Lucknow Farms

'Cow Tax' Would Further Cripple Small Farms

The Supreme Court last year ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate the gaseous emissions from farm animals and from manure if it finds that those emissions are toxic. This has led to proposals for taxes on agriculture, on a per animal basis, and for control of animal wastes in ways that remove offending gases from the atmosphere. Such proposals, even with a break-in threshold for the regulations, such as twenty-five dairy cows, will further cripple small farming. And on the revival of small farming depends the preservation and, hopefully, the renaissance of rural American life. Such EPA regulations would continue and strengthen the USDA policy, in effect since the 1940s, to destroy small farming in favor of large corporate farms.

Progressive Farmer Poll on Issues of Farming and Rural Life

The Progressive Farmer commissioned a poll on farming and rural life by the Zogby opinion polling organization. Three thousand adults living in rural America were interviewed. Politically, they remain overwhelmingly Republican (50% support McCain; 35% support Obama; 11% indicated "none of the above"); but their main concerns are the economics of farming and rural living, not political ideology in a philosophical sense. The rising costs of production inputs, such as fertilizer, and rising land costs and land rents are squeezing farming profits, even as commodity prices rise.

A question that interests me concerns land use: "What, if anything, is deteriorating landowner rights?" The answers:

• Increased government regulations -- 61%
• Land-use restrictions -- 51%
• Environmental restrictions -- 50%
• I do not think landowner rights are deteriorating -- 17%
• None of the above -- 2%
• Not sure/other -- 20%

On issue statements, to which the interviewee could agree, disagree, or indicate not sure, taxes and education obtained overwhelming assent.

"The amount of taxes people pay does not match the services provided by the government"

• Agree -- 81%
• Disagree -- 16%
• Not sure -- 4%

"The quality of rural education needs to be improved"

• Agree -- 72%
• Disagree -- 23%
• Not sure -- 5%

Pew Foundation Study: Factory Farming Harmful to America

The Pew Foundation has released a study of the effects of factory farming on American agriculture, environment, and rural life: "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America". Basically, the study finds that concentration of livestock in industrial factory-sized farms imperils the biosafety of the animals, makes our food supply unnecessarily vulnerable to disease and disruption, pollutes the environment, and impoverishes rural life.

The Pew study supports my conclusions and recommendations in my discussion of local food and rural America.

The executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, Robert P. Martin, provides a synopsis of the Commission's findings in an op-ed article, "Reject Mega-Farms", reprinted in The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California, Wednesday, May 14, 2008, B13.)

Updated. May 16, 2008.

Designer Food and Local Food

America's sit-down restaurant scene has dramatically changed over the past generation as the wealth of patrons has made possible more expensive dining. It is not simply that the dining rooms have gone upscale with the addition of demonstration kitchens, theme bars, bakeries, delicatessens, gift shops, and other food emporiums to entice diners, or that the menus have expanded to the size of novels.

The understanding of what restaurant food is has also changed. America once had a straight-forward expectation of restaurant food. There were traditional restaurant foods, which were basically foods that women cooked at home with ingredients available in local markets, but cooked by a professional chef better than mom could. There were ethnic restaurants, which served Americanized cuisine comprised by the foods brought to America by major immigrant groups. Italian restaurants are the paradigm example. These foods, too, were often versions of foods prepared in home kitchens. Upscale Americanized foreign food restaurants, such as French and Chinese restaurants, served foods not generally on the home menu; but adventurous home cooks might try to prepare them, following, for instance, Julia Child for French food and Virginia Lee for Chinese food.

To the traditional scene has been added two new approaches to food--designer foods, which I call "concept food", and provenance food. Designer foods are seen most frequently in the franchise and chain restaurants that have now flourished around the country, such as Applebees and Cheesecake Factory. Designer foods are imaginative fusion of flavors from everywhere and anywhere, coupled with colorful, appealing plating. Often you can guess the initial inspiration for designer dishes. A designer chef says, "Let's start with spiced ground Thai peanuts and see if we can find an Italian pasta that fits with it." Or "I love the way the Rio Grande cafe in Galveston used chili paste on steak; lets see how it works on Thai farm shrimp." The ethnic or local or immigrant or foreign food source is quickly lost in the designing of the dish. The dish has no obvious connection to the place in which the restaurant is located. The dish is invented by a professional designer chef, probably in the corporate headquarters of the restaurant chain in New York City, with advice from marketing and advertising consultants and refined in test restaurants on unsuspecting diners. It is often delicious, but it makes as little sense that the dish is served in Wheeling, West Virginia, as it is in San Francisco, or Portland, Maine.

