At an earlier MLT meeting Maynard Kaufman agreed to
write to the American Farmland Trust for more information describing
their activities. Parts of the following article represents a response
to some of the data sent by the AFT. The article can also serve as a
position paper to generate further discussion and activities for
the Michigan Land Trustees.
-Sally Kaufman, Editor
"THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, THIS LAND IS MY LAND":
Some Implications of the Land Use Conflict.
Maynard Kaufman
Among its objectives Michigan Land Trustees promotes broader access to land and the development of self-sufficient communities, so that more people can enjoy living on the land, but we also promote the productive use of that land for subsistence and small-scale market production. Finally, we promote a sustainabie productivity, which implies the use of energy-conserving organic methods which minimize ecological disruption. These objectives can provide a context for us as we figure out how to relate to some of the larger issues implied by the dispute over land use which is now emerging in America. This dispute has evolved to the point where its main issues are fairly clear. The fact chat we are seeing an economic competition for land in this country does not simply imply that we are running out of land. Rather, the issues emerge as we ask how land should be used and whether the economic power to outbid competitors for land should be allowed to determine land use. Until fairly recently this had been assumed, along with the notion that land was private property to be used as the owner chose.
These common assumptions have led to at least two perceived problems: the concentration of land ownership into fewer hands and the conversion of farmland to nonagricultural uses. Most of us are aware of the first problem and our hope is that land trusts can curtail this concentration of ownership and give more people access to land. The second of these problems, loss of farmland, has recently been given much publicity and it deserves our careful analysis and evaluation. According to the prestigious National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS) which was sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, the Council on Environmental Quality and other Federal agencies, the annual loss of farmland in this country is three million acres, or about 12 square miles per day,The NALS publication, The Protection of Farmland: A Reference Guidebook for State and Local Governments, reviews the various strategies by which state and local governments have sought to preserve farmland. These include various incentives based on tax relief schemes, right to farm laws, etc., and land use controls usually based on zoning. In addition to such legislative efforts to preserve farmland there are others based on private initiative such as land trusts.
According to the NALS Guidebook farmland is lost mainly as a result of "urban growth pressure" which "can be compared to a great flood moving out slowly into the countryside raising land values as it goes" (p.16). Part of this urban growth are the freeways which link cities, shopping centers and industrial parks, easements for power lines and other direct results of urban expansion. But even more land is lost to "development", that process by which land value rises above what it is worth to farmers. It is then held for future development or "developed"—usually platted and sold in smaller parcels. In the past this has resulted in the growth of suburbs with residential units on relatively small lots.
During the past decade this process of "development" entered a new phase with an unprecedented migration from urban to rural areas. Rural sociologists refer to this as a "migration turnaround"1. The 1980 census showed that between 1970 and 1980 population in nonmetropolitian areas grew at a rate of 15.9% as compared to a 9.8% growth rate in metropolitian areas. This is the statistical way of saying that the past decade has witnessed a substantial back-to-the-land movement. In fact this growth in rural population is not limited to counties adjacent to cities, but leapfrogged into non-adjacent counties where the rate of growth was 14.2% as compared to 17.5% in adjacent counties. But both rates of rural growth are higher than the 9.8% rate of urban growth. This kind of rural growth has been called "buckshot urbanization". About three fifths of the nonmetropolitian counties in the country are growing at a rate faster than metropolitian areas.2 Many of these new country homes are located on 10 to 20 acre tracts and thus their impact on land use is considerable. The growth of jobs in rural areas, especially manufacturing, has helped to make this back-to-the-land movement possible. Over 40% of the housing conscructed during the 1970's was built on rural land and on relatively large sized Iots. And residential preference surveys show that this process is likely to continue. NALS projected that about 12 million new households will be added to non-metropolitian areas between 1977 and 19953. Hence the recent explosion of concern over the loss of farmland.
As we focus on the issues implied by this land use conflict we must be clear that "loss of farmland" means "loss of farmland to industrialized production agriculture" and if farmland is going to be "saved" for production agriculture several issues entailed with this attempt need to be identified and evaluated.
The basic issue is whether a spontaneous movement of citizens to rural areas, which implies more rather than fewer land owners, should be allowed to continue or not. The other side of this issue is whether the trend toward larger farms and fewer owners should be supported and protected so that a high level of agricultural productivity can be maintained. Let us consider this question first.
The issue here is whether USDA policies which have helped large farms get larger and generally favored agribusiness industries should be continued. We must bear in mind that the growth of agribusiness was not so much an economic process as it was the result of political decisions which opted for hyperproduction in agriculture rather than for farming as a way of life. These policies, incidently, resulted in what has been called the biggest internal migration in history. During the 20 years from 1940 to 1960 nearly 20 million people left the farm. The number of farms dropped from 6.5 million to 2.5 million in 1980. Rising levels of affluence in our society during the past few years has made it possible for many of these rural emigrants, or their descendents, to return.
The NALS generally reflects USDA policy as it recommends saving farmland, and it does so for three reasons: (a) to provide food and fiber for domestic use, (b) to produce for a growing export market, and (c) to produce for ethanol manufacture. These policies assume a continuation of the conventional market economy rather than a shift to a more mixed economy (to be discussed below) and the expectation of continued energy-intensive industrial growth. Both of these assumptions can be challenged and with them items (b) and (c) above. Production for the export market, which is expected to double during the next 20 years, now totals nearly 45 billion dollars per year and uses over a third of our cropland. This export crop helps to offset the cost of importing oil, but in doing so we maintain an energy-intensive lifestyle at the cost of a non-renewable resource, namely our soil. Soil erosion also causes the loss of productive land. The same is true if high agricultural production is maintained in order to augment our liquid fuels. As Wes Jackson argued convincingly in New Roots for Agriculture, this would press more marginal acres into production and thus accelerate soil erosion. Even the NALS "Final Summary" acknowledges that the forage land shifted into cropland would be more susceptible to erosion. In other words, "saving" farmland for production agriculture would result in the continuing loss of farmland through erosion, and erosion is already responsible for the largest share of production loss on farmland.
