The Agrarian

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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition where we take a step beyond current news stories and politics to look at things from the past or sometimes the present.

This week, we are going to look at agriculture.

I know that Victor has written several books and we'll talk just a little bit about those and the current state of agriculture after this message.

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Welcome back.

Victor, I would like to remind everybody, is the Martin and Ilya Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, how are you doing today?

Very well.

Doing fine.

Well, we have an interesting topic today, agriculture.

And I know that you wrote two books about modern agriculture and much of your other Greeks is about agriculture in the ancient world.

Your modern books are the first one, Fields Without Dreams, about your experience on your farm and the family farm in agriculture and then the land was everything and those are modeled on 18th century writer was Creva Cor's Letters of an American Farmer and I found some interesting things in your book The Land Was Everything.

And I wanted just to start this off with a quote from you.

You were writing about the enemies of agriculture, and you had this to say.

You said, because farming involves nature and so remains always the most basic elemental conflict, both epic and guerrilla, there are clear enemies of agri.

enemies of agriculture, sensational and ordinary alike.

From their destruction accrues a large, precious knowledge for the rest of us about whom to fear.

This wisdom is not to be found elsewhere.

It is in no great book that I have read, on the lips of no professor, prophet, or French savant.

It is not to be found with them and their work, but unlike most other occupations in the history of civilization, in farming, both man and nature conspire hourly to thwart the agrarian, right?

So beautiful passage in your book, The Land Was Everything.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to us about that wisdom that's learned from the land.

Well, I'm sitting here and

I'm the fifth generation to live in the same house.

And I'm looking out at what was part of a 180-acre farm.

And now it's just 40.

That's all that's left that I own.

And I'm living in the original house that my great-great-grandmother, Lucy-Anne Milson, homesteaded.

And after I got my PhD in 1980,

I decided my grandfather had died.

My parents were at work.

I came home.

I thought it would just be for a few weeks.

I had a part-time job offer, but it ended up being for five years where I farmed full-time.

I mean, I read Greek at night.

I tried to keep up.

I published my thesis, Warfare and Agriculture.

And I had to be reacculturated.

When you're younger and you're growing up, people tell you what to do, but they were all dead.

So we had to make decisions.

I had a twin brother and a cousin as well.

And the farm had been sort of rented out.

The crops were not what you needed.

There was no drip system, the wells, you needed about About a million dollars in reinvestment, and yet it was losing money.

And there was no way how you were going to make money.

And so we decided that we would do all the work ourselves.

And I mean all the work.

We were going to do the pruning.

We were going to do all the tractor driving.

We were going to do the pesticide.

And each of us specialized.

I specialized in pesticides, herbicides.

I had a big spray rig, and herbicides was my

specialty.

From 1980 to 1990, because I kept doing it after I was teaching.

So I would go teach five classes, run home 27 miles away, get get on a tractor.

I mean, it amuses me now to hear about Roundup.

I thought Roundup, and you know, maybe I'll be struck dead with lymphoma tomorrow, but I bathed in that stuff.

They told us it was pretty safe.

Class one, it wasn't dangerous.

And we use Pearquap as everybody did.

I use Simazine, I use Carmex, I use Goal.

And you name any pre-emergent herbicide or any omite

or DFIN or Divome, all of these sinister petrochemical, organic chemical concoctions that was agriculture in the 1960s and 70s and 80s.

And we tried to pull out everything.

And we didn't just hire a bulldozer.

We used a chain and a tractor.

We pulled out vineyards.

We said, we're going to have organic fruit.

So we're going to go to farmers market.

Well, then, how do you get to farmer's market?

We're 180 miles away.

So I'm just trying to label all the enemies.

So we said, well, ATT went broke.

They're selling off all all their telephone vans.

You can buy an old telephone van for $1,000.

So we went and bought one.

I mean, it was so loud and rattly, and the transmission was gone.

And it wasn't like you can get it fixed.

Nobody had any money.

I mean, my mom and dad were completely scrapped.

They were signing our loans to keep this thing going.

And out of that experience, you know, one day I just sat down and I said, We just spent $5,000 and thin this orchard.

