According to a 2001 agricultural economic report, “urban expansion claimed more than 1 million acres per year between 1960 and 1990″ in the United States, and that expansion follows one of two two routes: 1. expansion of urban areas or 2. large-lot development (greater than 1 acre per house). (Heimlich 2001)
Land trusts throughout the United States have reacted to this trend of the loss of agricultural land to urban developers by working to protect farms and ranches (and some mixed-use tree farm operations) by creating easements for them as “working landscapes.” For purposes of discussion, forests have been teased out from the farm and ranching portion of ‘working landscapes’ since even, “Tree plantations are more biodiverse [than an annual crop], even though such plantations may be less complex than a ‘wild’ stand.” (Dekker-Robertson 1998)
Let’s not fool ourselves, no perfect solution exists (whether it be market-driven, government mandated or mixed enterprise) to our environmental needs for open space. On the contrary, compromises must be found. No right and perfect answer exists; only “good enough” exists.
At first glance, the creation of working landscapes appear environmentally correct. One would have thought allowing ranching and farming families to stay in business and ostensibly ward off urban encroachment would have been a good thing. After all, they are our neighbors and as such they hold a special place in our hearts (mine included). Now, I’m not as certain, at least from an ecologic or economic vantage point. Working landscapes now appear to be a form of environmental correctness.
What impresses me about the “working landscapes” solution is that it is neither government mandated nor is it funded by tax dollars (except to the degree that land trusts are tax-exempt as 501.C.3s). Farmers and/or ranchers who agree to a land trust’s requirements to maintain a working landscape bolster the land’s economic production.
What concerns me regarding “working landscapes” is that agriculture is arguably the most ecologically disruptive activities we humans engage in. There is no question that we are better off due to the invention of agriculture. Yet, we have become more efficient at growing food and fiber which means fewer acres are needed to grow food per capita. The upshot then is, saving a ranch or farm may not be our wisest course of action and freeing the land up for other uses (even urbanization) may actually be beneficial. As a result, working landscapes may not be better for our environment than urban development.
Proponents give an array of arguments for preserving, protecting, and maintaining working landscapes. (Arizona Land and Water Trust n.d.) (National Park Service 2008) (Morse 2010) These include preventing:
1. Loss of regional identity, distinctiveness, and character and its corollary loss of context for stories linking people to the land and an estrangement from the landscapes sustaining us
2. Unraveling of traditional social/economic relationships to the land and loss of special products of place
3. Loss of models in sustainable landscapes and living cultures
4. Fragmented landscapes
5. Loss of biological diversity
6. Food insecurity
7. Climate change
Below are my responses to each of these arguments and why I think they are overblown.
1. Loss of regional identity, etc.
Not just in the U.S. but also worldwide, the stories and the character of the land and those who work it are being lost. This comes as a byproduct of progress, the homogenization of time and place. Since humans began trading with one another and thus specializing in the products we did best, we have lost the ability and knowledge of how things are made. We have lost the ability to fashion projectile points from rock. The Stone Age did not come to an end from lack of stones; they were replaced by other and better materials and made into new products. Maintaining working landscapes to prevent loss of regional identity, distinctiveness, and character is, at best, a rear-guard effort that will devolve into a situation where tourists will stop to interact with docents who will explain how it used to be done. In other words, I believe that the working landscapes will become anachronisms
2. The unraveling of traditional social/economic relationships to the land and loss of special products of place.
The second reason to prevent loss of social/economic relationships for those “special products of the place” aligns itself closely to the first argument of preventing loss of place. Prevention again is a rear-guard action. As has been happening for the last ten thousand years because of trade and specialization, places are becoming more similar and less distinctive. Farmers, displaced from the ‘Euxine Lake’ when the sea level rose and broke through the Hellespont, brought their seeds with them, so Northern Europe lost its special products of place when the farmers planted the newer emmer and einkorn wheat grains. (Ridley 2010) The items we treasure as distinctive to place may not be as permanent as we would prefer to believe. Just because something is what we happen to have in our memory does not mean that it has always been that way.
As for those special products of place, we no longer manufacture Acheulian hand axes. After all Acheulian hand axes used to be quite special; the most important item for people, no matter the place, for one million years. (Ridley 2010) Yet, we no longer fret that no one uses them anymore. Once an item or process has been replaced, we have to move on–I do not see how farming and ranching is any different.
