THE CALL OF THE LAND

As We Teeter Toward The Tipping Point: A Rural Advantage
7/10/2010 6:53:06 PM
by Steven McFadden

http://www.grit.com/call-of-the-land/rural-advantage.aspx

The Sower“I am convinced that sustainability is the

defining question of the 21st Century,” John Ikerd said

one icy afternoon in the depth of February, weeks before

the Gulf of Mexico exploded into an infernal industrial

mess of oil, gas, and chemical dispersant.

Ikerd, a senior statesman among American agrarians, was

addressing a conference hosted by the Nebraska Sustainable

Agriculture Society in Lincoln. He earned a standing

ovation for his definitive, imperative, and impassioned

remarks.

Ikerd painted a convincing word picture of how sustainable

food production systems can and should be employed to

restore health to our bodies and minds, to restore

vitality to the land, and to restore long-term stability

to our economy. This healing potential, he said as he

sounded a conference keynote, is a rural advantage.

America would do well to take note.

The very day Ikerd spoke, Bob Herbert wrote an op-ed

column titled “Time is Running Out” for The New York

Times. “We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession,

and a vast majority of them are gone for good,” Herbert

reported. “The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs

bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth

about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and

the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our

declining living standards and get us back to an economy

that is self-sustaining.”

Noting that our economy has been thrown desperately out of

whack by frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative

bubbles, and exotic financial instruments, Herbert

reported that living standards are sinking swiftly in the

USA, and that there is no coherent long-term vision or

plan for reversing that ominous trend.

Almost as if he picked up on the same thought train as the

Times columnist, but basing his response on a lifetime of

work advocating for clean, truly economic agriculture,

Ikerd in his speech said that the issue which has

potential to bring this all into focus is public health –

specifically the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes,

hypertension, arthritis, allergies and asthma. All these

illnesses are related to diet, and our diet is directly

related to the way we cultivate the land and raise our

animals. It’s all linked.

Now gluttonously congested with agrichemicals, processing

and genetic-mechanical initiatives, that link has led to

some staggeringly expensive consequences. Health care

spending devoured 17 percent of the entire U.S. economy

last year according to the Federal Centers for Medicare

and Medicaid. Just a few years back it was only 5 percent,

6 percent, and then 7 percent. But over the same time

period that our diets and our land have been dosed with

chemicals, hormones, processing and GMOs, our health costs

have ballooned to the present onerous 17 percent. Soon,

according to the projections of the Federal Centers,

health care will be devouring 20 percent, and then 22

percent of our annual economy. That’s money we could be

spending on lots of other things we need.

“For the last 50 years,” Ikerd said, “our focus has been

on producing a lot of cheap stuff – with chemicals,

herbicides and GMOs. But the decline in human health has

paralleled this.” Putting the paradox into a sound bite,

he said, “Our country is now both overfed and

undernourished.”

One day before Ikerd spoke and Herbert wrote his column

for the Times, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R), a member

of the House Agriculture Committee, told the Nebraska

conference that consumers who buy directly from food

producers keep 90 percent of food income in the

agricultural sector, supporting their neighbors who are

local, sustainable growers. Fortenberry also made the

connection between clean, healthy food and the kind of

good health that could dramatically shrink health-care

costs.

John Ikerd, Ph.D.John Ikerd really drove the point home

with his facts and his rhetoric. The tipping point will

come, he said, when we realize that the economic and

environmental health of the nation depends upon, and is

directly related to the physical and mental health of the

people, and that that is related to the health of the soil

and the way we cultivate the land.

As with other American agrarians, Ikerd sees the potential

of clean sustainable agriculture to be the vision and the

plan that leads us out of recession and pollution and into

the future with clean food, healthy bodies and minds, a

vibrant environment, and a stable economy built on

something real and enduring.

“The tide is changing,” he said at the end of his talk.

“It takes healthy people to maintain healthy soil and to

bring healthy food from the land. There is a new purpose

for people to be out in rural areas now, to repopulate our

farmlands and to create healthy soil, and healthy food

that will lead to healthy people. We need to rebuild from

the soil up, and we can do it. Where are we going to find

the jobs of the future? They are on the land. There’s a

whole new concept of society emerging that is based on

local, clean healthy food. That’s the rural advantage.”

N.B. - John Ikerd published a new book online in April: A

Revolution of the Middle

Comments

*
Steven McFadden 7/13/2010 1:08:08 PM

Hi Mountain Woman -
Thanks for your comments. By all means, the answer

is not just transplanting city folk to the country for all

the reasons you enumerate, although out here in the

Heartland of Nebraska and other states, our villages have

been depopulated over the last 20-30 years, and could

definitely use an influx of people who know how to live on

the land, or are at least open to learning. Like Ikerd, I

feel that will happen for a host of economic and

environmental reasons, some harsh, and that eventually the

industrial models of 'working the land' will give way to

enlightened agrarian ways of 'living with' the land.

