With our definition of country living (country living is residing on the land and making a living from the land), we are able to distinguish between two different social-economic classes living in the country, the producers and the service providers. The producers are the first class essential to successful country living.
Primary producers.
To make a living from the land, a person has to produce a product that can be (in our capitalist economy) sold in the free market. The person (or family or farming organization) who works with the land and makes a product should be called the "primary producer". By primary producers, as distinguished from secondary producers, I do not mean to assign them greatest moral status; I mean they are primary, in the sense of first hands on the material that becomes the product. (It would be an ideological position to state that the primary producer is morally primary, as well. An ideological position or "story" about the primary producers is not unimportant in the marketing of their products, however; this is a matter we will take up later.)
Ken Burnside picking tomatoes, southern West Virginia, 1997. Library of Congress, American Memory Collection, Coal River Folklife Collection.
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A product is often, but not necessarily, a physical object.* The farmer, who is a primary producer, grows crops and raises animals to sell. The corn or lettuce or cow or milk or egg that he produces and sells is a physical object; but products of the land can be other than physical objects. If the farmer reserves 100 acres of pasture as a game bird preserve and sells access to it to hunters to shoot birds on it, the game preserve is also a product. If the farmer clears two miles of trails and lets a horse club ride the trails for a fee, the trails are a product.
Similarly, when a landowner sets aside a large forest and watershed as an ecological preserve, then sells permission to tourists to travel its roads and admire its beauty, the landowner is creating a product of the land. When a landowner of a mountain forest installs a winter snow skiing resort, the land owner creates a product, skiing recreation, that can be bought and sold.
The farmer growing crops, the owner of a game preserve, and a ski resort owner are all equally primary producers, as they are creating products directly from the land.
Dale Harwood demonstrates woodcarving, southern West Virginia, 1997. Library of Congress, American Memory Collection, Coal River Folklife Collection.
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There are, or potentially are, many other country producers, such as artisan weavers of wool from local sheep, artist potters using clay from local pits, miners of granite for kitchen counters from local quarries, wood carvers using local wood, and distillers of whiskey from local water. I wish here only to make clear the major distinction between primary and secondary producers and between producers and service providers. Extending the examples will be appropriate later in addressing the issue of increasing country production.
Secondary producers.
Arcadian Loom, late 1800s. Louisiana State University Rural Life Museum.
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Secondary producers are persons (or families or households or companies) who add value to the product created by the primary producer. The dairy, to whom the farmer sells raw milk, is a secondary producer. The dairy pasteurizes the milk, adds chocolate flavoring, and puts the milk in colorful containers, thereby making the milk transportable for long distances and attractive to a wider market of consumers. It adds value to the raw milk which is reflected in the increased market price the processed milk obtains over the market price of raw milk.
The designer or manufacturer, who prints patterns on textiles woven by local wool weavers or makes clothing or linens, is a secondary producer adding value to the wool textile.
The notion of value-added processing has recently received governmental approval. The term, value-added, is used to distinguish a value-added agricultural product from a commodity product, in which the identity of the contributors to the product are lost and the commodity products of different producers are the same across grade.
The National Commission on Small Farms (1998, p. 45 PDF format) recommended value-adding as potentially a major boost to small farm production and income. Since 2001, Congress has appropriated a small amount of funds for development of value-added agricultural processing industries, as part of an effort to assist economic development of rural areas. Rural manufacturing industries have been hurt by globalization of manufacturing in food and fiber industries (for example, North Carolina's loss of cotton textile manufacturing); value-added processing is seen by Congress as a means to offset those losses. Corn ethanol production is lumped into the category of value-added agricultural processing.
Bed and Breakfast Inn, Hillsboro, Greenbrier County, West Virginia
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I mean to expand the notion of adding value even further. A travel agency, for instance, is a secondary producer of land products intended for recreation tourism and eco-tourism. The agency packages, advertises, and sell tours of a wildlife conservation area, or weekend visits to bed-and-breakfast inns scattered throughout a pastoral farming county. It is adding value to the product, which is the conserved, beautiful viewshed. A travel agency that puts together winter skiing vacations is similarly a secondary producer for the primary product of the mountainside skiing resort.
Production for the free market is the economic basis of free country living. Production is a chain of value-adding activities from the planting and harvesting of crops and animals on the land, to their processing, to their packaging, to their advertising and marketing. Both primary and secondary producers are essential to the success of this enterprise (see Kenyon Butterfield, The Farmer and the New Day [1919] pp. 33-38 for a structured list of over 150 factors involved in the food chain from production to consumption). Production returns a stream of revenue to the producers that the producers then circulate in the regional economy by buying services.
