Why Family Farm Matters
Leland Swenson, CAFF executive director, and Judith Redmond, president of the CAFF board of directors wrote this article.
In an era when farmers are less than one percent of California’s population, it is easy to forget that family farms provide the basis for food security and are vital to our economic strength, environmental stewardship and cultural identity. The huge role agriculture plays in California’s economy was amply demonstrated in 2000, when direct gross cash value in farm production totaled more than $27 million. But the economic impact of agriculture is even greater. Every dollar’s worth of agricultural production is actually worth 10 dollars to the economy because of the high input costs of tractors, pumps, fertilizers, seeds and labor. Processing and marketing of agricultural products increases the significance of agriculture to the total economy even more.
What does agriculture contribute to environmental stewardship? Farms cover nearly 11 million acres in California. The way this land is managed has immense implications for environmental quality. Managing natural systems appropriately is always site specific and dependent on local knowledge that only family farmers and resident farm operators are likely to possess. If we want to capture the knowledge and wisdom of today’s rapidly aging generation of farmers, we must act quickly to provide rewards and incentives to financially strapped and struggling farms hen they make special efforts to practice environmental stewardship.
Family farmers also make a huge contribution to our cultural and social fabric. Our current relatively decentralized system of land and farm ownership produces more equitable economic opportunity, a greater sense of personal responsibility and feeling of control over one’s life. Children growing up in communities lucky enough to benefit from the existence of locally owned businesses are more likely to have a sense of personal potential and empowerment. Small-scale farmers, living on or near their farms, usually rely on local businesses for their needs and services and are likely to make contributions to the well being of the community as a whole.
We all know that the U.S. used to be a nation of farmers, who were the backbone of communities and the model for family values. The mythology is so strong that marketing researchers say that farmers are still one of the messengers the public trusts the most. But now, some economists advise that it would be better to let the family farm die so that water and land resources can be dedicated to industry and housing, uses that are considered to be of higher economic value.
A new study by the American Farmland Trust reports that the U.S. is losing two acres of farmland every minute to development, the fastest rate of decline in history. The loss has been on the suburban edge, where some of the country’s best fruit farms are being replaced by houses on large lots linked by new highways and malls.
Letting the family farm die is a view that is contrary to one that values the public contributions of farms to a stable economic base, to working landscape and to our social fabric. Through farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture and other strategies many consumers are developing a greater sense of personal connection to their food. Farms in California are increasingly the sites of educational programs for kids, farm tours for visitors and agritourism programs. By providing society with the gifts of nature’s abundance, California’s family farms are a fundamental component of food security.
