Industrial agriculture is too specialized

On its face, The Unsettling of America is a polemic against industrial agriculture. It makes many arguments that you’re probably familiar with:

• Industrial agriculture pursues short-term increases in production at the expense of long-term soil health
• Industrial agriculture promotes monocropping, which reduces soil health, makes crops more vulnerable to pests, and increases the fragility of the food system
• Industrial agriculture relies heavily on fossil fuels—both for synthetic fertilizers and for transportation of products over long distances
• Industrial agriculture promotes the sale and consumption of unhealthy foods

In 1977, when Unsettling was published, these arguments were probably more interesting. But in 2025 these are pretty tired—of course industrial agriculture is bad! I’ve seen all the Netflix documentaries, I know about the corn subsidies, the cow farts, the chemical fertilizers, etc.

But what’s interesting about Unsettling is the argument that underpins these claims about agriculture. Berry is concerned about the environment, yes, but he’s more concerned about specialization.

All of the criticisms about industrial agriculture boil down to the specialization of agriculture. For most of history, agriculture was an expansive discipline that included:

• Animal husbandry
• Ecology
• Botany
• Chemistry
• Meteorology
• Irrigation
• Nutrition
• Merchandising
• Customer service
• Accounting

But today, with the inexorable specialization of modern society, agriculture is basically just:

• Produce the maximum number of soybeans per acre

And all of the problems mentioned above stem from the fact that the broad remit of historical agriculture has been replaced by a single-minded pursuit of short-term profit.

Yawn, you might be thinking. Corporate greed has caused an environmental crisis? Pretty sure I’ve heard this song before…

Actually, society at large is too specialized

But—and here’s the fascinating part of this book—Berry doesn’t limit his scope to agriculture. He claims that specialization is ruining society at large—not just agriculture or the environment.

To make this argument, Berry stretches the term specialization a bit to include:

• The Englightenment tendency to split complicated systems apart in order to make them easier to understand and control
• The capitalist tendency to optimize for very specific, quantifiable goals (productivity, revenue, time)
• The individualist tendency to see oneself as an autonomous, self-reliant agent (rather than a small part of a complex system)

In our efforts to understand the world and control it, post-Enlightenment Westerners have split apart all sorts of complex systems. They’ve done this because it makes those systems easier to understand, easier to regulate, and easier to control.This is basically the thesis of Seeing like a state—which in many ways is a great companion book to Unsettled! Both authors argue that making a system legible is often at odds with making it healthy.

Berry lists a bunch of different domains where specialization have caused trouble:

1. Academia: Subjects like “food systems” have been broken apart into special departments for agriculture, economics, medicine, nutrition, chemistry, biology, and ecology. Each department is only concerned with its own narrow view of the world.
2. Business: Capitalism ensures that business only care about revenue, so they ignore all the ways they might be negatively impacting the wider world (ecological damage, worker abuse, consumer safety, etc.).
3. Our personal lives: Instead of living integrated lives where work, family, friends, recreation, food, and physical health are all intertwined, we have siloed each of these domains and made all of them less joyful in the process.
4. Our identities: The 20th-century obsession with the self, autonomy, and identity has encouraged us to be independent, self-reliant, and free from the societal bonds that humans have historically had to their community, geography, family, and vocation. This has led to s surge of discontent and loneliness.
5. Expertise: Specialization has led to doctors who receive no training about nutrition, farmers who have no concept of soil health, and software engineers who can’t explain how a computer works. This leads to bad outcomes, like doctors who can perform bypass surgeries but can’t recommend the healthy diet that would avoid the need for such surgeries.

Economic system separates us from “sources of life”

Berry argues that modern capitalism has taken away the greatest joys in life—which we used to get for free—and sold them back to us at a profit.

“Our economy is based upon this disease [of compartmentalization]. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.”

Some examples:

• We used to get exercise from our work, play, and transportation; but today most of those activities are sedentary, so now we are sold gym memberships and workout classes to try and reclaim the joy of exercise.
• We used to find joy in work—but now work has been so specialized that most of us find work tedious, and we must buy our entertainment from corporations.
• We used cook meals at home with our families, which was itself a joy and also a way to eat healthfully and spend quality time with our loved ones. Now we order takeout and eat rushed meals, removing several sources of joy (including our health!) in one stroke.

“We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.”

Automation reduces quality

The specialized society loves automation. It is both a cause and effect of increased specialization: specialized tasks are easier to automate, so we build specialized systems in order to automate them and we add automation to systems because their increasing specialization makes it possible.

Some automation can be good, but Berry warns us of some dangers:

1. It causes us to move faster, so we observe less and use less care
2. It causes us to specialize more, reducing our knowledge about the overall subject
3. Automation encourages us to view humans as pieces of the workflow that have yet to be automated. This, in turn, encourages us to evaluate humans based on quantitiative criteria like output and speed, and ignore the holistic improvements they may be providing to the system

“The substitution of machines for work animals is justified mainly by their ability to increase the volume of work per man—that is, by their greater speed. But as speed increases, care declines. And so, necessarily, do the skills of responsibility.”

