What is the White Space on the Map?

Redefining Urban and Rural: Agriculture Loses Without Planning

Comment By steve kelly, 2-07-08

That "respect" must first come from the property owners themselves. It is hard to nurture or regulate a "land ethic" in a culture all about money. Ag is legitimate and designated on the tax rolls. What's lacking is people who value its continued existence. Without (not just monetized) value, survival of ag, fish, wildlife, water, forests and everything else that makes Montana special will be traded as a commodity. Of course it's worth keeping.

Comment By David Nolt, 2-07-08

Another great article, Susan.

As the communities in Amsterdam, Churchill, Four Corners and Gallatin Gateway work to form neighborhood plans, farmers and city folk alike consistently emphasize preserving agriculture and the agriculture lifestyle as top priorities. As local farmer Walt Sales said at the Gallatin Grassroots Forum & NewWest.Net/Bozeman's forum last September, "We all eat."

I would be very interested to hear input on this issue from both Montana State University's agriculture department as well as all the many folks who now preach the merits of local food (a great concept, of course). For every residential and commercial subdivision that goes up in the Gallatin Valley (outside of existing towns) we lose fertile ground that could be used to feed new and existing Montanans and Bozemanites. We lose an agricultural family tending the land. We lose open space. The list goes on.

How many of the houses in the new subdivisions surrounding Bozeman are empty? Are the commercial developments bringing good paying jobs? Where will these people get their food? As gas prices soar and global warming shifts our natural systems, local agriculture will become all the more important, not only for food but for biofuel crops as well.

Again: we all eat. We need to support local agriculture both with our words and by putting our money where our mouth is. Crucially -- and preferably, yesterday -- we need to ensure agriculture remains a viable way of living and providing food in this area and beyond. This, among other things, takes planning, which takes community dialog. As far as what we can specifically do to preserve agriculture in the Gallatin Valley, I'm not entirely sure, but I think we're all probably pretty open to suggestions. Everybody wants their piece of country "paradise," but agriculture and the environment would be better off if more of us lived in town. The development going in at the Sawmill brownfield site in Missoula (see The New West magazine) is a great example of turning a liability into an amenity. Doesn't Bozeman have brownfield sites? Shouldn't we fill the glut of empty houses before building new ones? Can you even control that while protecting private property rights?

Of course farmers can do what they want with their land, but they have enough to worry about in their weather-dependent profession; they shouldn't have to worry about selling off their land to a developer in order to retire or pay medical bills. Once that land goes under, it's not coming back anytime soon. And you can't grow potatoes in pavement.

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-07-08

Susan's comments about the claim from settlers that Natives weren't using the land properly puts the current issues where urban people are seeing agricultural lands in the same way in a stark light. Technically, farmers and ranchers have no right to complain; those that benefitted from the sword shall die by it.

Ecologically, since Natives were using land in ways that had evolved over centuries and millennia, it seems that in fact their use was the highest and best use, and not anything that followed. (Any ecological assessment of the state of land in the West will show you that, if you're willing to see it). Of course, settlers, wanting the land, thought differently, and the United States Army took it by force, unleashing a radical and tragic ecological and social upheaval on land and Native peoples that is still going on.

That's what agriculture does--wherever it has appeared in this world, going back to the early years of the Holocene, it has engendered ecological upheaval and havoc and destroyed peoples that had lived on the land for tens of millennia.

What people who advocate for agriculture over urban development fail to understand is that latter naturally follows the former until there is an economic collapse with some reversion back to wildness, with the handicap that soils damaged by agriculture take a long, long time to recover. In too many places in the Old World (e.g., North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, southwest Asia, all places where I have traveled and observed the tragic results of thousands of years of farming and ranching).

That people are replacing cattle in the West is no justification for cattle. Essentially, the ecological impacts are the same.

So when we think about the highest and best uses of land, perhaps we need to think real hard--is it better to preserve agriculture, or is it better to try and return the land to the state to which it originally evolved to support wild animals and wild people?

That's kind of a thought experiment. We'll never get back to the pre-European state, it's true, but I think it is important to try to establish what it was and how it worked, if only to think more clearly about what we want to do with agriculture now. If it doesn't recover some degree of ecological insight and put it into practice, there's no hope for it.

