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)
Wm G Center
Blog Index and Explanations
(2) Richard Brewer- Conservancy
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