We had it sprayed.

sprayed it was all ready and it whoever heard it would hail in may it destroyed this entire santa rosa orchard it's gone all that work is gone and then i thought well at least the trees were here then i turned around and five trees had died of bacterial canker gumnosis i thought oh my god could it get any worse and so i got up to go get on the tractor and go back and the head gasket was blown out i thought how could that happen and then suddenly a guy drove drove up and Alexis, and he was from an insurance company, said, your insurance premium, where's your brother?

It's overdue.

I thought, it couldn't get worse.

And then it did.

And I wrote a book about, you know, going broke, basically.

It took a while, but I did that five years full-time and then another five, 10 to 12.

And then I got a very mysterious case of mononucleosis in 88 or 89.

I don't know what caused it.

I mean, everybody knows what Mona was, but it didn't go away.

It caused an immune dysfunction.

And I got very fatigued.

I got severe allergies.

I got kidney stone.

I had all these bizarre, and I had that for about six or seven years.

And I don't know, but it was a very good time.

And that's the time in which I wrote these things looking back because I had just enough energy to go teach five classes, drive home, and then write books.

You know, I went from kind of being tan and 200 pounds down to like 170 and a wimp.

So those books were written during that period of reflection.

You know, I thought that maybe we could make it with farmers' markets and selling organic fruit because I got to detest pesticides.

And that was before you wore protective equipment and, you know, hearing, I've got hearing loss.

I remember I had a...

One chemical, it was orange.

I won't give the name.

I don't want to be sued.

But it sprayed.

I mean, the roller pump on the rig kind of went into high.

it just automatically went up, the pressure went up and it burst the hose.

And I turned around, it just squirted my, I was covered from head to toe with it.

And I remember I felt like a salmon smell, salmon taste and smell in my mouth almost immediately.

And my, from my knuckles to my elbow were bright orange from about January to May.

Oh, my God.

And

stuff like that.

I had a lot of injuries.

Farming is very dangerous, you know.

I had a confrontation once with an officer that said, you have no business writing about military history because you've never been in the army.

And there was a point to that.

I don't know what combat is like.

But I said back to him, you have no business ever commenting on the quality of your food or how it's prepared because you've never farmed.

And

if you're not in war, farming is a more dangerous occupation than being in the military.

Whether it was my twin brother having part of his finger cut off or a neighbor who I knew well blowing his brains out or another friend who lost money who took a sleeping pill and put a noose around his neck right around the corner and then filled his garage up with carbon monoxide so that he would kill himself.

That was what farming was like.

And it was the period of globalization where all of the 100 or 200 acre family farms were being destroyed because the price collapsed Because with an interconnected world and the EU subsidizing California-type crops like fresh fruit or dried fruits, you really had to have a vertically integrated economy of scale farm.

That meant you had to have trucks, you had to have a packing house, you had to have a coal storage, you had to have a broker.

And if you could do that, then you could make money.

more money than you did losing it.

But for the people who were stupid enough, like me, who kept trying to push it and say you can still be farming, you doubled down.

So how did you double down and survive?

You did things that were kind of crazy.

You said, okay, I'm going to have dried tomatoes and I'll put them in jars and I'm going to can peaches.

I'm going to can

tomatoes.

I'm going to go get lye and make my plant olives and make my own olive oil and olives.

And no, I'll do better than that.

I will try to sulfur and have dried apricots.

We'll make grape juice.

So I had a whole garden, an acre garden garden of everything, and it was self-sufficient.

And, you know, the house was old, falling apart, and there were no health insurance.

My kids had no health insurance.

I thought, how are you going to do this?

And so then I started writing about agriculture to find a way to save the farm with our farm income.

And

I saw everybody, I'm looking out the window as I talk right now, and I say to myself, that

Armenian American family was destroyed in the 80s, and that place is now farmed by a corporation.

The people on the other side were an Italian family that had a little story.

They have completely obliterated that place has had a lot of problems.

I look at the other part and I said, that Italian American had a little orange farm and he was a master mechanic on the side and they've had so many gang problems there.

And that family over there had a little chicken coop and they had 20 acres of fruit trees and their kids went to school and they've had three SWAT teams over there.

And then I look over here and I look at ourselves and I say, what happened to our family?

And my mother died.

I mean, she was a very brilliant woman who'd gone to Stanford, University of Pacific and Stanford.

She had two BAs and a JD and she,

you know, was a female lawyer when there were no females.