3. Loss of models in sustainable landscapes and living cultures.
The term “sustainable” is the term du jour and means many things to many people. Yet the loss of this “sustainable landscape” stems from its inability to provide an income sufficient to ward off other encroaching income streams: farming/ranching became unsustainable from an economic point of view. That is the land succumbs to its “highest, best use.” Rather than being something to mourn, the trade from one use to another may be a natural outcome toward greater sustainability. By trading land for money, the rancher or farmer may prove to be better off than before. “Interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is,” says Matt Ridley, “suppose your local wheat farmer tells you that last year’s rains means he will have to cut his flour delivery in half. You will have to go hungry.” Today, you benefit from a global marketplace; “in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations.” (Ridley 2010)
“Economists have long recognized the welfare gains from specialization and trade,” wrote Steve Sexton on the Freakonomics website. “The case for specialization is perhaps nowhere stronger than in agriculture, where the costs of production depend on natural resource endowments, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunlight, as well as soil quality, pest infestations, and land costs. Different crops demand different conditions and vary in their resilience to shocks. So California, with mild winters, warm summers, and fertile soils produces all U.S.-grown almonds and 80 percent of U.S. strawberries and grapes. Idaho, on the other hand, produces 30 percent of the country’s russet potatoes because warm days and cool nights during the season, combined with rich volcanic soils, make for ideal growing conditions.” (Sexton 2011)
4. Fragmented landscapes.
This argument makes little sense. Farming and ranching patch quilts our landscape. Farming is a disruption of a natural landscape (often through deforestation) to grow food or fiber. Today, much of our fiber, though not our food, can be made from petroleum products with a much smaller footprint than agriculture. Urban areas need much less space compared to agriculture. The urban areas in the United States occupy about 3 percent of the U.S. whereas agricultural land occupies nearly 50 percent. (Frey 1995) It would seem more advantageous to have land revert to its natural state through use of greenbelts around urban areas.
5. Loss of biological diversity.
This argument aligns with the previous: the loss of biological diversity already happened when the area changed to agriculture. Agriculture fragments and disrupts natural habitats. In addition, predators to the crop, flock or herd (which are often displaced by the agriculture pursuit) are subdued through mechanical and chemical means. Maintaining working landscapes means ensuring the loss of biological diversity, not preventing it.
6. Food insecurity.
The desire of the land trusts is to protect small family farms and ranches because they are close by and therefore can provide food and fiber. Steve Sexton, writing on the Freakonomics website says, “[I]mplicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a ‘relocalized’ food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.” (Sexton 2011)
And, as noted by Jesse Ausubel, this argument does not stand up: “For centuries, farmers expanded cropland faster than population grew, and thus cropland per person rose. When we needed more food, we ploughed more land, and fears about running out of arable land grew. But fifty years ago, farmers stopped plowing up more nature per capita. Meanwhile, growth in calories in the world’s food supply has continued to outpace population, especially in poor countries. Per hectare, farmers lifted world grain yields about 2 percent annually since 1960. Two percent sounds small but compounds to large effects: it doubles in 35 years and quadruples in 70.
“Vast frontiers for even more agricultural improvement remain open. On the same area, the average world farmer grows only about 20% of the corn or beans of the top Iowa farmer, and the average Iowa farmer lags more than 30 years behind the yields of his most productive neighbor. Top producers now grow more than 20 tons of corn per hectare compared with a world average for all crops of about 2. From one hectare, an American farmer in 1900 could provide calories or protein for a year for 3 people. In 1999 the top farmers can feed 80 people for a year from the same area. So farmland again abounds, disappointing sellers who get cheap prices per hectare almost everywhere.” (Ausubel 1999)
Lastly, the United States Department of Agriculture is not sounding the full alarm, yet: “[Urban expansion] is not seen as a threat to most farming, although it may reduce production of some high-value or specialty crops. [emphasis added] The consequences of continued large–lot development may be less sanguine, since it consumes much more land per unit of housing than the typical suburb.” (Heimlich 2001)
7. Climate change.
Preventing climate change (by proclaiming his pet project prevents it) seems to be the last bastion of the scoundrel. Whereas it used to be that everything caused pollution, it now gets weighed by its “carbon footprint.” Sexton says this about the advisability of small farms for lowering carbon emissions, “The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser estimates that carbon emissions from transportation don’t decline in a locavore future because local farms reduce population density as potential homes are displaced by community gardens. Less-dense cities mean more driving and more carbon emissions. Transportation only accounts for 11 percent of the carbon embodied in food anyway, according to a 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon; 83 percent comes from production.”
Summary
So, to a Physiocrat or Romantic, preservation of so-called working landscapes may make sense. They preserve viewscapes, allow a traditional way of life to continue (ranching and farming), help our agricultural neighbors survive in these difficult economic times, and help maintain a region’s distinctiveness and character.