The other new approach to dining food I call "provenance food," which includes local foods and heritage foods. Provenance food reflects the agriculture of the region in which the restaurant is located. It reflects the seasonality and local availability of fruits and vegetables, meats, sea food or fresh water fish, fowl, herbs, sweetners, spices, dairy, smoking woods, and beverages. 

Just as American wines have evolved from generic replication of European wines to become varietal wines tasting of the local climate and soil (vin du terroir), so local restaurants are appearing to pay the same respect to local ingredients. The ingredients are fresh and organic. Dishes are prepared to enhance the natural flavors, rather than obscure them with spices and sauces. Pork, for instance, is a meat that tastes of the food in which the pig is raised. Feed lot pigs produce a lean, undistinguished white meat; but pigs allowed to forage in local woodlots, will taste of acorns, for instance. West Virginia's Department of Agriculture is encouraging its farmers to move to local browsing to produce pork for an emerging appreciative restaurant palate. Menus reflect the seasonality of the region. Wild Venison (or farm venison), wild mushrooms, and wild onions will make their appearance on the menu. Raw cows milks and goats milks, redolent with the seasonal flavors of local graze and browse, produce fresh soft cheeses. We should expect to see innovative restauranteurs experimenting with heirloom varietals of livestock and authentic historical recipes. The Food Network television programs have even encountered restaurants serving canned and preserved local foods for out-of-season menus.

The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy* is involved in sponsoring revival of heritage foods, as a means of encouraging farmers to raise heritage breeds of livestock.  In the November-December, 2007, issues of its newsletter, it reports that it cooperated with the New England Culinary Institute for a conference, Essex Junction, Vermont, on Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT). The goal of the conference defines the movement for food true to its provenance:

"The goal of the workshop, the fourth such regional workshop, was to identify which foodstuffs and ingredients are unique to the region or key to its culture and cuisine, and to determine which of those foods and the cultural traditions associated with them are at risk and in need of conservation, revival, and renewal. These efforts must capture the synergies among those already involved in eco-gastronomic conservation to gain more publicity and resources for their grassroots efforts." (P. 12)

Strictly speaking, local food restaurants are not reproducing home kitchen menus. The nationalization of American agriculture through refrigerated rail car transportation and commodification of most major food, such as beef and pork, eliminated regional foods by the early twentieth century for the mass of American homes. Recently, the globalization of foods has even destroyed seasonality in the food market. Beautiful, crisp, tasty apples from New Zealand or Peru are available in the North American Winter. California lettuces adorn supermarket shelves twelve months a year. Brazilian citrus appear a week after harvest to provide fresh oranges year-round. Home cooks use these foods and ingredients, erasing the vestiges of local food at home. The local food restaurants are therefore involved in local historical food revival and preservation. They bring back what is no longer practiced and consumed. Their menus are more akin to revivals of folk music and dancing, local crafts, and regional literature. They are bringing to their restaurant patrons the authentic voice of the local heritage.

The emergence of local restaurants serving provenance foods of their regions is an exciting and wonderful addition to the dining scene. Cuisine has always been a door through which to participate in and enjoy new cultures. Provenance restaurants should become key participants in the revival of American local, folk cultures and rural life, just as restaurants serving organic foods have been crucial to the restaurant food revolution since the 1980s.

*American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, PO Box 477, Pittsboro, NC 27312 USA

Revised, November 13, 2007. 

Foliage on Our Farm

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Latino Agricultural Labor Brings Unwanted Social Problems

In an American Thinker article about inappropriate rural political correctness, the author provides a glimpse of the social disorder--e.g., gangs, drugs, crime--that comes with employing immigrant Latino labor for rural agriculture and food processing plants. Rural America has to think harder about how to obtain its agricultural labor, or it will make rural America not worth living in.

Rural Public Schools Are Better Than Other Public Schools

Progressive Farmer discusses a study by the National Center for Educational Statistics on student performance in different schools. NCES has recently changed its classification of schools by locale. It now has four major categories of schools--urban, suburban, town, and rural.(Before 2006, NCES used three categories--central city, urban fringe, rural.) The NCES reports that rural school students are "testing better in science, math and reading skills than urban students. They particularly excel in science, surpassing even suburban students" (Natalee Singleton, "Rural Students Have the Answers," The Progressive Farmer, September 2007, p.8. The original report by NCES is here.)  Singleton is modest, though accurate here. Rural school performance is generally only slightly below that of suburban schools; this is an extraordinary achievement.

