the ostrich rhumba and the realm of the inevitable

preserving farmland

Why on earth do we find ourselves needing to defend the concept that farmland is fragile and valuable? If our food does not come from here – your here, my here, every here – we are vulnerable. If our food always comes from there, somewhere over there, somewhere else, somewhere we have no influence over, we are vulnerable.

We trade off our farmlands at are our own peril. When we scrape off the invaluable top soil to make room for concrete pads and asphalt and buildings, as we’ve done at increasing rates for decades, we destroy cubic tons of our capacity to grow food, of our capacity to sustain life. We trade life for a convenient place to put a building or a parking lot. We should be putting our buildings and parking lots in those areas of the planet which have less or no capacity to sustain life. We should have reverence for that which sustains life. Our farmland should be a sacred preserve. No thing should rank above saving farmland, nothing. Over the years we have been involved in a variety of civic efforts to define and protect farmland from development. Early on I felt a disconnection between those who would protect” open spaces” at all costs and those who wanted to protect “farmland.” I have returned to areas of Lane County, Oregon and seen what has become of large tracts of land “we” successfully protected from development thirty years ago. Without exception they are developed now into housing tracts and shopping centers and industrial parks. Our efforts only succeeded in holding off the development until the pressures of land values and encroachment drew those “open spaces” into the ‘realm of the inevitable’. No effort in those doings had been made to identify the needs and aspirations of people who might actually want to farm the lands we wished to protect.

In order to protect farm land you must first value farming and farmers. Our farmers and our farming knowledge should be a sacred preserve. Consciously or otherwise, each of us holds within a priority or set of priorities which govern us and guide our choices in living. We must argue that those priorities cannot place money or law or leisure or power or fame above life. Our first priorities must always be about a reverence for the sustaining, fertile, balanced, lovely fabric of life, for the web of life, for the art and craft of life. That web of life does not exist for humans without our thin and vanishing layer of farmland. If we revere life, and we must, then it follows that farmland must be held in the same reverence.

In order to protect farmland you must first value farming and farmers. To set farmlands aside and say ‘these are protected -we will not develop here’ , without making it possible for the land to be farmed, is almost a guarantee that at some point this unused set-aside land will be developed. Every day logical arguments are made by expanding communities that nearby open spaces are valuable to the growth of that community. Open spaces with no designated or obvious use attributed to them other than that they be ‘open spaces’ are the first to fall to the planner’s gavel. So-called experts, sometimes of dubious distinction, are called before local governance to give clear and simple evidence that this open space can or cannot be economically viable as farmland.

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“Yes, you might be able to grow crops here, but who would choose to farm this close to neighborhoods, and anyway this tract of land is worth far more to the town for a sewage treatment plant, industrial park, school, shopping center and  housing than to grow a truck load of cabbages.” Seldom does anyone stand to speak in defense of farmland. Where will the food come from to feed these expanding communities? From Mexico? From China? From Africa? From Europe? We have forgotten to ask. Most of us want to believe that there are intelligent people in government and industry who will not allow us to go without food. That these critical answers are being taken care of for us, every day and every way.

If this were true then we would not be losing one child every 36 seconds to death by starvation all around the planet. It hasn’t hit North America yet; we are protected by our fragile credit/debit society. But at the rate we have sold off our  capacity to produce food it will hit here, and sooner rather than later. We are paving over our farmlands and we are neglecting our farmers. We need farmland upon which to grow food. And we need farming and farming knowledge in order to get the job done. Our farmland must be a sacred preserve. Our farmers and our farming knowledge should also be a sacred preserve. How’d we get here anyway?

I was not a farm kid. From kindergarten through my first year of high school, I grew up in Orange County California. We lived in Buena Park and Fullerton. It was the 1950’s and there were orange groves and, dotting my preferred horizon, dusty shaded Eucalyptus-bordered farmsteads with occasional chicken houses and paddocks. Loquat, tangerine and lemon trees gave a citrusy turpentine smell to the rough, dry dirt we played in as kids. During those years, not knowing life was different anywhere else, we took for granted this landscape, peppered as it was with construction sites. During that entire decade I can never remember a time when there wasn’t a whole block of new houses being built within ear and eyeshot. The sensation of conflicted borders stays with me; on my left orange trees in perfect receding geometric labyrinth for as far as I chose to imagine – on my right houses and streets jammed tight for as far as I might dread. It was as if I lived on a beach where a sea of citrus groves met the shoreline of housing. I, of course, as a child, could not imagine a time when either would win out over the other. The dual landscapes belonged together, or so I thought. I was wrong. The housing developments won out and the citrus disappeared. And the packed thrum of the southern California of today was born.