However, from an ecological and economic perspective maintaining agricultural holdings makes very little sense. “The worst thing for the environment is farming,” says Dr. Pamela Ronald, “It doesn’t matter if it is organic [or conventional]…You have to go in and destroy everything.” (Voosen, 2010) We currently use nearly 40% of Earth’s ice-free land for our food and fiber needs. According to one source, that’s an “area 60 times larger than the combined area of all the world’s cities and suburbs.” (Wilcox 2011)
If the area figure cited is even close to true (and it appears that it’s close to the mark), then it is more beneficial to allow farms and ranches to revert to wildland (and urbanized area), especially if they are not economically viable.
Sources
- Arizona Land and Water Trust. Working Landscapes. http://www.alwt.org/whatwedo/workinglandscapes.shtml (accessed November 2011).
- Ausubel, Jesse. “Resources are Elastic.” Earth Matters pp. 46-47, Winter 1999/2000.
- Dekker-Robertson, Donna, Libby, William J. “American Forest Policy: Some Global Ethical Tradeoffs.” BioScience 48, no. 6 (June 1998).
- Frey, H. Thomas. “Trends in Land Use in the United States.” In The State of Humanity, by Julian Simon, 435-440. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1995.
- Grewell, J. Bishop. “Farming for the Future: Agriculture’s Next Generation.” PERC Policy Series, September 2002: 32.
- Heimlich, Ralph E. and William D. Anderson. Development at the Urban Fringe and Beyond: Impacts on Agriculture and Rural Land. Agricultural Economic Report No. 803, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2001.
- Morse, C. E., Kujawa, R. Strategies for Promoting Working Landscapes in North America and Europe. Vermont Council on Rural Development, Vermont Council on Rural Development, 2010.
- National Park Service. “Executive Summary, The Future of Working Cultural Landscapes: Parks, Partners, and Local Products October 21-22, 2008.” The Future of Working Cultural Landscapes: Parks, Partners, and Local Products October 21-22, 2008. National Park Service, 2008.
- Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2010.
- Sexton, Steve. The Inefficiency of Local Food. 11 14, 2011. http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/ (accessed 11 14, 2011).
- Voosen, Paul. Can We Feed the World Without Damaging It? January 4 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/01/04/04greenwire-can-we-feed-the-world-without-damaging-it-99381.html?pagewanted=all (accessed November 28 2011)
- Wilcox, Christie. Science Sushi Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture. 07 18, 2011. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/ (accessed 11 27, 2011).
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein
I am glad Michael brought up the subsidy issue–Planet Money on NPR did a series last summer where they tried to get a t-shirt produced by following a bale of cotton from the field, to the cloth factory for weaving, to the sewing factory and finally to them. They had a segment on cotton subsidies in Texas that really burned me up. Planet Money also did a piece on subsidies as they affect trade through a piece about how Brazil brought a complaint to the WTO against the U.S. for unfair subsidies, and our government blows off such complaints and does not pay the fines or comply with orders once the WTO finds that we are unfairly subsidizing certain industries.
Best,
Mary
As Baylen J. Linnekin, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Keep Food Legal, points out in an editorial in the Baltimore Sun,
I think the emergency has been over for a while.
Hello Timberati,
Obviously my challenge fell far short of the mark to change any of your beliefs. I spent a short amount of time trying to gather data to support some of my health claims using what we could probably both agree are unbiased sources. Indeed, it is difficult to quantify my beliefs with data, but, I am going to work on this task and will let you know, if and when, I come up with something. The danger in this type of endeavor is staying objective when ones mind has already reached a conclusion and you are now just looking for confirmation.
On the other hand, I will have an easy time showing the degradation to the environment of large-scale industrial farming. The use of artificial fertilizer and the pollution caused in the Mississippi River delta, as an example, is well-documented. I will work on some kind of summary showing those effects and why smaller type farms can be run more efficiently when the environmental consequences are entered into the equation. The problem with single crop large scale farming is that the consequences of those operations is not entered into the economic equation and thus their true cost is understated. Another area ignored are the governmental subsidies to these operations that are also usually not considered.
Your beliefs around interconnectedness as espoused by Ridley are well stated and I agree with that rationale to a point. However, I probably draw the line in a different place than you regarding the cost/benefit of this activity and that is another challenge for me to articulate.
Thanks for entering into this discussion and hopefully you will not tire of a respectful and thoughtful interchange of ideas and information.
Michael,
Again, thank you for entering into an earnest discussion. I look forward to your arguments/apologia.
Best regards,
Norm
The arguments that say the benefits of local agriculture and small farms are overblown always miss the point of the food quality. The arguments like those cited above from Sexton completely ignore that specialized food production by large scale enterprises produce an inherently inferior product.
The food I buy from my local farmer is organic, raised on land that does not use synthetic fertilizers (oil), and tastes much better. In addition, the meat I buy from local producers that is grass-fed, organic, hormone-free is undeniably healthier for me as well with the perfect ratio of Omega 3-6-9 for my body and no chemicals my body does not need.