An alternative to this "business as usual" policy is to foster the development of a "metropolitan agriculture" in those areas where the conflict over land use is most acute. This problem is exemplified in an article in the February 20 issue of Michigan Farmer, "does this Farm have a Right to Be?" Here are ten-acre tracts of upper middle class homes except one ten-acre tract which is the headquarters of a large commercial farm operation renting much additional land. The rural residents are suing the farmer because his operation is noisy and unsightly. The farmer hopes the new right-to-farm law in Michigan will protect him. Large specialized farms seldom conform to the pastoral expectations of the urbanized rural residents, and the commerical farmers are threatened by this "rural gentrification" as vandalism increases and costs of land and taxes rise. As land trustees who want to see land used productively we must question this "rural gentrification", but at the same time recognize that it does represent broader access to land and the possibility of small-scale production.
A "metropolitan agriculture" is so called because it would be more adapted to chose areas now pressured by urban growth. And since such areas include at least one fourth of our farmland (more or less depending on the region) it is an important proposal. A discussion on the possibility of a "metropolitan agriculture" was published in American Land Forum (Fall, 1981), but the discussants, including officers of the recently organized American Farmland Trust, seemed unable to articulate a vision of what such farms would be like. Such a vision is more coherently emerging in the recent appropriate technology literature. An alternate agriculture which is sensitive to ecological considerations, energy-conserving, small-scale and diversified is in fact emerging on the urban fringe where it is best adapted. If it were promoted by public policy and given the research and direction now lavished on production agriculture it could produce food for the adjacent urban area and of course for household subsistence. This is the strategy of working toward regional self-sufficiency which is recommended by the Rodale Press Cornucopia Project as best able to assure a food supply under conditions of rising energy cost.4 Above all this vision of a metropolitan agriculture respects the choices citizens are already making as they buy their small places in the country. It would, in effect, make room on a policy level for rural residents and new homesteaders who already occupy the space and thus turn what some see as a problem into a solution.
The big question is whether policy makers can envision
an alternative to the market economy and relinquish their attempt to
control it. The desire to exert control over nature, manifest in
industrial agriculture, includes the attempt to control the whole
system of production and consumption. Policy makers seem unable to
trust decentralized food production systems even though they are more
flexible and adapted to regional variations. But we know this
alternative is emerging without any official planning (hence the furor
over the "loss of farmland") and we know that Americans are raising
their own food in record numbers. According to a survey by the National
Association for Gardening, reported in the March, 1982 issue of Countryside
magazine, 38 million American households planted food gardens in 1981.
This represents 47% of all households, and the produce of these gardens
was valued at 16 billion dollars. Another 13 million households would
like to have a vegetable garden but do not have the land to do so. 69%
of rural households raised vegetables and the growth of homesteading
activities centering on food self-sufficiency suggests chat many of the
new rural residents are using their small acreages for their own
subsistence if not producing a surplus for direct sale to consumers.
This movement toward self-provisioning is but one aspect of the growth
of the household economy in our time. And it is growing, despite
official policy to the contrary, as the market economy declines under
the impact of rising energy and environmental costs.
The mixed economy which is emerging will help to redress the imbalance and fragmentation created as the market economy nearly displaced the household economy. Through advertising we learned to depend on the market economy as it mediated between production and consumption- and restructured our values and needs so they could be satisfied by commodities. We are now witnessing the growth of activities which Paul Hawken, in a brilliant article in the Spring, 1981 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly called "disintermediative." While the GNP was expanding there was need for a host of intermediative goods and services in the industrialized food system and they in turn contributed to the growth of the GNP. Now, as that system has matured and begins it contraction, disintermediative activities are recognized as a survival strategy and this is what is implied by the flood of new rural residents attempting to resettle America. Dare we imagine that the spontaneous decisions of ordinary people are wiser than the deliberate policies of officials as theyseek to perpetuate an obsolete system?
Can we trust people in the new back-to-the-land movement to produce food for themselves and for their urban neighbors? Or must we have policies which save farmland for a production agriculture in which raw materials are produced and processed in highly concentrated and specialized units with industrial methods, distributed by a highly centralized market economy and then finally bought by consumers? Can we as a society plan for a better balance between the household economy and the market ecomony, or between local self-sufficiency with direct farm-to-consumer sales and centralized national marketing? If we can move toward this more mixed economy, which requires less processing and transportation and is therefore energy-conserving, there is less need to depend on agriculture for export or to produce for ethanol. Thus a more moderate and sustainable level of agricultural production is possible. And more people, rather than fewer corporations, will own and use the land.
Footnotes
1See Don A. Dillman and Daryl J. Hobbs, (editors) Rural Society in the U.S.: Issues for the 1980's. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), for reflections on the centrality of this demographic phenomenon.
2For a clear discussion of this phenomenon and statistics given above see Charles E. Little and W. Wendell Fleccher, "Buckshot Urbanization: The Land Impacts of Rural Population Growth, American Land Forum. Vol. II, No. 4 (Fall, 1981) pp 10-17.
3NALS Executive Summary Final Report, January, 1981, p.2.
4See the Rodale Publication, Empty Breadbasket: (1981) for a
full-scale review of actual and potential problems in a food system
based on production agriculture and the market economy.