Back then there were three worlds with two dangerous jungles beyond the edge of our safe suburbia: one was the inner city where, as children, society led us to believe crime and anarchy ruled; and the other was that area of the wild unpopulated forests and deserts where bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters waited behind every tree and rock to tear us limb from limb. She, that changeling propaganda machine of ruling humanity, had our young attention, and society did not let the opportunity go to waste. We were also led to believe that, long ago and far, far away people actually cut the throats of animals, stuck them on sticks and roasted them over open fires for dinner. We called these people hunters (also savages).

When these savages got old they became lazy and cowardly and took to working in the dirt. They would actually yank roots from the ground and shake them off and eat them. If they had any extra meat or turnips they brought them to the edge of town and traded them to civilized people for bits of old canvas from which to make clothing. We called these unfortunate people farmers. They were them and we were us. We were darned glad, back in the wild and wooly 1950’s, that someone had invented large supermarkets where every kind of food was cleanly and humanely manufactured, without dirt or blood, for our comfort and pleasure.

Imagine the confusion and cataclysm when, as the 1960’s rolled in, we learned that all that had been a lie to keep us close to home. We came to find out, temporarily it seems, that the inner city and the wilderness were our soul defining friends and that suburbia was the center of bigotry, fear, and savage capitalism – the real jungle. So we grew our hairs long and ran to the woods to learn how to build a fire without matches, pluck a chicken, sing off-key, and recite Thoreau over bugdeflecting fires. Fortunately for the suburban masses not everyone left to embrace bucolic self-discovery; enough remained to assure a measure of continued avarice and inbreeding.

Meanwhile, concurrent with this fantastic saga of in and out, safety and danger, civilization and savagery, the vast majority of the landscape of the western world was thinly peopled by a third group of peaceable craftsmen, workers, agrarians, thinkers, artisans, gatherers, shopkeepers, bakers, candlestick makers. They lived in a world of balance with nature, orchestrating lovely multi-year adventures in husbandry and agronomy resulting in frequent bounties of food, fiber and fuel.

They formed little tightly knit communities or towns where small-mindedness was frequently seen for what it was. They  lived as though in spite of Realtors, brokers, attorneys, venture capitalists, politicians and school boards. We are speaking in the past tense here. We are speaking of our own third world in a better time, not one devoid of misery, mayhem and malevolence, but a better time nonetheless.

So for a piece, at least a couple of decades, people from each camp tried to understand those of the others. We’ll call it a short period of qualified enlightenment. During all of this time, during everywhen, the time before, the time then and the time just before now, there was one constant and it was the land. More specifically, it was the top soil. And with an even closer focus we might say it was that topsoil suitable for growing grasses and vegetables and fruits and nuts and mushrooms and herbs. It was that thin diverse layer of living particulate organisms which sustain life as we know it.

The corporate industrial monster has consumed and displaced millions of our third group of peaceable craftsmen and agrarians. They have done this by yanking the top soil out from under them. Now, today, we find ourselves returning en masse to the fog-shrouded suburban life-blind (as in duck-blind). We retreat to the false security of the huddle with our  styrofoam coolers, chips, and small electronic devices.

Some with scientific authority and sometimes unquestionable eloquence say it is too late for us humans. That rapidly diminishing oil supplies, global warming, deadly pandemic diseases, terrorism, and rule by idiotic pornocracy has destroyed life as we knew it on this lovely, lonely planet. Some go so far as to rather dangerously and arrogantly pronounce this as the will of God. But the vast majority do the ostrich rhumba, head in the ground and butt swaying to imagined drum beats. They are convinced that the culturatti are right and that so long as we imagine ourselves to be Britney Spears and Brad Pitt we are them, and life will continue in this mindless ostrich rumba until check out time, ‘which is a long time from here, thank you very much, see ya, like I really care’.