Have you read the Omnivores Dilemma? To me, the arguments for Polyface type farms are so overwhelming that how large-scale single crop industrial farming could be held up as the model in the face of data showing the environmental degradation along with the poorer food quality of those types of practices just smacks of selective data mining to promote a preconceived position.
And, beyond all those economic and health arguments, is the issue of our connectedness to the place we live. Humans are biological creatures and for me, the more I garden and work in the soil to improve it and watch it grow the food I consume the more integrated I feel. Sure, this is my one-person perspective, but, that is more real to me than reams of data from people like Sexton trying to convince me industrial food models are what we need. Plus my connections to the people locally that produce the meat, vegetables, egg, dairy and fruit I consume are precious – if you do have those types of human connections to food producers you are missing one of the major components of being a healthy and integrated human being. As sure and clean and water are an essential human need, being tangibly connected to our food sources is a basic need.
Michael,
Thank you for your comments. Your passion for food, the earnest civility you use to present your arguments, and the lack of any ad hominem, make your comment exemplar.
I did not respond immediately because your concerns deserved thoughtful and serious consideration. After all, I have a number of friends who swear by organic food and won’t buy anything else. So, is organic superior to conventionally raised food? Well, such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far, there is not only little extraordinary evidence, there is zero extraordinary evidence that organically grown food is any better for you than conventionally grown food. I have visited Scientific American, the US Dept of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, and public health sites from France and Great Britain. They all agree: there are no health benefits from organic food and there is no taste difference. As for your meat, it cannot be hormone free. All plants and animals produce chemicals (aka hormones) in their cells to turn on or off other functions in other cells. We eat chemicals every day and hormones are chemicals.
“And, beyond all those economic and health arguments,”you commented, “is the issue of our connectedness to the place we live. Humans are biological creatures and for me, the more I garden and work in the soil to improve it and watch it grow the food I consume the more integrated I feel. Sure, this is my one-person perspective, but, that is more real to me than reams of data from people like Sexton trying to convince me industrial food models are what we need. Plus my connections to the people locally that produce the meat, vegetables, egg, dairy and fruit I consume are precious – if you do have those types of human connections to food producers you are missing one of the major components of being a healthy and integrated human being.”
If you think about your proposition, I believe you will agree that it’s not possible to know more than a handful of the people supplying you with your–bananas, walnuts, pears, papayas, wheat, barely, rye, oats, artichokes, oranges, apples, plums, soy (tofu), grapes, peanuts, lentils, peas, coffee, tea, rooibos, chamomile, salt, pepper, cumin, chiles, oregano, chickpeas, chicory, wine, beer, olives, olive oil, mangoes, cashews, almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkins etc.? You get the idea. Your food comes from all over the world. Indeed, you know people from whom you get your food. That’s good. My neighbors grow grapes for wine, and they grow pears and walnuts. Yet there are other foods and fibers you and I get from elsewhere. This commerce connects us to people all around the globe. We may help poor farmers in South America and Africa who grow food that we cannot if we buy food not grown within an artificial radius.
Though I completely disagree with your positions, I respect your sincerity and commitment to doing the right thing. I also appreciate your eschewing the use of ad hominem argument that too often passes for dialog in too many discussions. My commitment to the earth and its health are central to my being. I am a forester. I have made my living being connected to earth and the trees that grow in it: knowing their growth rates, their needs, likes and dislikes, what harms their growth and what helps their growth. Many ways exist for us to connect to our environment and our fellow humans. In my mind, the desire to not see excessive land cleared for agriculture is at least as connected to the environment as wanting to grow one’s own food.
For reading material, I recommend to you Matt Ridley’s, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, because your tenets will be challenged. He argues that the less independent and less self-sufficient we become and the more we rely on others (people, companies, nations) for our needs, the better off we (humans, plants, animals, land, ecosystems) all are, and will be, forever. He says we are living better, living longer, and the planet is healthier because of our interdependence…The reason circumstances have improved for us and our world is that we’ve moved from being hunter-gatherers needing lots of land, to being specialists needing much less land. And the big reason for this specialization was the invention of exchanging one thing for a different thing. No other animal on earth trades one thing for something else and trading certainly does not happen outside of the group. Trade is quite different from reciprocity, which is “you scratch my back, then I’ll scratch your back.” Trade involves things that are different. And trade has allowed all who do it to specialize and be better off.
Again, Michael, thank you for your civility while challenging my tenets.
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With modern agriculture, more crops can be grown on less land allowing farmers to provide an increased supply of food at an affordable price.
True.
Check out this graphic: http://percolatorblog.org/2011/11/18/feeding-more-from-less/