by Arthur Yeatman, School of Living,
Cochranville, PA
(Yeatman credits the writings of Wes Jackson and Alanna
Hartzok for much of the information in his presentation.)
Twenty years ago Wes Jackson, a world renowned
farmer, geneticist, and teacher called for a revolution in
agriculture. He said the number one environmental problem,
aside from nuclear war, is agriculture. Why? Because
sterile agriculture destroys the water-holding capacity of
the soil and sends it sea-ward. Studies done here in the
corn belt states show that on an average with a 2" soil
loss, the yield is reduced 15%. With a 6" soil loss, yield
is reduced 30%. With a 12" soil loss, the yield is reduced
75%. The nitrogen, and phosphorous and potassium can be
replaced at some expense. But many of the trace elements will be severely lacking.
The story is as old as civilization. Two thousand
years before Christ the Tigres and Euphrates rivers of
Mesopotamia watered an area so rich that the area is
thought to have been the Garden of Eden. The area today is
a desert of shifting sands. China's Yellow River is called
Yellow for good reason. While its basin once supported
countless rich and prosperous people, at flood stage now,
soil accounts for 50% by weight of the river's flow.
In this country we suffer in part from a history of
early abundance and in part from the legacy that we brought
from western and northern Europe where rains were so light
that run-off was scarcely a problem. When our ancesters
landed on the virgin woodlands and prairies of our young
continent, they encountered thunder storms and quick
drenches. And then went on to plant such soil exposing
crops as corn, cotton, and tobacco. The age of fossil fuel
has allowed this erosion to accelerate at an even faster
pace. Our current agricultural system which features
monoculture annuals is nearly opposite to the original
prairie and forest which featured mixtures of perennials.
We are using sunlight tracked by the florals long
extinct. We pump it, process it, transport it over the
countryside as chemicals and inject it into our wasting
fields as chemotherapy on the fields we spawned with great
vigor, and we feel good to be feeding billions of people.
However, although Nature is very forgiving, we are surely
discounting the future. Monoculture means that botanical
and microbial diversity both in and above the soil is
absent. This invites epidemics of pathogens or epidemic
grazing by insect populations, which can spend most of
their energy eating and growing. Insects are better
controlled if they are forced to spend a good portion of
their energy buzzing and hunting among a mixture of many
species of plants that they evolved to eat.
I think it is possible to return to a system that
is self-renewing like the forest and prairie were and yet
be capable of supporting the current human population. We
have the opportunity to develop a truly sustainable
agriculture based on mixtures of perennials. This would be
an agriculture in which soil erosion is so small that it is
detectable only with the most sophisticated equipment, an
agriculture that is chemical free or nearly so, and
certainly an agriculture WHICH is scarcely demanding of
fossil fuels. Public awareness of the need to change our
direction is increasing as more and more of our drinking
water becomes polluted with chemical fertilizers.
Demand for certified organic produce increases
every year. The National Academy of Scientists has
recommended that children eat organic produce because
pesticide residues build up to dangerous levels in relation
to their body's size. An increasing number of farmers are
making the transition to more sustainable practices, such
as composting their animal manures for fertilizing their
soils, rather than spreading raw manure on their fields.
Organic farmers also gain fertility from diverse crop
rotations, fertilizer supplements of kelp, rock phosphate,
fish emulsion, and other products which do not harm the
microbial life of the soil or pollute the groundwater of
streams. Organic farmers control weeds and insects by
using timely planting, shallow tillage, cover crops,
beneficial insects, resistant varieties, AND diverse crop
rotations that disrupt the weed and insect cycles.
To achieve a system of agriculture capable of
saving our life sustaining soil, what must we do? I
believe we must change our direction from more and more
centralization of larger and larger corporate farms back
toward smaller family farm units where farmers are also the
owners who want to take care of their soils so that their
children and grandchildren will have land capable of
providing a livelihood. Extensive studies done by both
Mason Gaffney and Gene Wunderlich indicate that smaller
farms are the more efficient producers, getting much more
product value in relation to land value than large farms
do.
