Berry: I distrust entirely the terms “free market” and “level playing field.” Those phrases are intoned as if they were the names of gods, but what do they mean? How exactly do the conservatives and the libertarians think small farmers would be served by the free market and the level playing field?

The problem that has impoverished and destroyed farmers nearly always is that of low prices resulting from surplus production. That is also, obviously, a land-destroying problem. The only solution to that problem that can sustain the small farmers is the combination of production control and price supports as exemplified by the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association as it was reorganized in my region under the New Deal in 1941. I dislike recommending my own writing, but that organization and its work are explained pretty fully in “The Art of Loading Brush.” The conservative politicians and their friends in the Farm Bureau hated that program because it protected the small farmers, and they finally killed it. In its absence, our troubles have multiplied.

Recently, for example, 100 family dairy farms have been put out of business in this region, two of them in my county, because Walmart is building its own milk-bottling plant in Indiana. And so 100 self-employed, self-supporting, self-respecting farm families are being severely damaged or destroyed in order to increase the wealth of a family already far too rich. I am unsure what the farmers themselves have concluded, but I can conclude only what I already knew: They have no friends among the conservatives and libertarians. And if the Democrats and the liberals were to capture the government, those small farmers would find no friends among them, as they now are.

Both of the political sides, so far as I am concerned, have to accept responsibility for the emergence of Donald Trump, the autonomous man, the self-made man, economically “free” and sexually liberated, responsible only to himself, starting from scratch and inventing his own way of doing things. To get outside the trajectory that produced Trump, we will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example proves, and as proved by present failure.

Olmstead: Our trade war with China has highlighted American farmers’ reliance on the global market. Do you believe this reliance is a necessary risk in today’s globalized economy? How can these farmers safeguard their own self-sufficiency and well-being?

Berry: I have been arguing for a long time, and I still argue, that an economy worthy of the name should begin with proper care of its sources in the natural world and in the local cultures of land use. Beyond that it should be based upon the principle of a reasonable self-sufficiency, from the household to the local community and on through the categories of political organization.

Such an economy, within the variables of weather and human capability, would be formed within certain prescribed limits. To the extent that it would be limited and formed or formal, we might assume that it would be stable. Because such an economy has never been tried, we should not think of it with too much confidence. But there is certainly nothing limited or stable in our present casting about the “globe” for supplies and demands. This, like our present society, is disorderly if not chaotic.