Farms, Food, Community

Good News From Iowa By VERLYN KLINKENBORG, Published: February 9, 2009    

When I was born in 1952, there were 203,000 farms in Iowa, only 11,000 fewer than when my dad was born in 1926. By 2002, the number had dropped to about 90,000, with roughly the same acreage in production in a state with a population that had remained roughly the same. The national numbers followed the same track: fewer farms, bigger farms, less-diverse farms. To a lot of people, this looked like progress because the ideal of efficiency promulgated by the Department of Agriculture was bigger yields with fewer people.

This industrial notion of efficiency has always seemed terribly inefficient in other important ways: socially, culturally and environmentally. Too few people in a farming landscape means too little attention to the soil. It also means broken towns. The history of Iowa in the past 80 years has been the steady impoverishing of the rural landscape, a fact most easily grasped by the steadily dwindling number of farms.

So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find in the 2007 Census of Agriculture that the number of farms in Iowa has risen to 92,856, a level last seen in 1992. Some 4,000 new small farms have been created since 2002. These are very small farms, 9 acres or less, and they are producing a much wider array of crops than the rest of Iowa, which specializes in corn and soybeans. Most have very local markets, not Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. And yet as new farms are being created, midsize farms go out of business. Consolidation at the highest level — big farms eating slightly smaller farms — continues.

These are interesting numbers — 4,000 Iowa farms under 9 acres and about 1,500 with 2,000 acres or more. Still more interesting is the age differential. The average age of the “principal operator” on a farm has crept upward to 56 years old. But those small farms are being run by young farmers.     In a very real sense, they are going back to an earlier model of farming in Iowa. The farms are more diverse, and so are the crops they grow. To me, this is where the new passion for local foods finds its real meaning, and the best news is that Iowa is not alone. Nationwide, there are some 300,000 new farms since 2002. And the farmers? More diverse than ever, including a higher number of women. This is a genuine source of hope for American agriculture.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10tue4.html?th&emc=th

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