1950, acreage dropped to 1,063,346,000 in 1970; from a high of 6,293,000 farms in 1941, the number had dropped to 2,954,000 in 1970. In some regions, the decline was almost cataclysmic: in 1880, New England possessed 207,000 farms; in 1970, only 29,000; Rhode Island had 6,000 farms in 1880 and only 1,000 in 1970. And the process continues. Each year, it is now estimated, the United States loses some 3,000,000 acres of farmland—enough to form a corridor half a mile wide from San Francisco to New York.

The reasons are manifold. In the past ten years, the average price of farmland has blossomed from $196 per acre to $640; near major urban areas the price has gone even higher (in New Jersey, for example, the average price soared from a little over $1,000 in 1970 to $2,400 in 1980). That kind of money is hard to ignore, particularly when a farmer has only a modestly successful farm on one hand and a beckoning developer on the other. Equally important is the fact that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the population of rural areas is increasing at a faster rate than that of urban areas; and so are jobs. “Where the jobs are, people are,” Charles E. Little of the American Land Forum has written. “And where people are, the land must be used to accommodate them.” This, in turn, leads to what agricultural economists call the “impermanence syndrome,” a conviction on the part of local farmers that the farming community is doomed, so they might as well sell out and move to Florida or some other haven of the retired.

All this bodes ill for the future—not only of America, but of the world, for each year this country exports thirty-two billion dollars worth of food, much of it to nations almost totally dependent upon us for the very stuff of life. Alien Hidlebaugh, a soil scientist with the National Agricultural Lands Study, has graphically pointed up the economic implications: “Even in America’s agricultural heartland—the Corn Belt states—there is cause for concern. We anticipate a total of 3,200,000-acre prime farmland loss in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri combined if present trends continue to the year 2000. The annual loss will equal 480,000,000 bushels of corn—at $2.50 a bushel a...loss of $1,200,000,000 a year every year by the century’s end.”

Concern over the situation did not seriously develop until after 1957, the peak year of the postwar “baby boom” that had been the impetus for so much urban development. Confronted with the increasingly obvious, states, counties, and even towns scrambled to come up with zoning regulations and other devices that would stem the loss of farmland. Some—as in Oregon, where tough zoning restrictions and heavy tax advantages were instituted—were reasonably effective; others—as in Florida, which may lose all of its prime land in twenty years—were not. Since it was a national problem, it seemed clear, efforts on

the national level also would have to be made to solve it. To that end, in June, 1979, the Department of Agriculture and the Council on Environmental Quality, with the participation of other federal agencies, state and local governments, private landholders, and public interest groups, launched the National Agricultural Lands Study to examine the dimensions of the problem and explore solutions.

Then, as a kind of adjunct to that study, a group of interested citizens got together in August, 1980, to form the American Farmland Trust, sponsored by the Conservation Foundation and financed in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Scherman Foundation. Director Douglas P. Wheeler has articulated the organization’s goals: “The principal purpose of AFT is to address the challenge posed by rapid depletion of the nation’s farmland resource, which is being lost to haphazard development at the rate of three million acres a year. As a national, non-profit membership organization, AFT will (1) inform Americans about the gravity of this threat to agricultural equilibrium...and (2) undertake projects, both directly and through affiliated organizations, which demonstrate techniques by which farmland retention can be achieved.”

Whether such studies and organizations can significantly change the perception of farmland as commodity— which has all the weight of history behind it—to one that sees it for what it truly is—a resource—remains to be seen. We will probably know by the end of the century. In the meantime, it might be well to contemplate the implications of a poem which Alien Hildebaugh has tacked to the wall above his desk. The last stanza reads: “Behold the suburbs and their yield:/ Beneath the web of streets is sealed/ The coffin of a fertile field,/ The ghost of unborn grain. ”