And she was one of the first women state appellate court judge, superior court judge.

And all of her salary was pledged to keeping this money-losing farm and the way of life that didn't exist anymore.

And

she was peddling fruit with us in between cases on weekend.

And my dad, he was a decorated war veteran and he had land and he said, you've got to save the farm.

But it was insane because there were global forces in motion.

And then suddenly I got, you know, it was like schizophrenia.

I got a job at Cal State Fresno, the closest campus, and I went up there and it was like, wow,

people don't work 60 hours a day.

They've got nice cars.

They don't carry guns in the back of their car to shoot squirrels or coyotes.

They're normal.

They got this great North Fresno lifestyle, and yet they're more unhappy than the farmers are whining about everything.

It was very

strange, you know.

Can I ask you?

Because what you're describing when you say a way of life that doesn't exist anymore, it reminds me of in Roman history when the Vladifundia grew up, the huge estates run on slave labor, and it sacrificed all of those small farmers' lots.

And so the small farmer was forced into the city.

And there was usually, you know, when you read the history, they suggest there's huge social change.

And is that what you see

this new Latifundia?

Yeah, it was.

I mean, the average size of a California farm has expanded exponentially.

And there is no middle class out in the San Joaquin Valley.

There are poor people.

There's sort of a government middle class, teachers and government employees, but there are no independent business people who are truly middle class.

You had to get big or get out.

And the people got big.

I'm not criticizing.

I know them all.

They're very brilliant people.

And I'm not taking anything away from them.

But the idea that you were going to have an active PTA and Little League and all these small towns and everybody would know each other and the kids were going to be free-ranged and there'd be a common culture.

That doesn't exist anymore.

And I wrote about it in the historical, I hope I didn't use the present to influence the past, but I was interested in that phenomenon because the Greek city-state after the fourth century and the demise of constitutional government during the Hellenistic period gradually started to have, and into the early Roman, huge Latofundia, but they was under Greek auspices.

You had authors like Plutarch saying a countryside in 100 AD is empty, and yet you knew that very countryside from descriptions.

And Pausanias, who was near contemporary, was talking about the temples and the hamlets and the homes of people that they didn't know had ever existed, but they were still there.

And then you go back to Thucydides and there were viable little villages.

And so

it happens throughout history that you get specialization that makes a more productive economy.

You get cheap labor, servile in the ancient world, low wage here,

and you see a disappearance of the middle class.

And it happened in agriculture between the years 1975 to 2000, and it was devastating.

And the result was some people made an amount of money that was absolutely staggering.

If you got in big and you owned six or seven, 10,000 acres of almonds in the heyday of almond export and you shelled your own product and you had control over every aspect from the orchard to the container ship, you could make eight or nine thousand dollars an acre and they did.

But boy, if you were a 40 acre farmer and you were not a high school teacher or government employee or something, and you depended on that acreage, you were going to go broke.

Unless you're going to be a peasant.

I was a peasant.

I thought that that would be a noble thing and it was.

I never felt healthier.

I never felt more alive.

I never felt that I had skills that I didn't even know that I had.

I could, all of a sudden, I realized I could fix things.

I could fix the roof.

If I wanted to, the roof was leaking, I wouldn't get to call a guy to put a new roof.

I called an old friend and said,

How do you replace the old cedar shingles?

And

how do you paint your house when you have no money?

Well, you go into the end of the year and they'll sell all the paint they haven't sold and just put it together and mix it up.

And I did stuff like that.

And it was a good feeling.

But then I looked at people around me and I thought, wow, my kids don't have health insurance.

They'll never have any.

My cars don't run.

I have like, I had, I have very, I have empathy when everybody goes out in the country and they say, look at these people.

They are poor whites, poor Mexican people.

They all have eight or nine cars.

I had, I think, six at one time parked all around just because they would just, I would get one running and then it would break down.

So I'd get another one in reserve.

And it was a good experience, but it's over with.

And my children grew up with it.

They don't don't want anything to do with it.

I don't blame them a bit.

And my neighbors are all dead or all moved away.

And the people who surround this farm are mostly poor people who came from Mexico in the last 15 years.

And, you know,

it's just a different world.

It's unrecognizable.

