Jayber Crow Agrarian Reforms

Improved Essays
Moving Toward a Current Agrarian Reform
Consumers buying local produce in their communities are encouraging small farmers to aggregate crops responsibly and also keep local farmer markets. Farmers competing with larger non-local markets, and who lose their local farmer markets, experience the fight of accepting and rejecting current industrial change to their farms. Communities such as Port William, in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, also experience a current agrarian change to their local market and society. To showcase how current reforms are degrading Port William, Berry crafts a hatred between two characters in Jayber Crow. Having Jayber Crow support traditionally local agrarian practices, and having Troy Cathman, support large current
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Yet, small farmers entering the market are competing with other similar farmers. Through a constant under cutting of prices and usage of industrial machinery to increase profit margins, farmers create unstable markets. For example, many of the farmers in Jayber Crow gave up their traditional ways and migrated to industrial practice as a result of the economy dying; it promised them larger profits, but it also created a cheap surplus of goods that loses value when they do not sell and thus rot. In an interview with Berry’s daughter Marry, she notes how current agrarian reforms forget to set up necessary outlets for farmers to sell their produce to local business; this could be a solution to controlling levels of outputted produce (Collins 5). Yet, the overhaul of currently-practiced agrarian reforms on the economy, disrupt the socioeconomic relationship in …show more content…
As land is redistributed, certain Land Reform Areas are valued higher than others. For example, “Since about 46% of the land area identified for purchase is less than 10 kilometers away from communal areas” (Moyo, Sam, and Emmerson Zhou 12), the selection of farmers lead to land redistribution being unevenly allocated. The current officials decide on which farmers acquire what lands; with a priority toward current community members, outsiders face a difficulty in getting land. Similarly, underserving certain outside farmers in select districts means that productive individuals cannot practice environmentally safe farming and find “harmonious solutions” (“Solving for Pattern” 4) to an agricultural

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