When Preserving The Family Farm Does Not Preserve Family Farmers

The beautiful Rogue River Valley in southern Oregon is blessed with some of the best soils and climate in the world for growing pears. And if you're a regular customer--as I am--of Harry & David's Royal Riviera pears which are prominently featured in their catalog during the Christmas holidays, you know how delicious the fruit is which comes from this region.


But the pear industry in Oregon is in trouble--and it has nothing to do with the land or the climate or the farmers. It has to do with well-intentioned (in some cases) land use laws with horrible consequences. In the early 1970's, environmentalists encouraged the passage of a law which was designed to "preserve the family farm"--a popular term today. The law restricted land use of designated areas of the pear growing region for agricultural use only--without exception. Now, some 35 years later, the chickens are coming home to roost. Farmers whose land would be worth as much as $100,000/acre if they could sell the land to developers find that their land is valued closer to $10,000/acre--with no buyers.


Strict environmentalists would say "Well, that just proves the law is working; after all, who wants another shopping mall on land that grows delicious pears?" But the whole story has not been told. Farming is expensive. As farmers deal with increasing government regulation, confiscatory inheritance taxes, tougher employment laws--not to mention rising costs of fuel, chemicals, fertilizer, and labor--they often find that the best way to continue farming is to be able to sell their high-value land in order to use the proceeds of such a sale to buy less expensive land further away from urban areas. But the land use laws in Oregon prevent that.


The net result? In 1992, there were 87 pear farms in the Rogue River Valley. Today there are 48--and many of those are in trouble.


About a year ago, I attended a land use planning meeting at the City Hall of one of the towns where my family owns walnut orchards. The town was in the process of revising its General Plan, something that happens only once every ten years. There were a lot of environmentally-concerned people there--and they spoke fervently about the need to "preserve the family farm" by doing exactly what the people in Oregon had done decades ago: restrict currently-zoned land for agricultural use to agricultural use for time immemorial. I hadn't planned to speak. But after several of these people had offered their opinions to the Planning Commission members, I rose and said something like this: "I find it interesting that all of the people purportedly concerned about preserving family farms here are not farmers. My family has been farming our land in this town for nearly fifty years--and we've made a livelihood from farming for nearly a hundred years. In all that time, we've never sold any of our agricultural land to developers. Our life is farming, and we want to preserve that livelihood for more than ideological or esoteric reasons. One of the hallmarks of our nation's capitalist society is the fundamental principle of private property rights. The land is ours: we've been farming it for generations. And some of that land is in an area which is being squeezed by urban growth. We now have neighbors we didn't have 50 or 100 years ago, and they don't like the dust, the spray drift, the noise that we farmers make when we work our land and harvest our crops. We need the vital ability to be able to sell our land if need be at premium prices so that we can buy land elsewhere in the region that is far removed from the cities and towns so that we can continue to farm--so that we can continue this way of life we have enjoyed for five generations now."  When I finished--and to my great surprise--the room erupted in applause.


The land use laws in Oregon--and those now being established here in California--are built on good intentions (again, in some cases). But the notion of "preserving the family farm" does not preserve family farmers, and it is slowly but inexorably killing agriculture wherever those laws exist.


One final note: I have twice referred to the "preserving the family farm" movement as well-intentioned--in some cases. I choose to believe that most of the people in that room a year ago fall into this group. But there is a hard-core group of virulent environmentalists who know exactly what they're doing--and their purported concern for family farmers is a ruse. These people would willingly stomp on private property laws in order to slowly revert all land use back to nature. They do not care about farms or farming. But--as I have posted on the sidebar of this blog I designed--farmers were the first and original tree lovers.