Well, since you were talking about the big agribusiness business replacing the small farmer, I noticed in your book, The Land Was Everything, that you had a section on on the myths of farming.

And the last myth was that agribusiness threatens our food supply.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

You know, because when I was reading it, I was thinking, well, it does seem like maybe this is not a threat to the food supply, but it does seem like that, you know, peaches or plums, they don't taste as good as they used to.

So all of this engineering.

Anytime you have the basic rule is this, if it's not local, then you have to make adjustments.

Okay,

so I want grapes right now.

It's December.

There are no grapes.

I don't see any.

I look out and see these vineyards.

There's no grapes on them.

So they're in cold storage.

If they're in the United States, they were picked in October at the latest.

So how do you keep it?

How do you keep grapes there?

You have to put sulfur dioxide on them, or you have to put methyl bromide to fumigate them.

And they have to be a variety that have a thick stem.

And or they're imported from Chile or Mexico or Central America.

And that's the problem.

When you want fruit out of season or vegetables year-round, then you have to go to areas to accommodate that and you have to ship them at long distances.

In the old days, people said, On this farm, from, and I was very fortunate that I had the diaries of my grandparents.

So they had in the yard, in the farm, so right about now, they were eating pomegranates that were fresh, and they had pomegranate juice.

And they were shelling walnuts.

They had about 30 walnuts, huge Wilson Wonders, all these weird varieties that were delicious.

And they had pecans.

We still have two pecan trees.

And they picked them up, and we shelled them.

We put them in gunny sacks, and they were out in the porch.

And so, when we go down, my grandparents, they say, Hey, you want some pomegranate juice?

Ooh, I just went over and traded to the neighbor some

pecans.

And he has a cousin that has an apple orchard.

So we had apples stacked in crates.

And then we had grape juice from October.

And then we had raisins.

That's what we made with raisins.

So we washed and kind of rubbed the raisins, had a primitive stimmer, and that's what we ate.

And then it came and we had a winter garden.

And then we had a little rabbit hutch.

And that's what you did.

But remember what we're talking about.

You're talking about 10 to 20% of your energy was doing that versus drop by Safeway and just buy it, you know, if you have the money.

So what happened is to accommodate, it wasn't that farmers said, we love agribusiness.

It was the American consumer wanted to pay less percentage of their income on food and less time on the preparation of it, the acquisition.

And so

business accommodated them.

And we're not going to starve because the people who are in agribusiness, it's a science now.

I can't emphasize that enough to the listeners.

When I watch this corporation that's farming my almond growth, it's just absolutely staggering how economical it is.

I mean,

everything is perfect.

And if the consumer is worried about pesticide, they won't put pesticides on.

They really won't.

because they're react, they have the capital to react.

But what I'm trying to get at, it's based on one principle: produce as much food that's adequate, that is safe,

and at the biggest profit.

And that's how our system is so efficient.

But the old system said,

well, plants some pecan trees on the orchard on the alleyways and don't just level all those beautiful hills.

They're so picturesque.

So I had 60 acres that looked like Napa Valley Hills that were rolling.

And when it was sold off, the first thing the guy came in, he had a D9 and he just flattened it.

This is uneconomical.

It was.

But my point is, I grew up, every time I walked around an alleyway, I'd see my grandfather, and he had an old oiler, an old truck that he rented, and they were putting

used oil to make sure the dust did.

And he had trees along the alleyways.

It was like going through Hobbitville.

It was beautiful.

It was the Shire.

And then agriculture served a purpose in addition to producing food for non-agricultural people.

It purpose was to anchor communities and inculcate values that go back to the founders.

That is, physicality matched with intellectual activity.

Brain wrong, brain wrong, a total person, a shame culture.

You didn't break the law, not because you were morally superior, because if you did, somebody said, that damn Hansen kid, he went into town.

And he sprayed some graffiti.

And I saw him, and I went out to his grandfather, old Rhys Davis, and I told him, you should be ashamed of that, no good.

And he would probably say, this didn't happen.

I'm being hypothetical, but that stopped me from doing it because I knew that somebody would say, oh,

he wouldn't say, oh, poor Victor, he was going to be a professor.

He's a good boy.

They'd say, you know what?

Are you a bad seed?

Because if you're a bad seed, I don't want your name.

And that's how it was.

And I grew up in fear of shame.

