The Land Conservation Movement

The Land Conservation Movement

Land Conservation, like Jazz, is an American Invention.

Some people come to conservation by an epiphany, some by intellectual analysis.

- Richard Brewer Conservancy- The Land Trust Movement in America. (c) 2003

Land Advocacy Groups aim to protect land by promoting Government purchase or regulation. But Government is subject to the whims of the moment. We can not depend on Government to save land. Land Advocates are mostly unpaid amateurs. Land advocacy is hard work over a long period of time.

A Land Trust is a private non-profit organization for which the acquisition and protection of land by direct action form it's primary mission. Land Trusts are non-confrontational and apolitical. They work with willing land owners in voluntary transactions.

Land Trusts work in the green sector of conservation. They protect beauty in the form of natural areas. Land Trust projects are place based- connected to a specific piece of earth. Most Land Trusts are local, and may be associated with only one property or project.


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Farmland Trusts HF-003

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FARMLAND TRUSTS

"Nearly all farmland was carved from a wilderness of forests, wetlands, and prairie. Biodiversity has declined in the wake of the plow. The greatest challenge facing us, then and today, is to create an agriculture that is in harmony with the environment. One that feeds us without harming other human and natural life support systems. One that is sustainable, both economically and ecologically." So wrote Patrick Noonan of American Farmland Trust.

Farmland trusts see their mission narrowly. They're protecting farmland as farmland. In this they will succeed, to a degree. And they'll fail, because under current circumstances there is more farmland than is needed.

Conservationists need to look at farmland protection as one facet of land protection. Those of us interested in land protection need to try to make sure that WHEN this land is converted from agriculture as much of it as possible is put to some sensible use.

The best way to retain farmland is to ensure the profitability of farming.  But....

The first reason farming is not profitable is that the government wants cheap food. The federal government wants cheap food and cheap gas. When those prices rise voters get restless. The low profitability of of farm operations is the result of many government programs. The US government has been more successful than most in keeping it's subjects fat, happy, and on four wheels.

Another way in which farm commodity prices have been kept artificially low is by government toleration of large numbers of immigrant workers, often illegal aliens, who work for low wages and tolerate unsatisfactory, sometimes dangerous working conditions. The apologists for this kind of labor give the same excuse in the fields or in the slaughterhouse: "They are the only ones that'll do this kind of work." Left unsaid is the rest of the sentence, "at this wage, with the rest rooms locked and the safety equipment turned off".

Too much farmland is yet another way that farm commodity prices are kept low. Do we really need 65 percent of our non-federally owned land to be in agriculture? Obviously not, based on oversupplies of many crops and the inability of many farmers to make a living without heavy subsidies from the taxpayers. The reason we have too much farmland is historical. Farming is the way the country was settled. Farming was a way people could make a living. In 1900 over 40 percent of the US population lived on farms. In 1900, only 2 percent lived on farms. As a way of making a living, farming is now nearly insignificant.

The other reason farmland is in surplus is the increase in productivity that American Agriculture has achieved.  To be sure, part of this increase is illusory, based on large inputs of herbicides, fertilizers, and fossil fuel energy. More and more land is irrigated. In some irrigated regions the water table is dropping. Groundwater in some places is contaminated with fertilizer chemicals.

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The farmer who worked a farm two generations ago delivered eggs to families and traded chickens to the local grocery store for other supplies. He ground his neighbors' corn for their animal feed and their kitchen cornmeal.  The families of wheat farmer now eat wonder bread. They have no grinding mill, and they are to bust to bake. (3)


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Why Preserve Farmland- HF002

Why Preserve Farmland?


The farmers independence has gone. He buys what he used to produce. He sells raw commodities from which others make the profits he once made. The bank owns the biggest part of his farm, the children have moved to the city. A crop failure is no longer a time for belt tightening;  it's a disaster, for him and the American taxpayers, who pay even higher subsidies.

But myths die hard. For many farmers and many farmland advocates, the old idea that owning land makes you a free man lives on.  Saving the all-but-vanished farm culture is a powerful motivation for farmland conservationists. But there are also other reasons for thinking that we need to preserve farmland.

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The reasons for thinking farmland ought to be preserved tends to differ between farmers and non-farmers.  Farmers want to keep farmland so they can make a profit farming. Corporate farms have very little interest past the bottom line, but individual farmers usually also have interests related to a rural life style.

Non-farmers see farmland as important to the broader community. They see it as open space, scenic diversity, wildlife habitat, and as a living rather than a museum expression of one feature of regional history. As the farmland protection movement has developed, it has merged these two self-evident reasons.


Farmland also saves the local community money that would be spent in providing services to new residential development. Housing, commercial, and industrial developments cost communities more in services and infrastructure than they generate in taxes. Retaining farmland or any other open space more than pays for itself. Farmland that remains on the tax roles pays more in taxes that it requires in services.