Specialization of the individual has caused a collective identity crisis

“The so-called identity crisis, for instance, is a disease that seems to have become prevalent after the disconnection of body and soul and the other piece-mealings of the modern period.”

Berry argues that the modern affliction of “identity crisis” falls directly out of specialization: the compartmentalization of society severs the connections we all have to family, community, and land. It encourages us to “find ourselves” by shedding our responsibilities, traveling, and seeking answers from far-flung places and people.

Solution: live a more holistic life

If specialization and compartmentalization are bad, it follows that wholeness is good. And for Berry, wholeness and health are intimately related.

“That absolute good, I think, is health—not in the merely hygienic sense of personal health, but the health, the wholeness, finally the holiness, of Creation, of which our personal health is only a share.”

Berry has plenty of policy suggestions that are meant to fix the specialized society and make it more whole—like tax schemes to encourage more small farms, requirements that cities recycle organic waste into fertilizer, and the removal of onerous sanitation standards that make it impossible for small farms to be profitable.

But his most surprising recommendations are for individuals. He believes that we don’t have to wait for the system to change—we can make our lives whole right now, and in so doing start to fix the specialized system at large.

I’ve jotted down a few of his most interesting recommendations for individuals.

Restore connections to community and land

Berry was writing for an audience that, back in 1977, already felt confused, unmoored, and lonely. And that was before the Internet and all its isolating tendencies!

The problem, Berry believes, is that we are obsessed with ourselves:

• What is my purpose in life?
• What career will make me happy?
• Where do I want to live?

And to find answers to these questions we cut ties with our existing community, family, and obligations in order to “find ourselves.” We quit our jobs; we travel; we move to new cities—in short, we think that by severing our existing ties we will somehow unearth the “true” preferences of the self and achieve lasting happiness.

But Berry thinks this is exactly backwards! For Berry, happiness is wholeness, and wholeness requires strengthening our bonds to place, community, and family.

“Treatment [of the modern identity crisis], it might be thought, would logically consist in the restoration of these connections: the lost identity would find itself by recognizing physical landmarks, by connecting itself responsibly to practical circumstances; it would learn to stay put in the body in which it belongs and in the place to which preference or history or accident has brought it; it would, in short, find itself in finding its work.”

So the more we search “out there” for happiness, the less happy we’ll be!

Resist automation

Part of Western society’s inexorable march toward specialization is its enthusiasm for automation.

Obviously some automation is good—Berry himself lauds the machinery he finds at a modern organic farm—but he is wary of blindly adopting automation for the sake of saving time alone.

Basically, Berry had two concerns about automation.

It lowers the quality of the final product

Automation can produce bad outputs in several ways:

• It encourages human workers to move faster, which in turn means they will be less observant and make more mistakes
• It encourages us to make products that can be automated, instead of the best possible products
• It encourages us to optimize for legible, quantitative outcomes, so that we can easily monitor the automation

I see examples of all three of these concerns at my job, where we are rapidly automating tasks with AI.

• AI code generation means engineers are shipping much more code. Even if that code itself is of similar quality to human code, it forces all product development to move faster: faster code reviews, faster product launches, and faster testing. And doing all of those things faster means that important details are falling through the cracks, and more mistakes are being made.
• …

It treats work as tedium

“[W]e must learn again to think of human energy, our energy, not as something to be saved, but as something to be used and to be enjoyed in use.”

Consume ethically

Let’s take for granted Berry’s claim that corporations do a lot of bad things. Where does the fault lie?

• The corporation, for doing the bad thing
• The system (capitalism), for incentivizing bad behavior
• The individual, for buying products that are produced in bad ways

Berry would say the responsibility is distributed among all three (and I agree!) but he takes pains to emphasize that this doesn’t get us (consumers) off the hook! Berry argues that we are indeed responsible for how we spend our money, and that this is actually empowering.

“[A responsible consumer] is not confined to the negativity of his complaint. He influences the market by his freedom.”

So how do we become responsible consumers?

“A responsible consumer would be a critical consumer, would refuse to purchase the less good. And he would be a moderate consumer; he would know his needs and he would not purchase what he did not need; he would sort among his needs and study to reduce them.”

Basically:

1. Buy ethically-produced things
2. But not too much

Seems reasonable! But I think today’s discourse around corporate responsibility has made it easy for consumers to shirk responsibility for their consumption. Yes, it’s Big Ag that is ruining the environment—but they’re doing it because you keep buying their hamburger patties!

Conclusion: Just be Amish

“By restraint, [the Amish] make themselves whole.”