I didn't want to shame my grandparents.

I didn't want to shame their parents.

I didn't want to shame their parents.

I didn't want to shame my parents, my family.

And that's what the whole farming thing was.

It was pretty brutal.

I've heard people say, I come home and my mother, you know, they were college educated.

They were the first people in their family to go to college.

My parents were.

It was very unusual because

they loved the farm, but they said, you have to go off this farm.

You're not going to farm at 18.

That's what...

My mom said, you're not going to farm.

I didn't even want to go to college.

My mom said, you were going to go to college whether you like it or not.

My father said, you're not.

I was 18.

I mean, the Vietnam War was over with, but my father said, you're not going to join the military.

Nobody in this family has two rules.

You don't join the military and you don't say no when they draft you.

All this family were drafted and they either got killed or maimed or went psycho, but they all served, but not one of them volunteered.

And that was the two things I was told.

Your first allegiance is to your country by producing food, but you're going to go to college.

You can come back later.

So I was gone for 10 years

from 18, basically 17, 18, till it wasn't quite.

I got back at 25, eight years,

nine years.

Well, I was wondering, because you're suggesting, but you haven't really quite addressed.

So do you think this new way of farming is going to affect the social fabric like it did in ancient Rome?

It already has.

Leading to the ages.

it already.

There is no area.

I mean, we have a how many people are independently employed on, you know what I mean?

Like the founders were, or the Messoi of ancient Greece, or the Agricolae of Rome.

I mean, there's independent truck drivers, there's independent business people.

I admire them.

But the idea that there are still people who independently farm and get their hands dirty and they're mechanical and they do their own books and they have to plot how to make make a living.

It's very hard to do in this complex globalized world.

I would get up every morning and I'd say, and it would drive my siblings crazy.

I'd say things like, I have prorated the insurance for the year.

I have prorated the gasoline for the year.

I have prorated the daily rate of chemicals per year.

I have prorated the labor.

I have prorated the depreciation.

And I would say,

it's about $3,100 we got to make today.

And they'd say, why are you doing this?

That's not what it's about.

I said, ultimately, that's what it's about.

And I had a neighbor who really taught me something.

And I would be painting my house.

This house was built in 1870.

I would scrape it and get all this used paint, mix it and paint it.

And I had a rope around myself.

And I'd go up on the roof.

And, you know, if I fell, which I did once, I was dangling.

But he would come over and he'd say to me, thank you for painting my house.

I said, no, no, what are you talking about?

He said, I look at your operation.

You are not producing raisins as economically as I am.

And that means you're going to go broke.

Even your mom, who's giving her a salary, no doubt, to subsidize, she doesn't have the money.

You're going to go broke.

And then the land is going to go up for sale.

And the people who buy farmland are the people who can make it.

They can eat their other neighbor's shorts if they have to.

And I'm going to eat you.

And I'm going to take your farm.

And I thought, wow, what a horrible person.

And then I started thinking, God, he's got some primitive Neanderthal logic that happens to be true.

And so that really shook me up.

So I started probating everything and I'd go and talk and I'd say, we've got to make this amount of money today.

You've got to take this orchard.

It's not productive.

And so I started thinking like an agribusiness person.

And I didn't say, you know, I said, you know what?

If we're coming down that orchard and you are in your tractor and you're avoiding that beautiful scenic route with these trees at the end of each row, or you have that beautiful pond, it's not economical that's the gravy if you're making money we're not making money it was a shock to be in your early 20s and not know anything you know and

and suddenly you know you get on an old oliver tractor and you got a tandem disc and you've got to go get five acres and you got to do it cheap and then no sooner do you get out there and the bearing on the disc is out and you you spend four hours taking apart a Domri's disc and then you don't have the money for the new bearings.

You put an old bearing on.

It's probably no good that you bought it a Mart, used Mart.

And then you get in this old Oliver and it heats up and you don't know what to do because it's 55 horse and it's pulling something that should be pulled by a 70 horse.

And then you got to tow it over to another part, your ranch.

It was just like that every day.

And I'm so glad my children grew up on it because all three of them, they were never impressed by

people who didn't do physical work or they weren't impressed by money or status.

I really like that.

I mean, it makes you envious in a bad way.

It really does.