Comment By Roxanne Christensen, 2-08-08

We are now in an urbanized century, and farming needs to re-define itself to compliment, rather than compete with, densely populated areas. A new sub-acre farming method called SPIN-Farming provides a way for farmers to downsize their food crop production without downsizing their incomes. SPIN reduces the land base and operating costs of farm operations and re-casts farming as a small business in town. By serving the fresh vegetables needs of local communities, SPIN begins to position farming as an integral part of urban and suburban economies, rather than something isolated outside of them.

SPIN also removes the 2 big barriers to entry for first generation farmers – they don’t need a lot of land or money. Once food production becomes embedded within densely populated areas, the "farmers in the middle", those with hundreds or thousands of acres on the suburban fringes, can shift to resource farming which will help restore ecosystems and make some amends for the centuries of abuse that agriculture has inflicted on the environment.

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-08-08

Roxanne's recommendations make a lot of sense--they are more in tune ecologically than what we have now, and movement in this direction of local food would tend to break the chains that agribusiness has forged to make it such an oligarchy (e.g., livestock INDUSTRY).

However, we still have the problem created by agriculture in the West: what do we do about wildlife? Agriculture is inherently hostile to wildlife, and wildlife has suffered everywhere in the world where agriculture has existed or now exists.

Comment By Susan Duncan, 2-08-08

Way to go, gang. Got your thinking caps on.
Steve: Yup! Money talks. how can we make it speak for what we value?
David: Maintaining a presence for ag is not easy. To produce a product requires juggling natural/biological systems (weather and growth characteristics of plants and animals plus economic factors (ever changing local, state, national, and global markets) plus political decisions (free trade, farm bill). So much of what affects farming is done at the state, federal, and international levels that local efforts are only a small part of the picture. That's another reason why chambers of commerce don't get involved much. The State Dept of AG and MSU (as a land grant college and the research and development arm of ag state wide) have much more influence on ag policy than local and county government.

I agree with Roxanne's comments about fitting agriculture into the urban and suburban landscape - smaller scale ag, sized right for new reality of a mixed landscape, and producing for local consumption. I have not heard of SPIN-Farming. Do you have a source so I could look it up? But University of Idaho and University of Washington are doing classes and workshops for small scale ag entrepreneurs. Google http://www.cultivating success.org. University of Tennessee has a whole long list of small scale value added ag projects. As far as I know, MSU offers nothing like this, except a class on market gardening through the Horticulture program. The sources within Montana for this are AERO (http://www.aeromt.org) in Helena and ATTRA http://www.attra.org (a branch of the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte.)
Robert: I agree we DO have to go back and pay attention to how the basic biological and geological systems of a place work. Farming, gardening, landscaping don't succeed unless you understand how your land works first. Highline homesteaders dumped wood ashes on their gardens to improve the soil (because that's what they did in the Midwest). It only made alkaline soils much more alkaline, to the detriment of crops. The Dust Bowl was a classic example of not understanding the nature of the land west of the 100th meridian. I've seen houses around here in the flood plain, in very fire prone landscapes with only one way out, on windswept ridgelines, in snowholes, at the base of avalanche chutes. All this tells me people have only a man-centered notion of where they live which doesn't change when they move to someplace new.
As to wildife and ag. Our place has more wildlife than it originally supported due to irrigation. There's more food and cover here now.
We are half mile from the West Gallatin which serves as a migration corridor. I don't see ag and wildlife as at odds. Ag provides winter range that the National Forest cannot. Talk to FWP about their game ranges and cooperative relations with landowners. The one I know about is elk herds around Divide that use a lot of ranchland. Also Tom Milesnick north of Belgrade is doing fee hunting and fishing on his place. Milesnicks and Skinners have done riparian restoration work on the East Gallatin. Greater Gallatin Watershed Council is working with sub-watershed groups like Milesnick's Thompson Creek Watershed Group and MSU and Mandiville Creek to find funding and start projects.

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-08-08

Susan

When I hear about what great things ag is doing for wildlife, I always ask, compared to what? Before Europeans conquered the West, what was going on? Did wildlife depend upon irrigated pastures for winter range? Did wildlife rely upon alfalfa, an exotic import that originated in the Caspian Sea region north of Iran and is so "hot" that horses can get colic from eating too much of it? Did wildlife "need" predator control to keep their numbers high for human hunters? Did they need "working landscapes" to provide a variety of grasses and forbs throughout the year?

