No Farms, No Food

Uniting Farmers and Environmentalists to Transform American Agriculture

Don Stuart

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781642832310
• eBook ISBN: 9781642832327
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America's farms are key to the preservation of vital ecosystems and a stable climate. Yet farmers and environmentalists have not always seen eye-to-eye about the best ways to manage agricultural landscapes. Since 1980, American Farmland Trust (AFT) has been bringing people together to work for healthy land and a healthy food system.
 
No Farms, No Food traces the development of this powerful coalition responsible for landmark achievements in farmland preservation and conservation practices. It all began with Peggy Rockefeller's determination to stop the inexorable urban sprawl that was threatening the nation's agriculture. From this humble start grew a small but astute organization, and more importantly, a formidable constituency of farmers and environmentalists united around a common cause.
 
With leadership from AFT, that constituency drove through Congress the first "Conservation Title" in the history of the U.S. Farm Bill; oversaw the development of agriculture conservation easement programs throughout the country; and continues to develop innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture.
 
No Farms, No Food takes readers inside the political and policy battles that determine the fate of our nation's farmland. And it illustrates the tactics needed to unify fractured interest groups for the common good. No Farms, No Food is both an inspiring history of agricultural conservation and a practical guide to creating an effective advocacy organization. This is an essential read for everyone who cares about the future of our food, farms, and environment.
 

CHAPTER 1

A Quiet Revolutionary

Not every big idea changes the world.

Seventy percent of small business start-ups are gone within a decade.¹ Of the ten million patents registered at the US Patent and Trademark Office, a vast majority have never been used.² For every book accepted in the United States by commercial publishers, perhaps a thousand are rejected.³ Of the hundred thousand legislative bills introduced annually, under 4 percent become law.⁴

New nonprofits fare no better. Well over half are gone after five years.⁵ And almost never does one go on to broadly influence the national debate.

No one knew those odds better than Peggy Rockefeller.

By 1980, Margaret McGrath Rockefeller had been active in national public affairs for most of her adult life.⁶ Peggy was the wife of the legendary David Rockefeller, a global banker and highly visible public figure who was widely seen as the very embodiment of wealth and power in America. She was also a committed philanthropist and a member of several nonprofit and charitable foundation boards, including one created by the Rockefeller family itself. So when she first proposed a new national nonprofit organization to save the nation’s farmland, she surely understood the challenges it would face.

In the years leading up to 1980, Peggy had acquired a deep appreciation for agriculture. The Rockefeller family owned working farms in New York, California, Massachusetts, and Maine—serious commercial enterprises all. Peggy could frequently be found at one of these farms, delivering calves, driving a tractor, or building fences. “She could muck out a barn with the best of them,” said a family staffer. She was sufficiently involved in farming that she took time out from an incredibly busy schedule to complete a course at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine on how to artificially inseminate cattle.⁷

The Rockefeller family’s farms, especially those in New York’s Hudson Valley, were in areas often highly vulnerable to suburban development, where sprawl from nearby population centers was pricing the land well out of reach for most working farm businesses. It was increasingly evident to Mrs. Rockefeller and to her farming neighbors that, when the next local farm sold, it would probably end up in development. Like it or not, everywhere you looked, farms were becoming strip malls, factories, apartments, and housing developments.

Of course, the Rockefellers could protect their own properties from that fate by donating and recording conservation easements that prevented their future development. And they did. They placed agricultural conservation easements on some 2,500 acres of their family’s land, easements also specifying that these farms were to be environmentally responsible and would be managed under conservation practices approved by the USDA Soil Conservation Service.⁸

Yet few if any other working farmers were in a financial position to donate an easement—doing so would significantly reduce the value of their property. Many of these farmers had substantial debt. Even if they had built up enough equity so the bank would allow them to donate such an easement, and even if their farms were currently profitable, agriculture was a risky business. Who knew what the next season might bring? Their farms represented most of what they owned: their life savings and their only source of retirement income. How could they afford to give up so much?

Peggy Rockefeller knew these people. They had long histories on their land and a powerful sense of place. Their identities were inexorably tied to their farms and to the communities where they lived. They’d spent their lives laboring to develop farm businesses by understanding everything there was to know about their specific pieces of land. Selling to a developer would mark the end of what was often several generations of commitment by their forebears. For them to watch that heritage farm be converted into a strip mall or suburban estates was nothing short of a personal and family tragedy.

