One farmer's story: why I stopped drinking the chemical Kool-Aid.

• Author: Goodman, Jim
• Position: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR - Essay

I should have started reading Wendell Berry sooner. While he was writing about the social and economic destruction of rural America, I was being indoctrinated by a university system that touted the advantages of modern agriculture based on chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and hormones.

The mentality of farmers plowing "fence row to fence row" offended Berry, while I saw it as part of being a "progressive and efficient" farmer. For fifteen years, I did my share of damaging the soil with agricultural chemicals and pushing the cattle beyond their natural abilities to produce with hormones and drugs. At the time, I was OK with it. That's what we were supposed to do. We had to feed the world. Or so I was told.

But if I had read Wendell Berry sooner, or listened to my father, or even paid attention to that little part of me that said this way of farming is not right, it's not safe, it's not what you should be doing, it might have dawned on me that some of the theory I learned in ag school, particularly the omniscience of the market-driven economy, was a scam.

I was trained as a reproductive physiologist, so I knew hormones---boy, did I know hormones. In cows stressed out by high production, a normal reproductive cycle is the first casualty, but the right injection (prostaglandin) can straighten it all out. Steers implanted with hormones would muscle up like Popeye, and putting antibiotics in the feed made them grow even faster.

I remember during my college days, someone advocating for organic farming practices. I responded that organic farming was OK, but how many million people did we want to starve? Obviously I had drunk liberally of the corporate Kool-Aid.

Spraying crops with a cocktail of chemicals and adding a little insecticide at planting took care of all the weeds and bugs. It all worked great. Perfectly clean fields, great yields, living the dream. Still, I never used insecticides without seeing casualties: a few birds, the occasional cat, and the earthworms were gone, too.

And there were other warning signs. Those applying crop chemicals were advised to use caution and wear protective clothing. The precautions on the prostaglandin noted women should exercise extreme caution in handling the product because it could cause abortions. That never really sunk in until my wife, Rebecca, was pregnant.

When I felt it was no longer a good idea for Rebecca to walk in the field next to our house because of the herbicides sprayed there, I...