The answer of course is no; the ecosystems that existed in North American before 1492 did quite well without European farmers and herders radically changing the landscape for agriculture, thereby damaging the land and native biodiversity beyond repair.

True, before Europeans showed up, when human arrogance became too much among Native inhabitants, as with the Anasazi, the land expelled them, and they left their homes in ruins.

Where private and public ag lands now exist, or where overtaken by urban development, which is the entire West, those places were at one time native range for wildlife. It's no wonder that wildlife try to still use them--where else will they go? But now they use them only on sufferance of the landowner, the beneficiary, knowing or unknowing, of the theft of that land from wildlife and the Native people who lived here before.

Quite frankly, having grown up in agriculture myself, I know that wildlife are generally unwelcome where agriculture exists; I see it all around me here in the West (e.g. coyote and raptor carcasses strung up on fences. Yes, this kind of barbarity still exists). Those folks in ag who tolerate wildlife are indeed in a minority.

In my view, this undeniable fact of theft of land, and the precarious state of the land as wildlife range now, has left a moral scar on title to that land. That places a non-compensable responsibility on present and future owners of land to turn that land back to wildlife and native biodiversity to the greatest extent possible.

As a matter of historical record, here's what ag has done for wildlife in the West:

Fenced in the range and built ranches in river bottomlands, blocking access to range and migration corridors.

Killed off wildlife in droves, not only predators, but also big game that competed with livestock for forage. Examples, elk, bison, mule deer, pronghorn antelope in the Upper Green River Basin of Wyoming.

Let's not forget wolves and grizzly bears.

When the conservation movement gained political power in the 20s and 30s, ag, through its control of legislative assemblies, voted itself numerous subsidies, such as damage compensation payments, forcing wildlife agencies to use hunter and angler license fees to cover those payments. Ag also forced state wildlife agencies to limit big game herds to protect forage for cattle. Examples, depredation hunts, or late season cow-calf/doe-fawn hunts. These hunts still go on; our big game herds would be much larger were it not for rancher complaints about "too many elk, deer, antelope, etc."

Polluted streams with animal waste, fertilizers, chemicals, and fuels.

Damaged streams by leaving cattle in riparian areas.

Overgrazed the range and damaged its native productivity.

Pushed roads into canyons, across streams, and up into alpine meadows, leaving scars that will last for centuries.

Introduced diseases of domestic livestock into wildlife that has killed them off, such as bighorn sheep, or become liabilities for wildlife, such as brucellosis, which is used as an excuse to continue to slaughter wildlife to protect the "economic viability" of the livestock industry. The gross abuse of Yellowstone bison is just one example.

Etc., etc., etc.

I'm not so naive to believe that we can return to pre-European days where we hunted for our food, but one thing we can do is work to put agriculture into its proper place, where farmers and herders think of themselves as citizens of this country rather than oligarchs that seek to continue their subsidies and their political power to control wildlife management and land use to the detriment of wildlife and the rest of us who live here.

And, of course, I look forward to a time when farmers and herders take the time to learn ecology, geology, biology, botany for their own sakes rather than as means to an end: making a profit, and devil take the hindmost.

In closing, everything I have mentioned here is a matter of historical record. You cannot deny the push for subsidies out of the public purse, the slaughter of wildlife, both of big game and predators, not to mention raptors, and the extraordinary damage to upland ranges, riparian areas, and alpine meadows. All of these things are still occurring, and we have ag to thank for it. And yet, the arrogance of ag is never higher. Here in Wyoming, not a legislative session goes by without ag coming in with demands for another subsidy, or greater control over wildlife.

Two years ago, it was $10 million for predator control; ag got $6 million. Still a pretty pinch of change. This session, there's a bill that would prevent the Wyoming G&F;Department from holding federal (BLM) grazing leases. These leases have come with base property that G&F;purchased, using hunter and angler license fees/excise taxes, to dedicate to big game winter range (not livestock). The bill would require G&F;to turn these leases, which account for 120,000 acres of BLM-owned winter range, back to the BLM for re-issuance to ranchers for livestock use. In other words, this bill, HB004, backed by the Stockgrowers and pushed by the individual ranchers who would benefit from getting access to those leases, would steal 120,000 acres of winter range from the hunters and anglers who paid for those acres, and give them to ranchers.