it’s all connected
Diminishing oil supplies? That’s real. Behemoth oil companies depend on business as usual and so must define infinite within their specific profit cycles; they refuse to deal with a time when oil supply as we have known it will cease. But we the people have to deal with it, sooner or later. As small independent farmers of imagination and pluck we have some ideas of how to deal with it; from hand tools, to bio-deisel, to oil seed crops, to methane, to animal power, to solar and far, far beyond – the possibilities are quite staggering and wonderful. In other words, many of us see local alternatives to the fuel shortage issue. And poetically, the end of the petroleum age WILL spell relief for the climate and for the environment just as it fractures the so-called global marketplace. As regions reach for the ability to feed themselves, oil will be less of an issue.

Global warming? No question about it, we are in the middle of the beginning of drastic and potentially devastating changes in climate patterns which our own government chooses to pretend isn’t happening. Can it be stopped? Yes, the Earth’s capacity to heal itself is beyond our understanding and perhaps even our influence. (If need be the earth will simply rid itself of us.) Steps are being taken by other nations to control harmful emissions. The scientific community is unified in its call for those corrections in the human global footprint that should slow and even stop the global warming process. But it is arrogant to think that what’s good for the planet and its future climatological histories are those things we want in our environment. Before modern man’s presumption of control, humanity had to live with the weather, whatever it was. We can do that again. And here enters the sweet ironic connection: as the petroleum shortage grows, climate affecting emissions slow. So diminishing oil supplies bode well for the environment. As regions reach for the ability to feed themselves through appropriate technologies and craftsmanship, the effect of global warming will be mitigated.

Deadly pandemic diseases? Once upon a time not so very long ago, the world was a vast network of interlocking yet separate communities. What reached Tibet from New Zealand came slow and small; what passed from Guatemala to Bosnia was of the smallest and rarest significance. Today, with the corporate blanket of markets and distribution, everything is available to go everywhere tomorrow. Pepsico and McDonalds and Archer Daniels Midland guarantee it. They are duty bound to leave no market unsapped. The various communities of man used to enjoy an insular nature which prevented many contagions from speedily covering the globe. Not so today. Many far flung factors affect the spread of pandemic disease, from the destruction of the rainforests to the unforseen consequences of genetic manipulation. As dimishing oil reserves and global warming progress, and as mega-corporations continue their inevitable progression to implosion, the world will doubtless get larger with more of its parts insulated naturally from others. And as diseases do flare-up and spread, they will have unfortunate short term consequences that will further progress the move to local self-reliance. As regions reach for the ability to feed themselves, disease will be less of an issue.

Terrorism? Many believe the current climate of terrorism to be the result of peoples, governments and business stepping on one another hard. As the conditions progress to push us towards greater local self reliance, it is my contention that terrorism will be less of an issue. As governments, religions and corporations back off of meddling in the affairs of other countries – something that will happen if only because it is not cost efficient to encroach, police, invade, enforce, and manipulate across continents and oceans – terrorism will diminish. As regions reach for the ability to feed themselves terrorism will subside.

Rule by pornocracy? Political expediency, that phrase politely excusing public sector cowardice, and political correctness, two perfect oxymorons, may be destined for the scrap heap soon. We are experiencing one extreme end of the political pendulum pointing to a severe over-correction to the opposite end except for some very difficult economic realities on the near horizon. Government as we have it now, over-run with failed businessmen and women who sell themselves for money, and a sham political expediency (prostitutes if you don’t mind), will not be able to handle federal entitlement programs. The most accessible (though certainly not the best) models for management of these enormous problems comes from the private sector, from highly successful businesses such as Toyota, Southwest Airlines, Dell Computers, etc. Moving government to the business model will reduce the rule by prostitutes and courtesans in the short run. In the long run it will render government as we have known it to be obsolete. Back to our subject at hand: this means to protect ourselves we will have to have a food system firmly anchored to local selfreliance because government will not be able to protect us.

So with all of the world’s ills I keep coming back around to our need for farmland and farmers. The future, I prefer to see, is ours. Independent farmers and good farming offer the greatest hope for humanity and the planet. And modern conditions suggest that an intelligent farming vocation may be highly lucrative in many different ways. But it all depends on that land base. We have to have the land.

what’s to be done about it?
Meanwhile, the race to subdivide and develop all farmlands near suburban areas continues at a fever pitch. Once the divining province of realtors and developers, it has of recent become a right-to-profit for most short-sighted individual rural property owners, good decent folks who invested for years in that piece of land and who feel they have the right to do whatever they wish with it. Dilema. Thorny dilemma with horns.

