I think he romanticized the old ways of farming, but I think the overall point was to question what was good about the past and question the line we are fed that all technology is for the general good of all people.

I think it is possible to say that subsistence farming leading to disease and starvation is bad, and a gigantic corporate oligopoly run monoculture farm is also bad. One of his biggest points is really that life should be human scale and speed with human relationships as a priority, the idealized farm was just a way to show what that life looked like in the past.

This is a misrepresentation of Berry's thought. Like many traditional Amish or Mennonite communities, he wasn't at all adverse to mechanized agriculture, he simply believed that technology be used considerately, and that people seeing agriculture up close made for a rooting in local community that he believed beneficial. Even Berry's critics (and he had his share, me included) did not dismiss his ideas so readily as your post.

Reading McCullough bio of Truman and Caro bio of LBJ lead me to the same conclusion. It was brutal, and most who saw any means of escape seized it

I’m compelled by the romantic nostalgia, but I know I personally couldn’t cut the mustard

Surely there is an agreeable third option between life-and-death subsistence farming and spiritually/ecologically/gustatorily desolate conglomerate monocrop agriculture.

Food literally grows on trees.

>Just 4 generations ago, when people worked a low tech, hand-to-mouth agrarian existence without powered equipment, proper nutrition, or antibiotics, they were at constant risk of starvation from a single low yield harvest. It's a very hard life.

That's why we like it. The people in chairs in Wall-e don't.