No compensation to G&F;is authorized in the bill for this "taking."

If this is not theft, I don't know what is.

As I said, this kind of thing happens all the time, and I for one am damned sick and tired of it. I'm tired of the arrogance, the sense of entitlement, and the outright thievery that characterizes ag politics and culture, particularly livestock politics and culture.

I'd appreciate any suggestions from you as to how ag might discover a sense of humility and responsibility as citizens of a larger community rather than oligarchs who don't have to listen to anyone else. We're certainly not going to get such suggestions from the Stockgrowers, which is interested only in expanding its power over land and wildlife for private benefit.

RH

Comment By J, 2-08-08

Robert - I understand where your sentiment comes for. Not to offer any apologies at all, I will say this. Ag does do one thing that rampant rural subdivision does not: it protects the land base. No matter how damaged a piece of ag ground is, its usually possible to heal that landscape. Once a subdivision goes in, fragmenting habitat and scattering "subsidized predators" like cats and dogs across the landscape, it ain't going away. At least ag offers the possibility of restoration.

While I agree wholeheartedly that large landowners would do well to acknowledge responsibility as well as rights, lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Its easier to change management practices on a working landscape than it is to remove a platted subdivision. That's one of the things I get out of Susan's articles. Let's work work together.

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-08-08

J

I noted above that replacing cows with people does not improve things. On the other hand, it does not make things substantially worse. What agricultural development begins, urban development continues, but does not end. It's the very nature of civilized cultures, to which both rural and urban are necessary, to destroy what they touch. It's happened all over the world, and it's happening here.

Tell me, how are feral dogs and cats any different ecologically than domestic cattle or sheep? Is not considerable damage being done by both? Of course, the answer is yes. Looking for differences is just quibbling.

It is an ecological fallacy, and fantasy, that the "working landscape" is necessary to sustain land and wildlife. How did wild animals survive for millions of years without the "human" working landscape? This question may seem like a cliche, but it is certainly relevant.

Indeed, wherever you find "working landscapes," by which is meant agriculture, you find wildlife and land in distress, as well as the creation of pest species that do just fine in disturbed landscapes (e.g., whitetail deer on the East Coast).

We find ourselves trying to figure out how to "bait" (the word is Aldo Leopold's) landowners to consider the welfare of wildlife and biodiversity. This is true of both rural and urban landscapes.

Here in Wyoming, whenever winter range is dedicated to wildlife (something that doesn't happen anymore, because the Stockgrowers put a stop to it, to protect so-called "working landscapes," which leaves agriculture in place for more economic subsidies, such as conservation easements), you hear squawks out of the Stockgrowers that "land is being taken out of production." That, no doubt, is the ideological cover being given to HB004 that I mentioned above; the actual reason for the bill is the greed of ranchers near wildlife winter range who want those grazing permits for themselves.

Of course, the claim that the land is being taken out of production is sheer nonsense. It's only being taken out of commercial agricultural production so that its total productivity can be put to work for wildlife.

However, the focus of my comment was on the political-social-cultural behavior of agriculture, especially the livestock industry. One cannot look at the history of ranching in the West and not come out of the study without a sense of despair and anger. We all know, or should know, this history. It is one of brutality, arrogance, and oppression of land, wildlife, and yes, people too. That's what the range wars were about.

This rather despicable history--which is pretty much the history of agriculture everywhere, particularly pastoralism--is ensconced in the laws of the various western States that give ranchers oligarchical (rule by the few for the few) political and economic status. This leads to the extraordinary subsidies, tax breaks, and legal exemptions that characterize the livestock industry; privileges for the few paid for by the rest of us.

Something so simple as open range laws demonstrate the contempt the livestock industry expresses toward the rest of us. If on the highway, I hit a black cow on a black night with my car, I am financially responsible for the loss of that cow, not to mention the damage to my car, not the rancher who lets his cattle roam around unsupervised on the public roads.

Or "fence out" laws. If I don't want livestock wandering onto my property and damaging it, it's my responsibility to keep the rancher's property, the cattle, out, not his responsibility to keep his property under control.

It's his private property rights that count, not mine.

It's things like this, along with the big things, like the slaughter of bison or government funded predator control, that makes "working together" a nonsensical and absurd recommendation as long as the cowboys control the politics.

