I cluster together, as intimately related, the three most important values of country living:
- ownership of land,
- home and family, and
- the aesthetic experience of the pastoral landscape.
These values are at the top of country residents' self-reporting about their lives. Their discussion is a common subject in magazines, such as Progressive Farmer and Hobby Farms, about rural America. The values show up at the top of surveys about the rural experience and their preservation is at the top of rural residents' concerns. Taken together, they identify the countryside as home--a place where we want to be, where we belong, and which belongs to us.
Ownership.
Farmers have long been motivated by the desire to own their land. Historical societies, such as France, British Ireland, Russia, and Mexico, which compelled farmers to work the land and denied them ownership were divided by social alienation. They usually suffered revolution. Division between the land-owning aristocracy and the serf or peasant, between the planter and the slave, between the landlord and the tenant, also alienated the farmer from the land. Without ownership, the farmer was not vested in the health of the land, but exploited the land as he exploited the peasant.
Family of Pomp Hall, a tenant farmer, has breakfast, Creek County, Oklahoma, 1940. USDA Historical Photo.
(Click on image for full-size in pop-up.)
America was the great exception to historical agricultural societies. In America, land was free or nearly free. It was so abundant, once the continent was brought within the national boundaries, that it promised a whole new social order for the Western world. Ownership of land is a fact at the center of the American experience of freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency. The National Commission on Small Farms was wise to make federal programs to facilitate access to land of the highest priority in national agricultural policy.
Ownership means more than simply possession of title to land. Ownership also means freedom to use the land and the right to pass the land to one's heirs through inheritance. Ownership must be secure from overly burdensome credit and mortgage arrangements that threatens the farmer's possession year to year. Ownership must be safe from condemnation by governmental authorities eager to expand residential development that brings higher taxes. The Kellogg Foundation found over-development and residential sprawl listed by rural residents as the second biggest problem faced by rural America. Also, land must not be so regulated and taxed that ownership is an empty right. Secure ownership is a key to stability of land use in the countryside.
The freedom to use the land as the landowner wishes, within wide latitudes, is the key to entrepreneurship. Farmers survive by adapting to rapidly changing markets. Experimenting with crops from year to year, changing the size of herds or changing breeds, managing crop lands and pastures through conservation and fallow periods, and crop rotation are strategies that should not require the farmer to ask permission from any authority. Governmental agricultural policy should give the farmer maximum flexibility.
Economic justice is also part of ownership of the land. A democratic society cannot tolerate economic arrangements that work to deny the owners of the land a fair return for their investment and labor. Fair revenue and profit for the farmer or the land entrepreneur is often listed as a separate worry and economic unfairness a distinct grievance; but they reasonably should be grouped within the issue of promoting land ownership.
Home and family.
A young farm family, circa 1940. USDA Historical Photo.
(Click on image for full-size in pop-up.)
Home making and family formation in the countryside setting are historically central to country living. A Kellogg Foundation survey of rural Americans found "A strong sense of family" ranked at the top of the words or phrases that best characterize rural America. A young couple venturing into farming for the first time, when asked about their motivation, say they do it for their child, to teach values important to them (Nicola Smith, Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm [Guilford, Connecticut, The Lyons Press, 2004]).
When rural residents speak of their worries, often threats to home and family are at the top of the list. Low Income, decline of small family farms, alcoholism and drug abuse, teenage boredom and pregnancy, and rural gangs, for instance, obviously threaten the home with loss and family with dissolution.
Farm wife and sister prepare midday meal, 1941, El Cerrito, San Miguel County, New Mexico. USDA Historical Photo.
(Click in image for full-size in pop-up.)
There is a greater threat to the home and family of country living, however, than intrusions of sprawl or city crime or human vulnerability to alcohol and drugs. The greater threat is lack of knowledge, lack of know-how, and lack of schools. For over a century, farm agencies, agricultural experts, and rural critics have pointed to the lack of knowledge on the part of the farmer and the lack of home-making skill by the home-maker as the source of the vulnerability of the small family farm to misfortune. Agricultural extension, teaching farming and home-making techniques, has been conducted by insurance companies, agricultural colleges, the federal government, farming organizations, and commercial seed and equipment companies. In the next article, we will discuss this problem under the country living value of education.
The country school is central to to maintaining the country home and family. The consolidation of country schools and long-distance busing of rural children to towns demoralizes rural families. Lack of public country schools inhibits young families from moving into the country. We discuss this issue in our discussion of education in the countryside.
Aesthetic experience of the pastoral landscape.
Beauty is a motivation to life. We live for beauty. The significance of beauty is more than our subjective pleasure. Without its pastoral aesthetic setting, farming is ugly. Without the participation of the pastoral in the natural environment, farming and country life are alienating.
Grazing pasture and Catholic Church cemetery, Fayette County, West Virginia
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Think of the confinement lots in which so many of America's dairy cows pass their lives. The animals stand in their own excrement, cleaned only when they are ushered into the milking barn. In California, one sees such feed lots from the freeways, with dairy cows, or beef cattle, or hogs standing atop twenty foot high manure piles, or after a rain, standing in a foot of manure saturated mud. It is to deny this palpable reality, so obvious to everyone in California, that the local milk advertisers spend millions of dollars on ads about California dairy cows living in green pastures under warm sun and blue sky. Our revulsion at the ugliness of industrial farming is equal to our pleasure at farming in the pastoral landscape where animals range free in pasture and field.
The pastoral landscape is a national resource as much as wilderness and managed conservation forest, prairie, and desert. It is at the center of the country living experience. It is at the center of humane farming. It is at the center of craft and artistic occupations derived from the land. It is at the core of America's self-image.
The pastoral landscape needs protection and revitalization. The best way to protect it is to have a vital farming economy which keeps the pastoral landscape under cultivation.
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 7, 8, 10, 11, 2007.)
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