Rural parents who are under pressure to consolidate rural schools into towns should use such statistics to support the educational viability of rural schools. School consolidation is usually justified in terms of the educational benefit to students of larger, central schools. Large consolidated schools have more resources that students need, so the rationale goes. In few subjects, however, are such resources needed. I agree that it is possible to argue that, at the secondary level for AP classes in physics, chemistry, and biology, bigger enrollment schools can provide expensive laboratories and sophisticated equipment for experiments that small rural schools cannot. It is also possible that this argument is overplayed. Most of the work in those sciences can be taught well and effectively with a minimum of equipment. Rural schools have the advantage for biology of field observation not available to urban and suburban schools. In addition, the bruited advantages of consolidated schools are lost by the large amount of time students must spend on buses, which is time they cannot study or participate in sports.

Consolidation of schools has always been largely driven by factors other than pedagogy and learning. It is driven mostly by an industrial ideology that claims that centralized administration is the best way to organize bureaucratic organizations. But this ideology is wrong from the outset. Education suffers when learning is put into the context of bureaucratic organization and perceived as an industrial enterprise.

In the past generation, it has been argued that consolidated, large schools are necessary to provide a learning environment of student diversity, that is, racial and ethnic mix. The major argument against such reasoning is that Brown v Board of Education did not, as the Supreme Court has recently ruled, establish racial identification or skin color as a scheme of classification for school boards to create school district lines or artificial school enrollments; indeed, of course, the 1954 decision sought to prohibit such classification. We should not be afraid that having small rural schools would lead to another era of racial classification, with rural black children attending underfunded, de facto segregated schools, while white students attend modern, well-equipped, de facto segregated suburban schools. Surely we are capable of devising arrangements that would avoid this situation. If diversity is so important to school administrators, let them institute reverse busing, where white students from suburbs would be bussed, likely against their will, with rides of 1 to 3 hours each way, out to small, rural schools that might have a majority of black, Hispanic, or Asian students. Such a policy would of course be greatly resisted by suburban families and would, thereby, tear the veil of hypocrisy off the diversity ideology.

The most important relationship in schools is student to teacher. The central empirical finding on the learning environment is that student teacher ratios less than about 13 students to 1 teacher produce greater learning than higher student teacher ratios. Above 13 to 1, learning suffers and it matters little whether the ratio is 35 to 1 or 25 to 1. This low ratio is why expensive, private schools have better achievement by their students, because private schools seldom have classroom ratios higher than 13 to 1, and often less than 10 to 1. Rural schools, being smaller, have lower ratios; this is why their students perform better. Other factors, such as greater parental involvement, support this ratio, but without it they cannot substitute for it in boosting student performance.

Even small rural schools of one or two rooms, where a teacher might have 30 students in three or four grades in one room, can offer smaller student-teacher ratios. The teachers in such schools divide up the students into grade and interest levels, which brings the ratio down. Teaching assistants, such as educated rural parents and professionals, such as ministers, could assist the small school teachers with tutoring, setting up laboratories, and grading. Their assistance would make little difference in the large urban or suburban school, but in the small, rural school, it would greatly help the children with special needs. The notion that the "one room school" is not as good as the consolidated, centralized school is simply not true--or, perhaps more accurately one would say, does not have to be true. Given a reasonable budget and good teachers, rural schools can do well by their students.

Rural society needs small, rural schools as a core institution. Without schools, families will hesitate to live in rural areas. With schools, rural society and culture becomes alive and vital. Rural families must fight for schools. They must resist the false accounting measures that state legislatures use to destroy their schools.

Use Tax Vouchers to Restore Rural Social Life

I have argued, as have many people, that closing small country schools destroys a major foundation of country life. The large context for such cultural destruction is the state mandated centralized education. The mandate, which covers everything from minimum class size and racial balance to curriculum and standards to school cafeteria food, accompanies state tax funding of local education.

Two instruments must be created to counteract the pernicious effects of school centralization. The first instrument is to change state educational codes to separate out our country public schools, giving them a special set of guidelines they can meet. They should be freed from the county or city-based school district boards. Country schools could be conceived something like California's charter schools, which are quite successful.

