Saving Farms 
By Bruce Shields

Vermont is experiencing a war between two sharply opposed ideologies.  For lack of a better term, the philosophy governing Vermont for the last 100 years might be called "Modernist."  The competitive ideology, still without a direct name, may be called "Anti-Modernist."  The Modernist view holds that human knowledge is steadily increasing and that through the intelligent application of that knowledge, humans can solve all of our problems.  The Anti-Modernist view is the opposite: that human knowledge is the cause of all our problems, that humans have fouled our planet irretrievably, and the only solution is to sharply reduce human numbers and restrict the areas in which humans may operate.

Political and economic changes always occur within an existing framework, and typically most people wrapped up in and debating the wisdom of changes do not have time to study the wider significance of the debate.  In Vermont recently, the Modernists have tended to align with conservative politics (mainly because Modernism is now under attack and is therefore something to be saved) and Anti-Modernists have aligned with the Left.  The Left in Vermont is distinguished by its zeal for State regulation and control of the economic sphere, its belief that economic phenomena can be directed by the will of the legislature, and desire to centralize the governance of all elements of common life.  That desire probably explains the odd convergence in the Left Democrats of the leadership of labor unions and of environmental groups.

The economic sector most torn by the competition is farming -- which if Mae West was accurate is the world’s second oldest profession.  But in fact farming in the modern style is about 300 years old.  For thousands of years, most of the human population worked most of their lives planting, tending, and harvesting food from their own tiny tract of ground.  Often there was a surplus beyond what was necessary to survive until the next harvest, but sometimes there was not.  The earliest social organization involved marshalling and organizing that surplus to foster various public works, ranging from irrigation ditches to vast temples, from India, China, Persia, Egypt, to Yucatan.  In the Roman Empire, a wider regional organization permitted development of what today we mean by farming: production of food and fiber crops for sale by a sector organized for that economic purpose.  In Roman era excavations, North African olive oil and Greek wine bottles have been discovered in Scotland; British tin and copper has been found in Syria.  The Roman Empire collapsed about 1500 years ago, possibly as a result of an episode of Global Cooling, and was succeeded by the political and economic anarchy of the Dark Ages.

Later, land owners in Western Europe set out to improve their own condition, and also that of the poor people who comprised by far the majority of the population.  Nearly 80% of the population owned little beyond the clothes on their backs, and depended on sharing in the meager surpluses scraped from the small farms on which these landless laborers were able to work during the agricultural season.  When not farming, they were available to make war, which was a dominant form of political expression.  The "Improvers," as they were called, set out to make agriculture more productive so that the great mass of people could secure their livelihood and devote their skills to arts or crafts for sale, rather than engaging in warfare and brigandage.  The improvers quickly developed, from the emerging science of chemistry, procedures for manuring and using lime on farmland.  Lime and manure starting in the early 18th century all by themselves yielded more than 600% increase in the yield per acre on the land so treated.  The Earl of Eglantine in Scotland developed the Ayrshire cow, which yielded almost 400% more milk than her predecessors.

Key to the Improvers’ philsophy was the second element of economic development: development of manufacture to occupy the time and energy of subsistence farmers who were no longer needed to allow the population at large to subsist.  These Improvers founded cities and towns to house the population draining out of the countryside, and provided mills and factories for these people to work in.  The new mills produced goods needed by the remaining farmers, and bought the food and fiber these farmers had for sale.  Civilized life as we know it today derives from that division of labor.

Farmers were among the earliest adopters of modern technology, and in the United States the farmers adoption of technology fueled the wider industrial revolution.  Steel mills were needed to produce the steel plows, the iron mowing machines and reapers, and all the other implements of husbandry inventors were constantly evolving.  Railroads were needed to transport the yield of these farms to market.  The productivity of American farms increased very steadily, meaning that each year more pounds of food could be produced by each farm worker.  More significantly, increased productivity also meant that more pounds of food could be raised on each acre of ground.

Some inventions improved productivity by quantum leaps.  Before 1860, nearly 1/3 of the total land area of the USA was devoted to producing hay for horses, or fuel wood for both commercial and domestic uses.  Tens of thousands of cords of firewood annually were transported down the Hudson River to New York City, and down the coast of Maine for Boston.  The development of anthracite coal allowed the forests of the eastern US to begin to recover.  Development of the internal combustion engine freed up millions of acres of pasture and hayland formerly devoted to raising horse feed.  The full effect of those two improvements was not realized in places like Vermont until the 1950’s.

If anything, adoption of modern technology has actually speeded up in the latter part of the 20th century.  Most significant is the "Green Revolution," the discovery by bio-chemists of how to modify the genetics of crops to further reduce the labor requirements for raising these crops.  Round-up Ready corn, for instance, eliminates the need for four passes of the tractor over the field, sharply reducing the fuel and labor involved in raising the corn.  But the flip side of this is that fewer farmers are needed to maintain an adequate supply of farm product.

Overwhelmingly, farms in Vermont are owner operated small businesses.  The public at large learns about the effect of productivity increases when large industrial enterprises lay off substantial numbers of workers.  For example, as mechanical switches were installed, the phone company permanently laid off more than 200,000 human operators.  The operators’ labor unions understandably went nuts.  However, the consumer at large benefitted very substantially: if all those operators were still at work, a call to California would cost $15.00 per minute, and take up to 10 minutes to get connected.  But when improved productivity reduces the need for farmers, there is no layoff: a small business must be dissolved.  The phone operator can rage against Giant Multi-National Corporations, and not take her layoff personally.  But because in the world of independent farm operators the weakest always drop off, the farm operator tends to blame himself.  Psychologically, the reduction in farms is very difficult.

This brings us back to the Anti-Modernists.  Their reaction to the psychological stresses of improving agricultural technology is to freeze development at some previous stage.  The exact stage selected for the freeze may vary.  The Organic movement rises in part as an Anti-Modernist manifestation, rejecting certain "highly manufactured" forms of soil amendment and "artificial" means of pest control.  However, given the dynamics of agriculture, they make active use of all the soil and nutritional research of the past 100 years, but restrict the means by which deficiencies may be remedied.  Having said that, some sub-sets of the Organic movement reject the bacterial origin of disease and claim that all plant or human disease is caused by presence of artificial or manufactured nutrients.

The strategy of Anti-Modernists in Vermont presently is to extract from the market a premium price to offset their expense of foregoing technology.  So long as this is a promotional tactic to provide extra support from wealthier patrons, there is no social harm -- it is equivalent to William Morris’s persuading the super rich of his day to pay fabulous sums for handmade arts and crafts.  The vast majority of Victorian people were very happy to secure durable and well made materials mass produced on machinery.  But Vermont’s Anti-Modernists seem determined also to outlaw the technology they eschew.  To the extent they are successful, they will reverse all the social, public health, and economic benefits which have flowed to society at large as result of our improvements in agricultural technology.

A sign displayed in a Barre printers’ office years ago showed a printer talking on the phone.  The caption read, "You say you want the lowest price, the highest quality, and the fastest service? . . .  Pick two out of three and call me back!"  Vermont is in the position of the printer’s customer today.  We can keep our small family farms, we can have prosperous farms, we can have abundant food which all Vermonters can afford.  But we can not do all three at once.

Bruce P. Shields
Wolcott
bshields@pwshift.com