You see a guy who comes in to sell you an insurance policy and he's got a Lexus and you think, how did he, how does he do that?

How can he walk around in nice clothes in the middle of the day and not have to work?

But then you start, you know, you just say, it doesn't matter.

anymore.

You're going to do your thing and you're going to be physical.

And it gives you a confidence and you're not impressed by money or cars or anything.

And that was really good.

That's why changing the topic a little bit, everybody said to me, well, you're a hypocrite.

You voted for Trump and Trump did.

And I got so sick of it hearing all these Republican establishments.

And I said, I don't care what he tweets.

All I care is he has a message that people who work with their hands who are forgotten, they have hope.

They don't think that we should just do insurance and Silicon Valley and media and finance and corporate stuff.

They want to make stuff.

They want to be assemblymen.

They want to be manufactured.

They have their community.

They have small towns.

They're somebody.

And they were neglected and somebody came and spoke to them.

And so that was what it left me with: that farming was throughout history the incubator of values and culture and stability.

And the farmer was the backbone of the hoplite phalanx, the Roman legion, originally.

Yeah.

And when they went, when they went Republican government and democracy, then Republic, it went to.

And we're having an experiment because this is pretty new.

We've had a solid middle class.

You can go on Turner classic movies any night and look at these movies that are in the 40s and 50s that romance the, you know, the history of America and contemporary 40s.

I know, oh, they're sexist, they're homophobic.

I don't think so.

I think they were people from all walks of life that were independent and middle class.

And then you look at what our culture is producing, you know, you don't see a glorification of the middle class.

You don't, everybody, you know, that's what's the weird thing is we get so hung up on race and diversity, we don't talk about class.

Yeah.

And just because Olprid happens to be African-American, we don't think how absurd she is sitting by herself in a $90 million estate lecturing people about what?

oppression.

And I'm no left-wing Marxist, believe me, I'm a very conservative person, but I really value and admire people who can farm and independent fucker.

I really admire people.

I was going into the, get my hair cut and I went to the

car wash today and I gave a tip, a big tip.

And the car guy said to me, why do you always, you're the only guy that comes in and gives us two or three dollars?

And I always say, how much money did you make?

I like the guy who just loves what he's doing physically.

And all of us should reward physical labor.

I mean, that guy went in, he told me where to park.

This was in a mechanical car wash.

I mean, what value is physical labor just to spray your your car?

But he sprayed the car.

He got everything.

He got this.

He reminded me that my back window was down.

He did all of this.

He's worth $2 tip on an $8 car wash.

So I think we all need to get a reappreciation.

You know, throw away all these

values that these people stick down our throats.

You know, I don't really give a damn about some brilliant blogger or a Twitter freak or what so-and-so says

on so-and-so TV thing.

Just get an appreciation for physical labor.

Don't glorify them.

It's a pretty brutal world, the world of physicality, but at least give them their due.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's give a little moment for our sponsor, and then we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

And I just have one more question for you.

You said something very interesting again in the land was everything.

And you were just describing, this was also in the section on the myths of farming and that the farmer is nice and that the farmer is, I forget the other ones.

Yeah, nice.

And you did a lot to describe how unsociable and unpresentable and unlikable a farmer might be because they're distrusting, et cetera, right?

So you create this image of the farmer and then you write this.

The link between farming and mankind is not survival, but rather civilization.

And so I thought that that was interesting that you would say the link between farming and mankind is civilization when you

get a character that is so unsociable.

Yeah, but what I meant was everybody who's listening has got to be alive tomorrow.

There's no guarantee you're going to be alive.

You'll be dead in a week if you don't eat.

So civilization, to have time to read and to write and to think and to create nice things and luxuries and the adornments of life, it requires somebody to ensure you have food.

When I go to New York, I just got back in October, when I see these beautiful restaurants that were reopening, the beautiful food, I kept saying, where does that come from?

And who's making that right now?

Who's picking those strawberries?

Who's growing that beef?

So you have to have food and then you have to have shelter.

shelter.

And that means somebody's got to build it.

Somebody's got to put that granite counter in.

Somebody's got to put the septic system in.

Somebody's got to do the water supply.

And then I think it requires motion and

transportation.

Somebody's got a track.

Somebody's got to drill.

Somebody's got to make that car.

Without that stuff, you've got nothing.