At the U.S. federal level, existing farmland preservation programs are being underfunded or cancelled.  No one in government is talking much about it. It seems the quokerwodgers we elected don’t see the glamour in the issue. In the state of Oregon, rigid land use laws worked, ostensibly, to protect farmlands by restricting lot size and construction on those areas designated ‘exclusive farm use’. For this purpose ‘farmland’ was legally defined. Nongovernmental organizations, some of them quite powerful and very exclusive, rose up to become defining watchdogs of land use restriction. Development was effectively halted. The concept, on the surface, seemed to work but, from the first, cracks began to form. The all or nothing mentality of the NGOs which provided NO exception to the rules prohibiting additional second family residences on farmlands, fueled the public notion that these land use restrictions were inherently unfair. After decades, those hairline cracks busted open with a successful initiative petition, Measure 37, which, simplistically put, forced the State of Oregon to compensate landowners who could demonstrate a loss of income from the development restriction. Almost overnight large tracts of prime agricultural land have become slated for subdivision and development. In one small area due east of our 1500 resident small town of Sisters, the applications as of June 1st, 2005, point to 909 proposed new lots and homes, expanding the population by 2 to 3 thousand people and destroying, for all time, that 2,000 + acres capacity and true viability as farmland. In my view we did that. Those of  us who worked to try to protect farmland over these last four decades. We did it, because we went ahead without thinking, without a plan, without a working set of goals, without flexibility. We poured money into our organizations, hired expensive,  aggressive attorneys, printed fancy brochures and took legislators out to dinner and lunch.We successfully argued points of law  and lost sight of the reason for the fight. We did it, because we so-called activists blindly pursued the absolute preservation of open spaces without a plan to encourage, advocate, protect and grow farming on those lands. And we did it by being blind to the  real needs of aging farm families who wanted to be able to add an additional home to the farm without subdividing the property. We did it, or didn’t do it. We had an opportunity in Oregon to continue to protect farmland and we may have blown it. My friend, the Central Oregon philosopher and hay farmer ,Tygh Redfield, said, “We fell asleep on this one and they blindsided us. I just hope it’s not too late. Don’t people realize that once these restrictions are waived we won’t be able to go back? It will be irreversible.”

Oregon has, under its belt, a fantastic head start towards the long-term protection of farmland. When it comes to land use planning, three plus decades had made this state a role model for the whole world. Now we are threatened by shortsighted assessments working to mitigate the effects of Measure 37 to make it so that the state does not have to pay anyone compensation, even if we must waive wholesale all existing use restrictions. Why aren’t we working to take this measure before the courts, to test this measure at all levels, and if need be, draft over-arching legislation which addresses all public concerns? The Oregon electorate did not vote to destroy for all time it’s sacred farmland base! Perhaps we need to fight initiative with initiative, give the state’s voters an opportunity to decide if farmland is something they wish to protect? Even if just for this moment, losing sight of the sanctity and frailty of our farmland base will spell disaster for us. It’s not like we can go back and reclaim all that land later. We cannot afford to stay asleep. In my view, the preservation of farmland does not come down just to suitable rules and regulations, it’s about cultural imperatives. How do we make it unthinkable to pave over our farmlands? Searching my mindscape for a correlation, I thought about Central Park and Golden Gate Park.

There is NO way anyone in New York City or San Francisco could get away with developing any piece of those magnificent sacred park scapes. I also thought about public cemeteries. Perhaps we should think about allowing communities to have several small cemeteries situated adjacent to or on prime farmland? Maybe if we built churches on the corners of our farms?

Perhaps we need to think creatively of how we might allow communities to think of our farmlands as sacred, as a public trust and as a point of pride like we do the great city parks, as we do with our cemeteries and houses of worship. After all, it is the farmland which sustains life, all of life.  I keep returning to the notion that we cannot preserve farmland without giving equal effort to the preservation of good farming and good farmers. Every person who eats owes his or her life to farmland and to the dedication and efforts of a threatened group of craftsmen we call farmers. LRM