But for many of them, that outcome was unavoidable. While the approaching suburban sprawl was unwelcome, it offered their only realistic endgame. With their entire savings tied up in their farms, selling was their only real path to retirement. Even if they stuck it out and kept the land, could they count on (or should they even ask) their children to maintain the farm? These were kids who’d often moved away to the city, perhaps even at the urging of their parents, who themselves saw little future in farming. Selling felt like selling out, but what choice did they have?

They needed an alternative.

Beneath the sheen of the Rockefeller name, Peggy was a quiet advocate. Ever humble, she advanced her cause with calm, reasoning with her opponents rather than trying to defeat them. She had robust, well-considered opinions tempered by common sense and political wisdom. It was a mix that made her very effective.

In a 1994 American Farmland Trust board meeting, for example, a discussion was under way about the Walt Disney Company’s plans to build a huge theme park on historic farmland in Northern Virginia. Peggy Rockefeller, then seventy-nine years old, had, thus far in the conversation, said nothing. But she had obviously been listening. Finally, when the room momentarily fell silent, this aging envoy from high society spoke: “I’ll go out there myself and picket, if necessary,” she said.

This was the woman who proposed creating American Farmland Trust (AFT).

The Early Vision

It’s hard to know exactly what she or any of AFT’s early founders truly anticipated for the future of their new organization at its inception. Obviously, it was to be a national farmland trust. And they certainly knew it would work in federal public policy. Given the influence of the nation’s agriculture industry, the only conceivable path to policy success would have to be through coalitions with farm groups.

The new organization’s ultimate environmental mission was murkier. Environmental activists were already changing the world of agriculture—very often by working counter to the nation’s farmers.⁹ But given AFT’s early goals, while Peggy Rockefeller may have seen the need for farmer–environmentalist mediation, it seems unlikely that she and the rest of the founders fully appreciated how vital that role would become in the years ahead.

As they saw it, American Farmland Trust would be a national land trust focused on protecting agricultural lands. It would hold agricultural easements, particularly in the many regions not then served by land trusts with knowledge of farmland—which, in 1980, was most of the country. It would support and encourage state and local government programs that purchased agricultural easements. And it would pursue federal policies that supported the protection of farmland. Soil conservation certainly seems also to have been an early objective.

But a role in helping farmers protect the broader environment was considerably less clear. And building bridges between farmers and environmentalists on land use and environmental issues may not have been considered at all.

An Unlikely Mission

If finding common ground between farmers and environmentalists had been anticipated as a central objective, it seems highly unlikely that American Farmland Trust would ever have been formed.

For one thing, the obstacles to farmer–environmentalist reconciliation were enormous. Success would require that the new organization scrupulously till the center of the political field. It would have to cultivate partners on both sides of the farm–environmental divide and both sides of the political spectrum. It would need to value consensus and avoid conflict.

The often-blistering confrontation between the nation’s farm and environmental communities was driven by disagreements about key issues such as land use planning, water quality, soil erosion, wildlife habitat, and toxic chemicals. Farmers managed over half the total American land base, and farming profoundly affected that land in ways that made environmental impacts inevitable. Meanwhile, the farm owners struggled to earn a living in one of the most precarious, stressful,¹⁰ and competitive enterprises on the planet. The farm–environmental debate crossed cultural chasms between urban and rural, professional and entrepreneurial, liberal and conservative. And it fed on fundamental differences in human values like respect for the past versus concern for the future, free choice versus social responsibility, science versus life experience, the intellectual versus the emotional.

Overcoming these divides was made ever thornier by the practical realities of funding an advocacy organization. It was common understanding in 1980, as today, that the way to raise money for nonprofit policy advocacy is to fuel our worst fears and arouse our deepest biases.

If I’m an environmentalist and I am told that socially irresponsible farmers who care nothing about the environment are polluting our rivers, destroying habitat, endangering wildlife, fueling climate change, and placing the future of our planet at risk, of course I’ll chip in to make them stop. If I’m a farmer and I’m told that environmentalists who care nothing about agriculture and know nothing about the way I farm are demanding ridiculous rules that will drive me and my neighbors out of business, putting at risk the struggling farm started by my great-grandfather, which I hope to pass down to my children—all to solve problems that either don’t exist or were caused by others—of course I’ll do everything I can to resist them.

These are clearly vast oversimplifications. But who would donate to an organization that claimed to bring these two hopelessly alienated groups together? Had Peggy Rockefeller recognized how central consensus building would become to ATF’s success, she might have had second thoughts.

Instead, she launched a more-than-forty-year endeavor that has turned a small, little-known group of center-of-the-field activists into a national force on agriculture and the environment.