You've got the third world.

You don't have anything.

So you can't have laws.

You can't have civilization unless you can eat, unless you can find shelter.

And half the world can't do it.

And we do it very well because of our system.

So, you know, but the people, there's a brutalizing effect on the people that have to do it because it's not well compensated.

And we have this idea that if you're educated with a bunch of letters after your name, you're a morally superior person.

So there's no status in it.

And in fact, people would.

come up to me and say, are you that weird guy out there on Mountain View Avenue that got a PhD in something called classics or whatever it was at Stanford?

And I see you out there pruning.

What a fucking idiot, excuse me what an idiot you are

you know why would you do something stupid like that and then my mom would say well don't worry one day you'll be a professor and then instead of your degree being ridiculed it will be a something of honor and she was right but it never had to be ridiculed I was the same person

and so you know it's a it's a little i'll just finish with one story you know it rained in 1980 and it had rained in 76 and 77, and we picked too early.

So if you're paranoid about losing your whole raisin crop and putting those green grapes on the ground to dry, you better wait until it's got 20 degrees sugar.

And if you don't, when that dries, a raisin turns into a skin, there's not enough sugar in it.

And yet it's like eating weedies rather than a meaty raisin.

But people then get paranoid.

So I think, well, at least they don't weigh very much is what I'm trying to say.

So

five pounds of grapes will only make one pound of raisins rather than three pounds making one.

So, of course, being young, we picked, I think, instead of where we should have around the first of September, my grandfather always said, Well, you know, boys, you need half the place picked between the first and the fifth, and then you got your money making fifth to tenth.

If you pick after the tenth, you'll get rain or the dew will come or something like that.

So, anyway, we picked on the 22nd,

and it got unfortunately, they were bitter.

There were like 17 or 18.

And it got to be one of those weird San Joaquin Valley Augusts where it got to 111.

And you could see them literally in the morning at 11 o'clock, they were purple grapes.

And by two in the afternoon, they were black.

And then the next day, they were weedies.

And I thought, This is tragic.

We're only going to get, instead of our 180 tons that we need to pay the bank loan, we're only going to have 140.

40.

And gosh, this guy drove up in a car, this farmer.

He said, I saw you.

You thought you were going to get ahead of everybody.

So you picked too damn early.

I said, yes, I did.

And he said, 50 ton of raisins just went up in smoke.

I said, well, actually, they evaporate.

Well, whatever you call it, they're gone because you were a stupid asshole.

That's what you were.

You panicked, boy.

You should have waited and waited.

And I said, I would have been raped.

Well, then you take it.

You know, you take that risk, you'll have nothing.

So he basically was right.

He said, you wait until you got the sugar.

You don't hedge, you make a good raisin, you get rain, you lose it.

And I said, well, I lost three out of five years, our family.

We'd be broke.

At least we'll have 140.

I won't pay for that.

But my point is, there was no sense that he should hide the truth.

You know,

I wish he had said, you know, I feel really tragic because we're all in the same boat.

We got rained on, so we're all doing what the other alternative.

And it's going to be very, it's going to not work out either way for us if it gets hot.

I said, well, i thought it would be 90 and maybe i could get in a little wet raisin that wouldn't be as sweet but but he should have had some compassion but he had passion but no compassion

i think that's a line of the professional of the movie but anyway that's what farming is about it's a great thing as long as you don't it's a great thing as long as you don't have to do yeah yeah i was going to say it's a great thing if you don't have to be one

my mom said to me once she was a brilliant woman she said to me, we can all farm, keep the land and the family.

This house is 150 years now, but she said, we can keep it for 300 years as long as we have a rule that to keep the land, you don't farm it.

In other words, you get jobs and you rent it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So absolutely.

It took me 50 years to learn that lesson.

I think what most people romance though is just the life out there.

They don't conceive of the actual work, but the life is.

My mom was so funny about that.

I grew up in a house next to the one I live in, a very small one, 800 square feet.

Yet five of us.

My mom would have pledge when I was like eight years old, and she would make all of this old furniture look really nice.

And it was so hot in June, and we only had a water cooler, but she had the windows open, and then the tractor would be disking, and the dust would come in.

And, you know, our driveway had no oil on it, no gravel.

And then the whole house within minutes would be covered with dust right after she used her pledge.

