Excerpt
WHILE the Food Security Act of 1985 was revolutionary in pairing production control strategies and broad conservation intentions, its effect in changing the appearance of rural America largely has gone unexamined. The look of the land may be critical to farmers' decisions to participate in key provisions of the act and to economic development benefits realized by rural communities. The potential to intentionally enhance the visual appeal of the landscape should not be overlooked as conservation provisions of the 1990 farm bill are developed.
The visible consequences of agricultural policy most appropriately are labelled aesthetic effects. The attractiveness of the rural landscape is a market externality. But it is integral to daily life, underpinning economic decisions about the land. Agricultural policy affects landscape aesthetics in much the same way now as it affected habitat and water conservation prior to the Food Security Act of 1985. Aesthetic effects result from current policy, but to date the policy has not been directed toward manipulating those effects.
Nonetheless, aesthetic effects unarticulated or cloaked by other labels play into agricultural land management and policy decisions. No one who …
Footnotes
Joan Iverson Nassauer is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, 55108. Contribution No. 17,480 of the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, based on research supported by the station and grants from the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs and the Soil Conservation Service.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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