Sustainable Agriculture as a Tool for Rural Community Development
By Geoffrey G. Milz

This article is the synthesis of a broad review of the academic literature that attempts to understand, describe and support the use of sustainable agriculture as a tool for rural community development

With the coming of the industrial age in the United States came massive changes to all sectors of the economy. Over time, the production of goods from automobiles to zippers became faster, cheaper to consume, more capital intensive, mechanized, energy dependent, chemical dependent, and homogenous. The movement towards the industrialization of agriculture was similar. However, nearly 90 years since the first John Deere tractor turned its first furrow, a movement is growing in the fields and farms which calls into question the wisdom of this trend towards the industrialization of our food production processes.

The literature that attempts to explain and support this alternative agricultural movement is seated in the sociological, ecological economics and agricultural fields. The industrialization of agriculture in its quest for cheaper food costs for the consumer through efficiency by technology has led to bigger farms, increased mechanization, increased dependence on export markets, and specialization. Alternatively, as the academic Paul Lasley puts it, “Sustainable agriculture is a general concept that reflects an emerging set of cultural practices and also an underlying set of values and beliefs. Alternative agriculture, organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, eco-agriculture, permaculture, agroecology, low-input farming among others are common labels for alternative models that seek to redefine agriculture.”

The trend in America towards a decrease in the number of farms, while the average farm size increases, is can easily be seen in recent census reports. This phenomenon is either noted or implied in all of the literature on rural development through alternative agriculture. Indeed, packed within this trend is the basis for the Goldschmidt Hypothesis. The Goldschmidt hypothesis explains that as the size of farms increase around a town, the quality of life decreases. It was based on a comparative study conducted in the 1940’s in central California by Walter Goldschmidt. His study was a landmark in linking farm size and structure to rural community development and has been tested with various methodologies in subsequent studies more than 17 times. In many, but not all, cases, the relationship between the health of small, sustainable farms and rural community development has been strengthened.

This leads to an interesting discussion on the role of sustainability and sustainable agricultural systems in modern rural community development. It is clear that there is no common understanding of sustainability as a concept, not even among the academics who write about it. In classes where it is taught, students seem to leave each with his or her own understanding of sustainability. The thinking on sustainable development lacks any sort of density. In the center one may find a few viscerally understood premises. Radiating and revolving around this core at various distances are bits of thought in the literature, like many electrons floating around a tiny distant nucleus. Such are the individual contributions. Some contributions focus on infrastructure, others on philosophy, some on policy others on practice. But despite this ambiguity, individuals, academics, students, organizations and governments still, after many years, gravitate towards it. Sustainability is still seen as a path which, if you can find it, will lead to the Promised Land where the problems of poverty, affluence, social intolerance and environmental degradation are alleviated.

What is truly amazing about this amorphous, electron-cloud of literature on sustainability is the relative gravity it is able to produce. In the natural world we are able to observe that the more densely packed the matter of an object is, the greater the gravity of that the object and the greater influence it is able to have on its surroundings. Sustainable development literature defies this natural order. Somehow, despite its {spread out ness} it has been able to pull supporters in from wholly different and unexpected backgrounds. I would argue that this phenomenon is not simple happenstance. It is not some weird and unexplainable phenomenon. The concept of sustainability is able to court brilliant minds, powerful governments and well-endowed organizations because of the gravity of situation it seeks to remedy. The study of sustainable development is the study of conflict. It is innate within it. It is inextricable. It is the depth and breadth of conflict which prevents the premature and naïve reconciliation of ideas seemingly opposed within the literature of sustainable development.

The literature presented in this review is no different. Sustainable agriculture bucks a trend that has been building since the industrial revolution. It is currently at odds with federal agricultural policy, federal trade policy, a macro-level understanding of neoclassical economics, multi-national and multi-million dollar agro-business and the mainstream consumer in America. But all this is changing.

This review looked at those academics who have studied how sustainable agriculture could be used in rural community development. It found that the literature produced in this field has sought to agitate for movement towards sustainable agriculture in one of three ways, through policy change, programmatic change or systemic change. These categories are not unique to sustainable agriculture. In fact, nearly all facets of sustainable development could include these categories. What makes sustainable agriculture of particular interest to me in the field of planning is two fold. First, sustainability is an anthropocentric construction that seeks to maintain the natural systems that sustain human life on earth. The natural system that every individual is perhaps most intimately and daily aware of is the food system. There is a direct physical connection between the grower of food, the food and the earth. It is easy to see. Everyone can immediately understand it. Secondly, the sustainable agriculture movement is about more than just food. It addresses the most important conflict in sustainability, the growth versus sustainability issue.

As this paper is penned, in late Autumn, the airwaves are jammed with messages of more. Christmas, to many, is a time of dissatisfaction. We are told that we do not have everything we want, we are not satisfied, we are not content, and that the gatekeeper to this world of satiation is the local affiliate of some global retailer. Sustainable agriculture seeks sustainability by seeking real satiation. Sustainable agriculture is the recognition and reaction to glutton. More is now less. We have more things that carry less meaning. We have more food that carries less nutrients. We have more “communities” but we have fewer interactions.

Sustainable agriculture seeks sustainability by seeking community. It is premised upon the idea that food brings people together on a familial level, as in Thanksgiving dinner, but also on a community level. Now, as the pace of the rural diaspora quickens, small family farmers are leaving behind shells of the once lively Main Street, USA. As the average size of farms increase the hinterland is less able to support a small local commercial center, civic organizations, schools, professionals like doctors or lawyers, and those people, places and organizations that allow for vibrancy and life of a small town.

Sustainable agriculture is able to help as a tool to be used by independent family farmers to get into a marketplace that has shut them out in the past. There is a growing number of consumers that are willing to pay more for some sense of fulfillment. During a trip to the market perhaps a relationship is developed between the consumer and the producer of her food. Perhaps consumers are willing to pay 10 – 15% more if they understand that they are helping out Mr. Turner and know about his farm just outside of town, if they know that buying from Mr. Turner means that herbicides and pesticides have been kept in their drums and not released into the regional environment, if they feel like they are doing the right thing.

Hope of moving towards a more sustainable food system, and towards the sustainability of our species in general, relies upon an optimistic understanding of the human spirit. In general, people do not want to do wrong. People want to feel good about the way they are living and the market place has shown that increasingly, those who are able to make the choice, choose sustainable agriculture. Organics are the new buzzword at the supermarket. Agribusiness has responded by trying to dilute the meaning and intention of the sustainable agriculture movement, but has met resistance from an educated or “enlightened” consumer class.

Hopeful, educated, aware. Those who fit these criteria will be the change agents in the sustainability movement whether in bountiful fields producing our food or bustling city centers tending our business. Wherever they are found they will have taken a lesson from Isaiah, Iccarus and Sisyphus, from Berry, Goldschmidt and Kirschenmann, and recognize that taking too much, flying too high or pushing too hard leads to a society that few will want to be a part of.

As we look out into the hinterlands of our country, once specked with porch lights from family farm houses, we see a changing landscape. Sustainable agriculture offers a tool for planners, policy makers, grassroots organizers and farmers to slow, halt or perhaps even reverse the social, environmental and economic impacts of industrialized agriculture on rural communities. Now as we take our first steps down the path to a more sustainable food system, we may look to those whose writings have been reviewed in this and subsequent papers as way finders. There are many questions and few answers. Ultimately we will need to make decisions informed by our awareness, hope and educated understanding of how to live in a more perfect world.