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attracted some attention — Mr. Andrew Catlett of Fort William, Kentucky.”
    Andy, getting to his feet, said loudly, “Port!”
    The organizer of the conference bent to the microphone again. “I’m sorry. Yes, of course, Mr. Andrew Catlett of Port William, Kentucky.” He smiled, and the audience laughed, with sympathy for the organizer and in discomfort at Andy’s unseemly chauvinism.
    Having made one mistake, and knowing it, Andy proceeded directly to another. Instead of the text of the speech he had prepared, he spread on the rostrum the notes he had made on the speeches preceding his.
    â€œWhat we have heard discussed here this morning,” he said, “is an agriculture of the mind. No farmer is here. No farmer has been mentioned. No one who has spoken this morning has worked a day on an actual farm in twenty years, and the reason for that is that none of the speakers wants to work on a farm or to be a farmer. The real interest of this meeting is in the academic careerism and the politics and the business of agriculture, and I daresay that most people here, like the first speaker, are proud to have escaped the life and work of farmers, whom they do not admire.
    â€œThis room,” he said, “it’s an image of the minds of the professional careerists of agriculture — a room without windows, filled with artificial light and artificial air, where everything reducible has been reduced to numbers, and the rest ignored. Nothing that you are talking about, and influencing by your talk, is present here, or can be seen from here.”
    He knew that he was showing his anger, and perhaps the fear under the anger, and perhaps the grief and confusion under the fear. He looked down to steady himself, feeling some blunder, as yet obscure to him, in everything he had said. He looked up at the audience again.
    â€œI don’t believe it is well understood how influence flows from enclosures like this to the fields and farms and farmers themselves. We’ve been sitting here this morning, hearing about the American food system and the American food producer, the free market, quantimetric models, pre-inputs, inputs, and outputs, about the matrix of coefficients of endogenous variables, about epistemology and parameters — while actual fields and farms and actual human lives are being damaged. The damage has
been going on a long time. The fifteen million people who have left the farms since 1950 left because of damage. There was pain in that departure, not shown in any of the figures we have seen. Not felt in this room. And the pain and the damage began a long time before 1950. I want to tell you a story.”
    He told them how, after the death of Dorie Catlett, his father’s mother, he had sorted through all the belongings that she had kept stored in the closets and the dresser drawers of the old house where she had lived as wife and widow for more than sixty years. He went through the old clothes, the quilt pieces, the boxes of buttons, the little coils and balls of saved string. And old papers — he found letters, canceled checks, canceled notes and mortgages, bills and receipts, all neatly tied in bundles with strips of rag. Among these things he found a bill on which the ink had turned brown, stating that in 1906 Marce Catlett’s crop had lacked $3.57 of paying the warehouse commission on its own sale.
    Neither Andy nor his father had ever seen the bill before, but it was nevertheless familiar to them, for it had been one of the motives of Wheeler Catlett’s life, and it would be one of the motives of Andy’s. Wheeler remembered the night his father had brought that bill home. His parents tried to disguise their feelings, and Wheeler and his brother pretended not to notice. But they did notice, and they learned, over a long time, what the bill meant. Marce Catlett had carried his year’s work to the warehouse and had come home owing the warehouse