In defense of farmland

Excerpt

ALTHOUGH many signs point to farmland protection as the principal land use issue of the 1980s, current economic conditions threaten to retard its public recognition. There is a tendency during hard economic times to tolerate the exploitation of resources in search of short-term advantages. Many farmers, suffering low commodity prices because of several bountiful harvests, have concluded that we have too much, not too little, farmland.

In the context of a troubled economy, farmland conservation has come to be a favorite target for many economists. Recent treatises by Julian Simon, Michael Brewer, Robert Boxley, and William Fischel provide the best examples of this phenomenon. The first complaint of these free marketeers concerns the statistical claims of the National Agricultural Lands Study. The economists want more and better data before enunciating policy. They also claim that the free market will adjust for significant losses of farmland, bringing “new” land into production and spurring greater production on the residual acreage. To them, there is no resource problem that cannot be addressed by the “ultimate resource” of human ingenuity. Farmland conservationists stand accused of falsely crying “wolf,” of fomenting unneeded public concern over a nonproblem.

These declarations have made it more difficult and more imperative to make the case for agricultural land conservation. And that case iests mainly on one word: …