Thankfully, the move toward Urban and Suburban

Agrarianism is well under way -- and I was happy to be

able to present dozens of models of what is happening in

my book, The Call of the Land. But more and more models

and innovations keep coming forward, even since the book

was published less than a year ago. Great hope in this.
*
MountainWoman 7/13/2010 12:56:18 PM

Interesting article. There is a definite interest in

Vermont in eating locally produced food and agritourism

has become very popular but with that popularity comes

skyrocketing food prices and I'm glad we produce our own.

I do worry though about romanticizing farm land and

perhaps causing an exodus to the country of people who

really belong in the city. When land is lost to sprawl or

even small acreage plots, it's gone forever and so many

people who move to the country demand the services they

had before. It's always a struggle in Vermont where we

fight to keep our land free from development. We need to

revitalize our cities with roof top gardens, community

gardens and other methods of keeping our cities vital,

healthy population centers and we need to discourage

sprawl to precious farmland. Nothing irritates me more

than seeing a mega-mansion plunked down in the middle of

once beautiful, fertile soil.

How do you encourage people to live lives based on

less consumption when they are bombarded with images of

excess every day?

And how will we feed an ever expanding population

without the massive farming we have now? This is a topic

of great interest to me and it would be most enlightening

to perhaps have a round table discussion on the challenges

facing us as we move forward.
*
K.C. Compton 7/12/2010 11:01:49 PM

Steven, thank you for this excellent post. I started

reading it and thought, "Hey, this guy's a reporter!" Good

to know my instincts still serve me.
I wish I had already gotten set up on the farm my

kids and I dream of owning together, however. I worry that

the point will tip too soon, too soon.
Dave--I hear you're going to come see us soon.

Looking forward to that. And the point you make about

America being a nation of city dwellers is correct--

however the "urban farm"phenomenon is changing the

equation. I fully see cities in the future in which food

is so local you just go up to your roof top pick dinner

from the vine and harvest a few eggs for the evening

omelet. When our nation began, cows, sheep and chickens

certainly occupied our urban landscape (I wonder if Mrs.

O'Leary's cow messed it up for urban livestock for a

century or so?) and I think the next 50 years will see

them become a part of city life again. Won't THAT be cool?

--K.C.
*
Chuck 7/12/2010 10:07:30 PM

@Steven, thank you for your good writing and

shedding light on this. Ironic how America was primarily a

farming country and now there are so few family farms,

only heavy corn and soybean production by large commercial

farms.

No big employment problems then, in the old days. I

guess I dream we will at least return to a country filled

with local organic farms and lots of people working them-

-and people eating local.
*
Steven McFadden 7/12/2010 4:15:00 PM

Hi Dave -
I live in the shadow of the Sower, and can see him

up there scattering his seed even as I sit and type. A

falcon family has taken to nesting a ways down below his

feet, so he's got company up there atop the capital

building.

In the blog post above I am mainly reporting what

others have said -- John Ikerd, Bob Herbert and on --

rather than writing my own views. I've was a news reporter

for a long time, so that's a habit hard to break. But

ultimately I do agree with the notion that Ikerd put forth

that as things wobble and collapse -- as they are -- there

is an advantage to the rural life. The sophisticated,

sustainable, agrarian or rural life is in fact -- as

personified by the kind of people who read Grit and

implement the ideas -- the hope of the present and the

future. That's my view. That's why -- like you and the

other Grit bloggers -- these are the things I am

interested in and choose to write about.

The industrial mess in the Gulf of Mexico is, alas,

driving the point home relentlessly just now. Folks are

lucky that there is Grit and other places like to turn to

for clues and guidance about the way forward.

Thank you for your comments. You have so many

worthwhile insights to share. - S.
*
Nebraska Dave 7/12/2010 3:56:58 PM

@Steven, by the way I love the picture of seed

sower. I visit the Capitol Building quite frequently. For

those readers that are not aware, the seed sower is a

statue on top of the dome of our State Capitol (Nebraska)

building.
*
Nebraska Dave 7/12/2010 3:53:11 PM

@Steven, I agree with all you have said but

unfortunately America has become a city dwelling consumer

nation. I wish that our thirst for more would turn around

but I don’t think it will until it hits us in the pocket

book. It seems to me people have excepted the higher gas

prices and are driving just as frivolously as before they

thought it was a tragedy the price of a gallon went above

a dollar. I’ve been to many Central American countries and

seriously we still do have relatively cheap gas here

compared to their prices. Our country is so extravagant in

the way we live. We will spend more on a fast food dinner

for the family here than a Central American family will

for an entire week. Understand I love this country and

thoroughly enjoy its conveniences. As I’ve stated in other

replies before, I sure like the hot showers and the flush

toilets, and I hope you are correct in stating that the

consuming trend is changing or we will have to learn all

over again how to survive and not enjoy the good life we

have now. I understand about the unemployment but other

countries have unemployment rates that are three and four

times higher than ours. I’m not saying that we should just

be grateful for how things and not be concerned about

what’s happening. This country is still the best in my

humble opinion. I believe there are a lot of things we

could do to make this country even better and getting back

to our grass roots heritage living certainly is one of

them.