Farmland keeps agricultural jobs. Farms provide jobs for the farmer, his wife, and maybe a few hired hands. But farms provide trucking jobs, wholesaler jobs, jobs in cereal factories, snack factories, sausage factories, and advertising agencies. They provide jobs at chemical companies, and in farm equipment manufacturing and sales, and at the loan office at the bank. Farms provide lots of jobs in the ag colleges, extension services, and in federal and state agriculture departments. Farming creates jobs, it's just that most of them are hundreds or thousands of miles away from the farm.

One more practical argument for saving farmland is that it retains an option. Granted that we have a surplus of farmland. But we should not let it be developed. If that happens, it's lost to other potential uses that may be more desirable in the future. This is not an argument for retaining farmland in production agriculture. Rather than growing surpluses of corn, soy beans, or watermelons, we should retain currently unneeded farmland in some sort of a soil bank. Someone, probably the federal Government, pays the farmer to keep the land in, say, native grasses. We should also view it as an opportunity to gain back some of the natural lands that were lost to agriculture during the past two hundred years.

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When novelist Louis Bromfield came home from Europe just ahead of World War II and returned to the Ohio land of his ancestors, he recreated at Malabar Farm the approach to  farming that most of us would like to keep in the American landscape. But Malabar Farm exists now only as a museum, and that kind of farming is as rare as a quilting bee.  (2)

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The History of Farming (USA) HF-001

The History of Farming

In the years following World War II, farm families increasingly wanted a standard middle-class life. Probably the single most important agent promoting the new materialism was television. Starting in the 1950's TV and the kind of life it promoted helped bring down the traditional American farm culture.

To make money to pay for the TV set, clothes like the other kids wore, and all the other middle-class trappings, farmers adopted the pesticides that the chemical companies began to push at them after 1945. Up until that time, most agriculture except fruit growing was "Organic"; it had never been any different.

Probably the strongest current in agriculture in the late 1930's and early 1940's was an environmentally sound approact exemplified by Broomfield's Malabar Farm. In an almost unbelievably short time, that current died. Nothing was left but the chemical tidal wave.


The pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers took over- produced by the chemical companies as substitutes for their wartime products. They are advertised heavily, and promoted by the Ag colleges who were, and are still, dependent on the chemical companies for funding.

A long and deadly cascade had begun. The chemically dependent farmer could obtain higher yields.  Farmers continuing to farm in the old way could still grow crops, but they couldn't make a living, at least not a middle-class living, in competition with the chemically dependent farmers. They fell in line.

With less dependence on manpower, farmers could farm more land, and they needed to. They borrowed money to buy land. To farm that much land, they had to have to have a big tractor, so they borrowed more money.

There was no need anymore for a a tree in the middle of the field where a team of horses could rest in the shade while the farmer ate his lunch. The grasses, herbs, and shrubs in the fencerows, and the fencerows themselves, were expendable. They took up room that could be in corn and were an obstacle to the big tractor and the new big corn picker.

There were costs to these things- interests to be paid to the bank, and many others. Pest insects became more of a problem as their predators were poisoned and the habitats of the predators were demolished. Birds began to die from eating the animals that ate the plants coated with pesticides. Soils became less and less living systems and more and more just dirt that held the plants up while they absorbed the chemicals the farmer had to add every year.


The extension service told the farmer that it was inefficient to raise his own pigs or vegetables or to have a little orchard. He could use that land to plant more row crops. When you take your time into account, the experts told him, it's cheaper to buy chicken already cut up at the grocery store. Leave raising chickens to the specialists. There was no room anymore for a general purpose farm.

So the 1950's brought TV, pesticides, and government policies that pushed a switch from agriculture as a  way of life to agriculture as a specialized business. Nothing has improved since.

"Adapt or Die" Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture told the farmers, and they have adapted to many unnecessary and dangerous practices. Most recently, they've adapted to high priced genetically engineered seeds developed by the chemical companies, which are also the seed companies now. The seeds don't grow better soy beans, but they're immune to the effects of the herbicides the company sells, so the farmer can soak his fields with it and not worry.

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Land Trusts generally tend to be cool, in the jazz sense. They approach their work in a relaxed, even mellow way. The supporters of Farmland protection, on the other hand, are often as intense as a chorus of Potato Head Blues" by Louis Armstrong. The natural lands conservators have been at it since the 1890's, when the natural lands were already being rapidly lost- often by conversion to farmland.

Another reason the urgency shows so clearly is that farmland advocates see themselves as defending not just land, but a way of life.  Almost no one would argue against the preservation of the family farms as advocated by Jefferson, Aldo Leopold, or Louis Bromfield.  (1)


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