So how does tax policy relate to helping
agriculture be more sustainable? Smaller farms are more
efficient, largely because their operators have been better
stewards of their soil, by growing a greater diversity of
crops in smaller fields, thus reducing the ill effects of
monoculture. The tax policy of shifting taxes off of both
farm income and off of building values and on to farm land
value and all natural resource values would have several
benefits to a sustainable agriculture:
One, the price of farm land would come down, making
farm land affordable for family sized farmers. When the
annual rental value of land is not taken by the community
who created it, but rather is allowed to be claimed by the
landowner, who did not create it, then the more land value
that the owner holds, the larger his unearned benefit is.
And therefore the larger farm has an advantage over the
small farm.
Two, money currently invested in site costs would be
available for new technologies and practices which could
improve soil retention and quality.
Three, it would eliminate Tax Loss Farming. Income tax
payers can now reduce their taxable income from other
sources by deducting their losses from farming. A 1996
study in New York state found that farm losses exceeded
farm income by about $10 million a year. Nearly all the
households with over $100,000 in non-farm income showed
farm losses, while only 20% of households with less than
$5,000 of non-farm income showed farm losses.
These psuedo-farmers do not have any incentive to use
soil-enhancing practices. Many who live near a metropolis
are simply holding the land in speculation to sell it later
for development purposes. By eliminating the income tax
completely on farming, Tax Loss Farming would be
eliminated, and efficient profitable operations would be
encouraged.
By shifting the property tax from a tax on both
improvement values and land values to land values only,
small family sized farms would benefit, since they have a
higher ratio of improvements to land than do large
corporate farms.
This tax shift principle applies to the
relationship between agricultural land and non-agricultural
land, also. The genuine farmers in Queensland, Australia,
for example, many years ago wanted to shift to a two-rate
property tax higher on land value and lower on improvement
value because they found they were paying more than their
share of the municipal costs to make up for the token
payments by the owners of vast undeveloped acreages. Site
value rating, as they call it, has now become the dominant
system in Australia, being used in 92% of their
municipalized areas. Their farmers pay less with land
value taxation than with other tax systems.
As population increases and technology advances,
our need to utilize our natural resources in an
environmentally sustainable way becomes more and
more critical. A 3300 head confinement hog farm here in NE
Iowa, for example, which pollutes French Creek with its
manure, is economically feasible because of federal crop
subsidies making feed cheap and because of an absence of a
tax on the water. Charging for the use and abuse of our
common heritage would render this operation uneconomical.
The inefficiencies of transporting food thousands of miles
would become apparent if all the costs of the environmental
deprivation involved were included in the price of the
product. Collecting the land rent from the owner of every
natural resource used in the production and transportation
of a product to the ultimate consumer would result in
higher prices for products that use fossil fuels to
transport them long distances.
To summarize, I would draw the following
conclusions. One, preserving our soils and the many life
forms in it and over it is essential to our continued human
existence on this planet. Two, large scale farms growing
huge acreages of a single crop must use chemicals for pest
control and fertilizers which threaten the soil's
biological life. Three, small scale farms tend to grow a
diversity of crops for local markets. Crop diversity
provides the pest control from the balance of hosts and
predators found in nature. Four, land value taxation will
reduce the incentives to concentrate farm ownership into
larger units and to lower the land prices making it more
affordable for entry level farmers. Five, land value
taxation will, therefore, have the positive effect of
making our agriculture more sustainable.
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editor's note: Artie Yeatman is a retired farmer
and Community Supported Agriculture gardener, and is office
manager for the School of Living which was established in
1934 by Ralph Borsodi. School of Living's Community Land
Trust holds seven parcels of rural land in three states.
The School of Living aims to foster self-governing
communities which are democratic, humane, globally
conscious and ecologically sound. All of its resources,
especially the land it holds in trust, are held in
responsible stewardship for all living creatures. Email
S.o.L. at GreenRev@S-o-L.org or artiey@epix.net. Write to
S.o.L. at 432 Leaman Rd., Cochranville, PA 19330.
Both the land trust movement and the land value tax
movement historically came out of Henry George's work. The
land trust movement became developed as a way to implement
collecting community created land rent on a smaller scale
because land value taxation was sometimes difficult and
challenging to implement politically.