THE VANISHING FARMLAND SCAM IS BACK

             March 6, 1991: Washington Post editorial approves a bill

        before the Maryland General Assembly to prevent "suburban sprawl"

        in the name of "protecting farmland."

             March 28, 1991, banner front-page headline in the Press

        Enterprise, Bloomsburg, Penn.:  "Farm Preservation:  $100M

        Mistake?"  Pennsylvania is spending a hundred million dollars to

        "purchase development rights to prime farmland in an effort to

        shield it from development".

             The most conclusively discredited environmental scam of

        recent times is back again in the news, alive and well.  The

        phony conservationists who want to prevent people from building

        houses on farmland, in the name of preventing future food

        shortages, are again mobilizing the powers of government to

        attain their private goals.

             The Pennsylvania and Maryland programs -- along with those

        of 17 other states -- are founded on the false idea that the U.

        S. is losing farmland at an unprecedented rate, and that the

        farmland is needed to stave off hunger in the future.  Both those

        assertions have now been wholly disproven.

             Even the original purveyors of the "vanishing farmlands

        crisis" -- the U. S. Department of Agriculture and its National

        Agricultural Lands Study -- have 'fessed up and agree that the

        widely-reported scare was without foundation.  The "crisis" was

        simply a political scam of the environmentalists in league with

        the USDA and with people who own homes that abut on areas which

        might be developed into housing developments, and whose vistas

        and ambience might thereby be affected.

             To understand the movement that is now surfacing again,

        let's review the story.

             These were typical headlines in 1979 and 1980:  "The Peril

        of Vanishing Farmlands" (The New York Times), "Farmland Losses

        Could End U.S. Food Exports" (Chicago Tribune), "Vanishing

        Farmlands:  Selling Out the Soil" (Saturday Review), and "As

        World Needs Food, U.S. Keeps Losing Soil to Land Developers"

        (Wall Street Journal).

             The "crisis"?  The urbanization of farmland supposedly had

        tripled from the 1960's to the 1970's, from less than one million

        acres per year to three million acres per year.

             This assertion was wholly untrue, as we shall see.  Nor is

        there reason to regret whatever "paving over" does take place.

        Hard as it is to believe, all of the following are true at once:

        a) Knowledge-based increase in food productivity provides us with

        ever more food per person on over less cropland.  Hence, people

        at home and abroad eat better than ever.  b) The price of

        foodstuffs continues to fall, as it has throughout human history.

        c) The quantity of trees being grown has been rising.  d) The

        wilderness recreational area has gotten bigger.  Moreover, there

        is no reason why this logic-defying process by which all good

        things increase cannot go on without limit.

             Over the course of more than two centuries, in the process

        of reaching a population of about 200 million people, the U.S.

        built towns on between 31 and 35 million acres.  Then in 1979

        NALS announced that suddenly, in just 10 years and with a

        population increase of only 18 million people, the urban and

        built-up areas had increased by 29 million acres -- a near-

        doubling.

             That is, the USDA warned that the long-run trend had jumped

        from about one million acres of total land urbanized per year as

        of 1967 to 3 million acres yearly in the mid-1970's.

             Quickly there were several debunking articles by academics

        in technical journals and "little" magazines, using a wide range

        of data and a variety of data.  We got a lot of help from Thomas

        Frey, a geographer who for many years had been the keeper of the

        urbanization and other land-use data for the Economic Research

        Service of the USDA.  Tom could find no support for the scary new

        numbers in the standard set of sources from which he yearly

        distilled his estimates.

             Tom Frey also developed a personal problem.  He began this

        episode as an amiable organization man who went through channels,

        did everything by the book, and was accommodating whenever he

        could be.  But when he informed his superiors that the widely-

        publicized estimate did not square with the facts, his bosses

        systematically bypassed and ignored his assessment.  All the way

        up to the Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland, they harassed

        Frey.

             Even though no one else in the USDA would speak up for his

        position, Frey became stronger and more outspoken even as the

        heat upon him intensified.  The pressure was always indirect, but

        unmistakable.  His manuscripts were altered to the extent that he

        refused to put his name on them.  But he continued to do his job

        effectively and with courage, the sort of government servant that

        the public deserves but whose existence we sometimes doubt.

             Several studies revealed huge errors in the single survey

        USDA relied upon, and the 3 million acre estimate was quite

        impossible.  But that did not stop USDA, which managed to

        mobilize other government agencies to swear to the USDA lies in

        order to rebut our criticisms.  For example, USDA had claimed

        that farmland was decreasing, to support the idea that farmland

        was being urbanized.  But we showed that farmland was in fact

        increasing.  Now the Census Bureau said that the earlier acreages

        were really higher than their published figures, and hence there

        could have been an actual decline even though the record showed

        an increase.  But our analysis of the "adjustment" showed it also

        was as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  And eventually the Census

        of Agriculture revealed detailed data confirming the increase.

             Now fast forward to 1984.  Based on new data, the USDA's

        Soil Conservation Service issued a paper by Linda Lee of Oklahoma

        State University, on leave with SCS, that completely reversed the

        earlier scare figures and confirmed the estimates by "our side."

        And the accompanying press release retracted the former

        estimates.  "[T]he acreage classified as urban and built-up land

        was 46.6 million acres in 1982, compared to 64.7 million acres

        reported in 1977."  Please read that again.  It means that

        whereas in 1977 the SCS had declared that 64.7 million acres had

        been "lost" to built-upon land, just five years later SCS

        admitted that the actual total was 46.6 million acres. That is,

        the 1977 estimate was fully fifty per cent too high, a truly

        amazing error for something so easy to check roughly as the

        urbanized acreage of the U. S.

             The press release continued:  "The 1977 estimate thus

        appears to have been markedly overstated."  You might say so.

             But the discrediting has not stopped the false claims, and

        the collection of huge charity contributions.  This shows the

        boldness of the farmland preservation movement:  Last year I

        wrote about the phony 3 million acre figure in the Washington

        Journalism Review.  Robert Gray -- who now runs the American

        Farmland Trust, an organization with a multi-million dollar

        budget founded on the proposition that farmland is being "lost"

        at an unprecedented rate -- responded that my

        "allegations...are...factually incorrect" and he repeated his

        discredited claim that "during the late 60s and through the 70s,

        3 million acres ...were lost...annually".

             I then replied:  "I will wager $10,000 with him that 1

        million acres is a more appropriate figure than the 3 million he

        asserts".  Mr. Gray was not heard from.

             Does the phony scare matter?  Following upon USDA publicity,

        in 1980 Congress provided a tax break to owners who will attach a

        "conservation easement" to their land which will keep the land

        out of development and in agriculture in perpetuity.  And to ease

        the owners even more, some states have programs to recompense the

        owners the difference between the current market value and the

        value after the easement.  As usual the public purse is being

        tapped to further the purpose of the special interest group.  And

        in 1981 the Farmland Protection Policy Act was enacted by

        Congress.  Hundreds of state and local laws restricting farmland

        conversion also are still being passed.  All this legislation is

        based on wrong information, and with no reasonable prospect of

        doing good for the nation, but with much prospect of causing harm

        to individuals and damage to the nation.  So it goes in America.







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