And the dust would stick there like spreckles on a cupcake or something, you know.

Oh, my God.

Hard work defeated.

I know it.

And it was just dust everywhere and just chemical smells and everything.

But it was a good time.

I was looking at pictures the other day and I looked at Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving.

There's like 25 people there, 30 people.

And they all were such, I looked at their faces, they're all dead, but they were all so happy and they worked so hard.

It's another thing, just to finish, where I get really angry about this white supremacy and whiteness.

All these pampered little privileged people of all different races that are mostly professors and lawyers and politicians, they just condemn an entire generation.

These are bad people because they didn't go to, you know, they didn't go to the diversity, you know, equity, inclusion workshop.

And I just looked at that picture there today of all these farmers.

And I said, look at that guy right there.

That guy got his stomach and his lungs eaten out at Bella Wood in the 91st Infantry Division.

And look at that guy there.

That guy kind of...

had some severe problems after flying over 40 missions over Tokyo in a B-29, crashing in Iwo Jima twice.

I mean, for rescue.

And then I looked at over there.

I said, look at that face over there.

That guy was such a wonderful cousin, but he had dingy fever fighting in the Philippines and he had 106 fever and he had brain damage.

And then I looked at the other guy and I thought, wow, he never made a dime farming.

He went broke.

He was so bitter and he had reasons to be bitter.

And yet they're all happy and they're all talking about.

Then I see these very privileged people with these psychodramas, you know, and condemning this, all these people as so-called white.

And they're horrible people.

And

they were not.

they worked shoulder to shoulder and of no different no class distinctions with armenians and blacks and mexicans and the race was incidental and the most successful farmers in my area as i look around 360 from this window were japanese americans armenian americans and punjabi american and none of them were white they were very successful and they loved this country and for some people just in our generation the most leisured and affluent in history suddenly to announce that all the past were evil and they, they, in their infinite wisdom and superior morality, are the only good generation.

I'm saying to them, what did you do?

Did you go defeat the Nazis?

No, you lost in Afghanistan.

Did you build the Hoover Dam?

You can't even build high-speed rail.

It looked like Stonehenge 10 years later.

What have you done, this generation?

What have you built?

Oh, you went to the moon with primitive.

No, you didn't go to the moon.

What have you done?

Tell me what you've done oh you've got the highest murder rate in history in chicago okay that's accomplishment what else have you done oh you're 30 trillion dollars in debt that's an accomplishment oh you shut down the whole damn country because you were terrified of covid and when these people suffered through polio and all sorts of diseases you sue everybody but what have you done compared to the people who you every single day trash and besmirch that you know whose shoulders we are sitting on top of, the dead.

So, you know, that's something that you get when you live in the same place.

You look at every generation that lived here and you look at them and you think, my God, those people were wonderful people.

They did this, they did that.

And this country has no gratitude.

Gratitude is one of the most important attributes of a society.

If you don't have gratitude and you're not gracious, for people who've done you a favor and you're not reciprocal,

that goes across generations, then you're nothing nothing yeah this generation has no gratitude for anybody that came before them they don't even know what the name gettysburg is they have no idea what shitle is they have no idea whatsoever about battle of okinawa they have no idea of d-day they have no idea the fillets gap they don't care all they want to tell you is lecture in this nasal voice about how they're morally superior and how they've had such a wretched life.

And, you know, I think to myself, what have you done?

And I can really see it at the Stanford campus when I'm there.

I just see all of these activists and all these posters and all this screaming and all these BMWs and all these Mercedes and in the parking lot.

And I think, why should we listen to you?

You've done nothing.

I have a great admiration for scientists and mathematicians and entrepreneurs that do something, but not these other people.

That's a rant, but it has something to do with agriculture to end.

It has something to do with agriculture yeah okay so it has to do with the people are freed up from being in agriculture oh i'm sorry we went too long sammy i got carried away in nostalgia we're we're at the end i would like to remind everybody that victor does a podcast with jack fowler and those podcasts are called the traditionalists and the classicists and soon we're gonna have jack drop those names but still we're calling them the traditional classicist and soon we will be just the victor davis handsome show And on that note, thank you very much, Victor.

Thank you.

And thank you, everybody, again, for listening.

Yeah, and this is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.