The second instrument is tax vouchers. Rural families should be given vouchers for their tax dollars to spend on their education. They should be permitted to pool vouchers to fund public country schools or to attend private schools.

When country schools are preserved, other rural institutions can flourish. If educational vouchers would work, why not tax vouchers to support country medical clinics and visiting nurse programs, and food and clothing cooperatives associated with low-cost retailers such as Wal-Mart, for instance?

We need to recognize that state-mandated centralization of services is a significant force causing the deterioration of country social life. It makes sense to return decision power to rural families to invest in country institutions they see as crucial to their way of living.

Agrarian Suburban Developments

The Wall Street Journal profiles four subdivision developments built around agriculture (Sara Schaefer Munoz, "For Sale: Condo W/Chicken Coop", Wall Street Journal, Thursday, May 17, 2007, D1). Babcock Ranch near Fort Myers , Florida, is the largest with 17,000 acre development surrounded by 73,000 acres of agriculture, including a nature preserve (USDA conservation lands?) and a cattle farm. The other three subdivisions are Bundoran Farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, South Village, in South Burlington, Vermont, and Tryon Farm, in Michigan City, Indiana, about fifty miles outside of Chicago on a commuter rail line.

Farmers appear to like the developments, because they promise markets for their fresh produce (The Journal runs a lead photograph of suburbanites harvesting vegetables in a field [community support agriculture arrangement?]). Residents like the developments, because they promise rural landscape with urban amenities. And--this is America 2007 after all--they like the notion that they are helping to conserve agricultural lands.

We'll have to see how attractive this arrangement is over the long term. The article states that, already, some residents are unhappy about some agricultural practices, such as burning fields to remove non-native grasses, the aromas from chicken coops and farm animals, and animals (and wildlife) wandering into residential neighborhoods. One developer is quoted as saying that "creating a community where agriculture is functional and where people can live is a delicate balance". Delicate balance, indeed. Living in Southern California, where, since 1945, agriculture (and, mind you, perhaps the highest value agriculture in the world) has retreated before suburban development, we have seen the delicate balance impossible to maintain. Eventually, meaning within a few years, homeowners begin to file law suits and, despite legal protections for agriculture, drive the farmers out. But perhaps not every area of the nation has SoCal's voracious appetite for subdivision and intolerance for competing land uses. Agrarian community development deserves to be watched.

A Theory of Rural Life, 10: Conclusions and Recommendations

1. "Country living" is residing on the land and making a living from the land. The countryside that makes this living possible is a unique environment, distinguished from wilderness, the city, suburbia, and rural residential estates.

2. Though the American countryside is a middle landscape, it is not simply or inevitably a transitional environment in the historical evolution of America from wilderness to the city. It was designed by our ancestors as a permanent state. It could be permanent, but only if--today--conservation of the countryside is made the highest goal and highest priority of rural development.

Recommendation. Governmental rural development programs must be changed to make preservation of the values of country living and the countryside their major goal, rather than job creation, rural industrial development, and relief of poverty in rural areas.

3. The countryside is an integrated fabric of life, fusing nature, agriculture, other country livelihoods, and country residence within the values of country living.

Recommendation. To conserve the whole fabric of the country, conservation must be accomplished within the context of comprehensive planning for land-use stability, using the tools of district-wide zoning, minimum acreages, and permitting.

Pro. Without comprehensive planning of the countryside as a geographical district, incremental urban sprawl will convert the countryside, parcel by parcel, until so little of the countryside remains that all opportunities for its conservation are lost.

Con. The planning process, zoning land use, and permitting will restrict the freedom of land use and dilute the rights of property ownership that have been central to country living. The planning process might also hand the tools of government to the advocates of urban sprawl should they come to dominate planning commissions and departments.

4. Education for country living is the most important means, after the family, of passing the values of country life from one generation to another.

Recommendation. Country schools, k-12, must be maintained. The consolidation of country schools and busing of students to town schools must be stopped.

Recommendation. Community and technical colleges should develop vocational curricula for farming, including small farming, country vocations, and country crafts and skills.

5. Developing new consumers of products of country living and the countryside is and has been central to creating economic incentives and political support for preservation of the countryside.

Recommendation. Marketing country living and the countryside must be more highly developed and effective than it has been in the past.

Once country living is gone and the countryside is destroyed, they cannot be recovered. Conservation of country life should be as high a national priority as wilderness protection and historic preservation in towns and cities.

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.