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12 F A R M L A N D P R O T E C T I O N Land trusts generally tend to be cool, in the jazz sense. They approach their work—their newsletters, their dealings with land owners, their discussions with the unconvinced—in a relaxed, even mellow way. The supporters of farmland protection, on the other hand, are often as intense as a chorus of “Potato Head Blues” by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. Part of the difference in attitude between preserving natural land and preserving farmland comes from the newness of farmland conservation. The natural lands conservators have been at it since the 1890s, when natural lands were already being rapidly lost—often by conversion to farmland. The decline in farmland began much later. Another reason the urgency shows so clearly is that farmland advocates see themselves as defending not just land but a way of life. I say “farmland advocates.” Both in manner and activities, most of the farmland protection groups are as much Sierra Club as Nature Conservancy. They’re activists, defending a way of life that is vanishing or—perhaps they fear—already gone. Almost no one would argue against the preservation of the family farms as advocated by Jefferson, Aldo Leopold, or Louis Bromfield. When novelist Bromfield came home from Europe just ahead of World War II and returned to the Ohio land of his ancestors, he re-created at Malabar Farm the approach to farming that most of us would like to keep in the American landscape . But Malabar Farm exists now only as a museum, and the kind of farming he promoted is as rare as a quilting bee. There was a time when having a farm brought independence. The farmer had his cash crops that brought in enough money to buy seed for next year, clothes when the old ones wore out, a new car once in a great while, and some paint for the house (or the barn anyway) every couple of decades. Even when there was a drought or a depression and the cash crops didn’t net any cash, he still had his garden, his woodlot, a place to live—the essentials of life. People that had pulled out and gone to the city might have been standing in breadlines during the Great Depression, but the farmer had his cow, some fruit trees, and a few chickens. In the years following World War II, farm families increasingly wanted a standard middle-class life. Probably the single most important agent pro- moting the new materialism was television. The consumer goods people in the Soviet-led Eastern bloc saw on television killed Marxism in the late 1980s, but thirty years before that, starting in the 1950s, tv and the kind of life it promoted helped bring down traditional American farm culture. To make money to pay for the tv set, clothes like the other kids wore, and all the other suburban middle-class trappings, farmers adopted the pesticides that the chemical companies began to push at them after 1945. Up to this time, most agriculture, except fruit-growing, was “organic”; it had never been any different. Probably the strongest current in agriculture in the late 1930s and early 1940s was an environmentally sound approach exempli fied in the United States by Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. In an almost unbelievably short time, that current died. Nothing was left but the chemical tidal wave. The pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers took over—produced by the chemical companies as substitutes for their wartime products, advertised heavily, and promoted by the ag colleges, then as now heavily dependent on the chemical companies for funding. A long and deadly cascade had begun. The chemically dependent farmer could obtain higher yields. Farmers continuing to farm in the old way could still grow the crops, but they couldn’t make a living, at least not a middleclass living, in competition with the chemically dependent farmers. They fell into line. With less dependence on manpower, farmers could farm more land, and they needed to. They borrowed money to buy land. To farm that much land, they had to have a big tractor, so they borrowed more money. No need anymore for a tree in the middle of the field where a team of horses could rest in the shade while the farmer ate his lunch. The grasses, herbs, and shrubs in the fencerows—the fencerows themselves—were expendable; they took up...

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