CHAPTER 2

A Changing Landscape

The year was 1980. With the Vietnam War over, the Cold War sputtering to a close, and the Gulf War still a decade away, America was struggling to redefine itself. On the heels of historic inflation, an unprecedented embargo that produced a huge global spike in the price of oil, Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, and a humiliating hostage crisis in Iran, Americans turned the US Senate over to Republicans for the first time since 1954. And they awarded the presidency to an elderly, well-spoken, comfortably conservative cowboy movie star by the name of Ronald Reagan.

So it was a time of peace but also a time of unsettling public events and shifting politics. In the midst of that upheaval, even a close political observer might have overlooked agriculture as a defining issue. Peggy Rockefeller and the small group she’d enlisted to her cause did not. She and her fellow founders sensed the need to transform the way the country farmed.

That change had already begun with an amazing body of environmental law that had passed the US Congress over the previous decade. In the aftermath of the 1960s and in the wake of the first Earth Day in 1970, Congress and the Nixon presidency created the Environmental Protection Agency. They then followed up with a decade of environmental legislation the likes of which had never occurred before and has not been repeated since. New legislation passed dealing with water quality, air quality, endangered species, marine mammals, toxic substances, and a host of other environmental threats.¹

With farmers owning and managing half the nation’s land, it seemed obvious that they would be affected by these new laws. And it was inevitable that they would worry about the threat these laws seemed to pose to the already-risky business of agriculture.

Emerging Land Use and Property Rights Movements

While all this was happening, a new “smart growth” movement was also emerging.² Its proponents aimed to make cities more efficient and livable and to protect their surrounding environment by concentrating development. The economy was booming, cities were growing, and land in the path of urban growth was, of course, quickly increasing in market value. Much of that land—especially that which was flat, accessible, and easily developed—was agricultural.

The farmers who owned that land mostly wanted to continue farming. But they were unlikely to object when, for whatever reasons, their land increased in value. Predictably, farmers feared new zoning laws that might dramatically devalue their property by restricting future opportunities to develop it, however speculative those prospects might be.

One might think that was greedy of them. But Peggy Rockefeller and her colleagues knew that the net worth of nearly all those farmers (and their families) was tied up in the value of their land. They were often also in debt that had been extended, in part, based on the land’s value.³ And their success often depended on future lending.⁴ Newly proposed zoning laws could suddenly place that value at risk.

The idea of growth management was relatively new in spacious, sprawling America. It was only natural that farmers would resist it and that, in response, a vigorous new, mostly rural, property rights movement would also take root, a movement that aimed to protect private lands and insisted on compensation for reductions in property value resulting from “regulatory takings.”⁵

The Law of Conservation Easements

Closely linked to the new smart growth and environmental movements, another, less public, development was taking place in 1980: a change in the law of conservation easements.⁶ In most places in the country, landowners were allowed to use long-standing real property easement law to set aside a limited ownership interest in their land, an interest that would protect from future destruction certain environmental and other public benefits provided by their land. These were called conservation easements. Land under a conservation easement remained in private ownership. But through such an easement, the owner could convey certain specific property rights to another party in a way that would, in effect, extinguish those rights. By this means, one could prevent future development and protect natural values provided by that undeveloped land—values like wildlife habitat, water quality, or open space. Or, in the case of an agricultural easement, one could protect the land for farming. The easement interest would then be held by some secure agency or institution or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Subscribe
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1. A Quiet Revolutionary
• Chapter 2. A Changing Landscape
• Chapter 3. An Idea Whose Time Had Come
• Chapter 4. The Big Ask
• Chapter 5. Beginning the Journey
• Chapter 6. A New Voice in American Farm Policy
• Chapter 7. The 1981 Farm Bill: An Early Policy Victory
• Chapter 8. The 1985 Farm Bill: A Transformation in American Farm Policy
• Chapter 9. The IRS Finally Acts, and a Land Trust Phenomenon
• Chapter 10. Power at the Center
• Chapter 11. Helping Farmers Protect the Environment: An Emerging AFT Mission
• Chapter 12. Launching a New Farm Policy Vision
• Chapter 13. The 2008 Farm Bill: Strategic Research
• Chapter 14. The Power of Research
• Chapter 15. Institutional Efforts
• Chapter 16. Local Food, Local Farms, and Local Farm Communities
• Chapter 17. A New Regional Presence
• Chapter 18. Individual Land Projects: Getting the Job Done, One Farm at a Time
• Chapter 19. Communicating the Message
• Chapter 20. Fertile Fields for Development
• Chapter 21. New Leadership and New Ideas
• Chapter 22. A New Vision for the Future
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index