of the human condition—in this case our dependency on the soil to feed ourselves—and how these material realities shape our dreams and myths. Agriculture has been our security against the state of bare life, but climate change has made us more aware of the fragility of our existence, our dependence on nature, and the limits of our ability to solve any problem with technology, and we are again urgently revisiting questions about how we use our limited arable land.
Soil remains an ongoing source of material resistance in a world of frictionless data, where the immaterial dialectic of binary code seems to master all material flows. However virtual life may appear, “grain is still grain,” in the words of Leonid Brezhnev, and soil is still soil. One day we may indeed loosen our immemorial ties to the soil as technological innovations offer new means of food production, but for now our dependency on the soil is a universal condition that unites human societies across millennia. The story of Russia’s relationship to its soil may serve to remind us of the conditions of food scarcity that were once a central feature of human experience—conditions that still persist in the developing world and that, in the age of planetary climate change, may once again come to define our lives.