You should note that it is somewhat controversial to classify, as I have, my secondary producers as producers at all; agricultural economists sometimes refer to them, as does the USDA, as "processors", or lump them in with service providers. I believe, however, when the natural history of a product from origination to market is traced, they are clearly in the line of direct value-added production.
The major example that I can bring from my own research concerns Southern California's historic citrus industry. In the 1890s, the region's orange growers organized themselves into processing and marketing cooperatives. Growers provided the capital to buy land, prepare and plant land, and grow oranges. Cooperatives, such as "Sunkist", usually provided harvest labor, processing of oranges in packing houses, and transportation and marketing elsewhere in America.
Packing oranges in a Sunkist co-op packing plant, Redlands, California, 1943. Library of Congress American Memory Collection.
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It would be a mistake to say that the cooperative added no value to the oranges. Oranges picked from a tree are not completely attractive products able to command a price high enough to repay their growing costs. The packing house washes and dries the oranges, culls inferior fruit, sprays the fruit with protective wax, sorts the fruit into different sizes, wraps each fruit in a colorful tissue, and packs the wrapped fruit in boxes or cartons with colorful art work identifying the "brand" of the growers. They have transformed the raw fruit from a commodity to a necessary luxury. This fruit is then able to command a high price in the competitive markets of the Eastern US cities, where it faces competition from Spanish, Australian, African, and South American oranges. The packing houses and market agencies are not simply "processors" of the value created by the growers, they add value to the value of the growers' raw product.
Historically, in Southern California, citrus the was first "export" crop that returned a stream of revenue that could be re-invested in social and economic development of the region. As citrus planting required land development, the citrus industry created and supported the enormous land industry--surveyors, lawyers, contractors, etc.--that made the region livable. Citrus preceded and was more important than the oil industry and movie industry until 1930, returning cumulatively about a billion dollars (historically an enormous amount of money) to the region in four decades. Both primary and secondary producers in the chain of orange production were (are) necessary to create the product that returns a high enough price to keep them all in business.
Service providers.
Mealtime for family and hired hands, 1939. USDA Historical Photo.
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Of course, a successful countryside contains more than producers. There are harvest laborers who are hired to pick crops, teachers in the country schools, clergy, merchants in the market town, highway workers maintaining roads, telephone and Internet engineers, elected governmental leaders and public employees running county and village governments, doctors and lawyers, police and sheriffs, contractors and construction workers, florists and seamstresses and plumbers, bankers, USDA agents, mechanics who fix tractors, and so on. All these groups provide services that enable producers to create the products that the region exports and sells. They are service providers and appropriately called, as a group, the service class. If the producer class prospers, the service class should prosper. If producers fail, service providers fail.
Service providers contribute to the success of the countryside economy, but their services could be diminished or even withdrawn for a period of time without destroying production. They are essential to the quality of life in the countryside, but not to the production process. In contrast, if the producers stop producing products, the rural economy, as a countryside economy based in the land, loses its revenue stream from exports and collapses.
Note that I have classified agricultural laborers in the service class, rather than separating them out as a distinct social-economic class. There are several reasons for this decision. First, in small agricultural operations, family members are often the year-round labor and clearly must be classed in the category of owner/producer. Second, a permanent labor class, resident in the agricultural region, exists in few regional American countrysides any longer. A (mostly Mexican) agricultural labor class resides in California's central and Coachella valleys, and (I suppose) in similar regions of Texas and Florida, but in most rural areas of the nation, this class is small, compared to the nonpermanent, migratory harvest labor force.
The distinction I have drawn between producers and service providers enables us to see where the effort and resources must be focused if country living (based in the land, as we have defined it) is to be revitalized. Producers must be enabled to own land and to grow, make, and sell products profitably. All else is secondary. Fix the producers first, then the other sectors of the country life economy should repair themselves.
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*In economics, nonphysical "products" are usually described as "services". I am, perhaps controversially, classifying nonphysical products as primary and secondary products for the purpose of emphasizing their relationship to the land. I restrict the term, "services", to production of qualify of life of country residents, regardless of relationship of the services to the land.
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Contents
A Theory of Rural Life
1. What is Country Living?
2. Social-Economic Classes.
3. Conditions for Successful Production.
4 pt. 1. Land-Use Stability.
4 pt. 2. Landscape Preservation.
5. Country Living Values.
6. What Are Values?
7. A Home Place.
8. Education and Identity.
9. Marketing the Countryside.
10. Conclusions and Recommendations.
(Revised, April 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 24, 2007.)
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