One Seed of Hope? Ag Land Trusts

Tumbledown just this week learned about land trusts (see Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella organization). Tumbledown's interest is agricultural land trusts, the kind that work to save groups of farms on the edges of development. Maybe Tumbledown has been asleep, or maybe just ignorant, or maybe too much oriented east of the Mississippi (most of the existing trusts seem to be a western, even Californian phenomenon), but this seems to be a way of preserving the quickly passing culture of small farm communities. An individual with the hankering to become a farmer, would be well advised to do it where a community is actively seeking to preserve the way of life--donating to preserve land from development for farming--than to tempt fate by playing the Lone Ranger.

The first ag land trust, as self reported on their web site, was the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), established in 1980. (The crest of a recent farming financial crisis in which many small farms were sold or lost.) According to the MALT web site, the trust acquires voluntary "agricultural conservation easements" on farmland, "encourages public policies that support and enhance agriculture," and has "so far permanently protected 38,000 acres of land on 57 family farms and ranches." 57 family farms and ranches sounds to Tumbledown like a small, but vital, agricultural community, the kind of community that is absolutely necessary to support the individual family entering farming for the first time, the kind of community that hardly exists anywhere any more.

A little closer to home, the American Farmland Trust and Farmland Information Center report that "more than 100,000 acres of Indiana farmland is converted to non-farm uses" every year. Tumbledown has publicly mourned this loss before. But AFT also reports that "Evelyn Parker Chambers and Mary F. Parker have donated an agricultural conservation easement on the Parker Farm, located in Sand Creek Township [Bartholomew County, Indiana], to the Sycamore Land Trust. So, even in Indiana, momentum may be building for this movement.

For Tumbledown, hope springs eternal. Perhaps even now the seed for many small farms is being planted.

Tumbledown Farm

A Good Farmer?

Tumbledown Farmer is pleased that the Star continues to publish stories that question the sale of farmland. But that was not the emphasis on the front page of the Business Section this Sunday ("Attached to the Land," Indianapolis Star, July 30, 2006). Sure, farming is business, but for the better farmers it is also a calling, so there was much with which to argue. Tumbledown Farmer found especially aggravating the assumption by Roger DuMond (Kova Fertilizer agronomist) trumpeted by Norm Heikens (reporter) that "good farmers...farm a lot of acres in a mechanized manner." The implication drawn by the reporter is that "poorer soils...breed a less prosperous, more cautious farmer." The statement could have been accepted as merely descriptive (perhaps even received with some literary approbation if the article had approached the classic descriptiveness of, say, James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; see August 25, 2006, NY Times article on the artistry of Walker Evans), except that it was paired so closely with the previous statement as to castigate the farmers with small holdings of lesser quality land as "bad farmers" (not directly stated, but certainly implied).

Tumbledown has to ask, do "good farmers" really "lunge" at the chance to sell the most fertile soils and "bad farmers" hesitate to sell poorer soils?

Again, the too prevalent assumption that "the exclusive function of the farmer is production and that his major discipline is economics" goes unchallenged. (Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony, "Discipline and Hope," p. 127) Perhaps that is excusable in a business page article, but I hope not. The article betrayed a commitment to efficiency and specialization in agriculture (another word for a destructive exploitation of the land) that exalts annual production and industrial degredation of the land over the maintenance of fertility. The article applauds the quick courage of a few big farmers whose lack of attachment to the land they farm is evident. And diminishes the courage of the small farmers "whose allegiance to their land, continuing and deepening in association from one generation to another, would be the motive and guarantee of good care." (ibid., p. 93; see also pp. 91-92). It takes courage to farm poor land well.

Tumbledown also asks how can it be "good" for the richest Indiana farmland to be underneath a Honda plant? How "good" can a community remain that not only allows, but welcomes and applauds, the sale of the richest farmland not to the best farmers, but to manufacturing plants? Are there not urban wastelands in Indianapolis that are good enough to pave over for such factories? (Or sports arenas?)

Tumbledown Farmer thinks the reporter should have quoted Confucius to the fertilizer salesman: "The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner." Bad soil can be made better with the addition of humus. Give "good" farmers, the kind who become "attached" to their land and reluctant to sell, time and a supportive community and their "bad" land will improve. "On the other hand, if shiftless greedy men have exploited it [or sold it to Honda], there will be little left that is any longer worth anything either to the owner or to the nation." (Louis Bromfield, Pleasant Valley, "The World within the Earth," p. 156)

"A good farmer, a 'live' farmer is not one who goes into the field simply to get the job of plowing completed because he must first turn over the soil in order to plant the crops that will bring him in a little money." Instead, he walks the ground and "sees the humus in his good earth and counts the earthworms...[and] knows that out of the soil comes everything." (ibid., pp. 157-158).

The "good" farmer is firmly attached to the land she farms.

Rural Indiana: America's #1 Target (for terror and "progress")

Two Indiana stories have grabbed the attention of the Tumbledown Farmer in the past few weeks. The first contained the news that an Amish popcorn plant sits atop the government's watch list of state terror sites. (The National Asset Database. Perhaps the list was alphabetized? See the front page article in the Indianapolis Star, July 13, 2006.) Brian Lehman, the astonished owner of the popcorn concern, said "I don't have a clue why we're on the list. We're on a gravel road, not even blacktop. We're nowhere" (ibid.) The second story percolated for months in the news, at first merely as a rumor, then as a competition between small towns in Indiana and Ohio to land the next auto manufacturing plant. The reward for selling farms that had been in families for 5 generations was the promise of 750 manufacturing jobs (and millions of dollars, many times the going rate per acre for agricultural land). "Indiana lost 93,000 acres of farmland a year from 1997 through 2002, accelerating a decline stretching back 60 years" (Indianapolis Star, "Green Acres," April 30, 2006; 165 square miles between 1978 and 1992, a chunk the size of Blackford County, ibid., editorial, "State must protect precious farmland"). "Progress" in the form of a Honda plant has put rural Southeastern Indiana in the crosshairs in a way that no terrorist could ever hope to do. And Hoosiers have been complicit in the paving over of the farmland. Is it any wonder that we have inherited a Tumbledown Farm?