Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

From: Prairie Writers Circle prairiewriterscircle@landinstitute.org
Subject: Op-ed: An America without farmers?

Dear op-ed editor:

In this Prairie Writers Circle essay (720 words including tagline), Deborah
and Frank Popper note the disappearance of the farmer in the United States
and other industrialized countries, and wonder what this means for the
future. The Poppers are authors of "The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as
Method."

Photos of the authors can be downloaded from our Web page at
www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/11/19/3fbba5e6326fc

Or we can e-mail an attachment: Write to granberg@landinstitute.org

Thank you.

Scott Bontz bontz@landinstitute.org

The Land Institute

785-823-5376

An America without farmers?

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had
a
chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for
substantial and genuine virtue."

-- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of Virginia"

By Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper

Prairie Writers Circle

In 1801, when Jefferson became president, 95 percent of Americans
essentially made their full-time living from agriculture. By the turn of
the
20th century, it was 45 percent, and by the turn of the 21st less than 2
percent.

In 1993 the Census Bureau stopped counting the number of Americans who live
on farms.

"Farm residence," it reported, "is no longer a reliable indication of
whether or not someone is involved in farming. ... The cost of collecting
and publishing statistics on farm residents and farmers in separate reports
could no longer be justified."

Over the past two centuries, the nation became urban, then suburban, and
now
increasingly exurban. Farmers, especially those who are small-scale,
full-time and living on their farms, have become politically and culturally
distant to most Americans. We still have agriculture, but it is mostly
large-scale agribusiness. There is little Jeffersonian farming, almost no
"labor in the earth."

The desertion of the small family farm constitutes the largest population
movement in American history. The small-farmer diaspora, here and abroad,
partly or wholly underlies other storied American population shifts: the
development of cities and suburbs, the settlement of the West, the late
19th
and early 20th century European immigrations to the United States, the
post-1965 Latin American and Asian ones, the black migration from the rural
South to the Northern ghetto, the rise of the Sunbelt, and even the growth
of military bases around the country.

The family farm is one of the last homes of old-school American ethnicity
and beliefs. In 1993 the Census Bureau found, for example, that farm
residents were almost all white, half lived in the Midwest, and their
households were 25 percent less likely than nonfarm ones to be headed by a
single woman. These differences from the rest of the nation have
intensified
over the past decade.

Many family farmers encourage their offspring to leave that life, and these
perhaps unusually deferential children listen. Why they should move on is
obvious. The United States is a nation whose metropolitan areas, despite
all
their evident problems, can offer better pay and more opportunity than most
of its countryside. This imbalance has existed for the nation's entire
life.
But it was nowhere near as large or visible in, say, 1960, much less 1880
or
earlier pioneer periods.

American small farmers are victims of the same impersonal national and
international economics that wipe out small banks, railroads, airlines,
newspapers and stores here and elsewhere. Farmers, like the others, have
responded to continued pressures for large-scale, homogenized production --

in farming's case, high per-acre output. Having only this aim, their
success
brings about the demise of most of them and their communities. American
small farmers now appear to be at the far end of a vast economic shift that
gives every promise of eliminating them.

A momentous transition looms. Although the United States and other First
World nations have been heading toward it since at least the late 18th
century, no nation of even modest size has ever explicitly chosen to
navigate it. No one knows the full implications of a farmerless America --
or a farmerless France or Japan.

Are there really the links Jefferson suggests between farming and virtue?
Does a domestic population working the soil ensure a nation's social and
physical health? What are the international and security consequences of
the
near-total disappearance of the farmer? What happens when the world's most
powerful country no longer has those who work their own land?

These are at least nation-scale questions, ones whose answers turn the
hinges of history. They obsess many farmers, their political
representatives
and their intellectual interpreters in this country and abroad. The
suburban-exurban America hardly notices. In its Information Age world the
farmer has mostly been gone for generations.

Deborah and Frank Popper are authors of "The Great Plains: From Dust to
Dust" and "The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method." Deborah Popper teaches
at the College of Staten Island-City University of New York. Frank Popper
teaches at Rutgers University. Both are members of the Land Institute's
Prairie Writers Circle, Salina,
Kan.___________________________________________