That makes one of the strategic targets of conservation the political power of the livestock industry.

Given the politics, it makes one wonder therefore just what are we getting by keeping ranchers on the land? What are we getting for the millions upon millions of dollars of agricultural subsidies, which can be seen as public investments in private enterprise, that goes to the livestock industry in our states every year? Over the decades, we the public have invested billions of dollars in agriculture. What have we gotten for it? Food production? Just how much locally produced beef stays here?

It seems to me that the primary thing we're getting is the opportunity to continue to subsidize an economically non-viable but politically arrogant social group.

We'd be better off economically by condemning the land, whether ranchers or surburbanites are on it, and opening it up to wildlife and restoring it for biodiversity.

That, of course, won't happen, given the politics and economics. First of all then, we have to change the politics, which means destroying the livestock industry as an oligarchy. The best way to do that is to go after the subsidies, in a negative way, and in a positive way, use the savings to protect land, wildlife, and biodiversity.

As for the subdivisions, they depend upon cheap energy, which is fast becoming a thing of the past. Economic necessity, I predict, will drive their populations out--of the subdivisions and the West. Climate change will definitely be a factor, as well as water scarcity. Then, maybe, those who have the will to remain despite the problems of existence will be able to establish some degree of sustainability as they search for the necessities of life, which, perhaps, we will have protected and handed down to them by protecting land, wildlife, and biodiversity from the ravages of civilization.

RH

Comment By Rose Mary, 2-09-08

Those of us who regularly read NewWest.net have become particularly aware of the fact that many articles and discussions are most pointedly, and most often, ones that might appear on a website named NewWestMONTANA.net. Some of the articles and discussions can appropriately and readily be applied throughout the New West area which this website claims to represent and address.

This is not one of them.

Nor are those you have previously written on this subject, Susan. Had they been written and posted on a NewWestMONTANA website that would have been a horse of entirely different color ... perhaps. It is indeed unfortunate that you have failed to make that distinction, particularly so regarding the current and actual Facts of the Matter(s).

Therefore, although the rest of us might have some degree of interest in becoming aware of The State of The Union Address in Montana, and might become wiser regarding the attitudes expressed by some of the residents of Montana that might reflect some of the attitudes and problems that might now or at some future date apply to the rest of the New West, to identify problems and to describe them as being true or applicable to the entirety of the West, new OR old, is inaccurate and misleading to New West readers as a whole.

As I read your previous articles, acknowledging as I did in my comments that your overview of rural vs. urban descriptions were certainly accurate as far as they went ~ with your own acknowledgement that you were using stereotypes as your examples voiced ~ I could not help but notice the VERY few comments made by any owner of any large parcel of privately-owned property. Almost all of the comments your articles have motivated have come from those persons who do NOT own the land you wish to control without the benefits or the encumbrances of that ownership and none of those commenting, as I readily recall, have offered up onto the negotiation table any asset of their own of equal or greater value.

Your previous representations that you would be addressing "cooperative" solutions for all the problems that ail the Great State of Montana seem to me to have not been addressed in this article. Unless, of course, you actually believe that the word and intent of any "cooperative" can be adequately addressed and/or identified with problems solved when only ONE side of the table is occupied? If you think you have welcomed, or even considered, "the other side of the table" ~ or "the rest of the story", as the case IS ~ where are those voices within either your article or any of the comments posted with them? Do you really think that "preaching to the choir" ~ those who covet what another person owns preaching to those who covet what another person owns ~ is the equivalent of any sort of a "cooperative" adventure? Some of us would not relate to that as being any kind of a "cooperative" discussion or solution.

When those "cooperative" voices on the other side of the table appear ~ from those MONTANA land owners of the large parcels of land you are lobbying to control ~ it will at least be an interesting and educational adventure to share with MONTANA residents for the rest of us through the actual New West beyond the boundaries of the State of Montana.

Should you wish to continue to represent this article and those comments attached to it as a condition of the entire New West then you must bear the burden of accuracy describing what IS throughout the *entire* West, which you have blatantly failed to do, all the while implying otherwise.

FACTS substantiate this statement I have made, a statement that you, too, could confirm with proper investigation THROUGHOUT THE WEST ~ as could those who have commented here and in conjunction with your previous articles.

Hopefully all those who read this series on this website will take the time to investigate those inaccuracies and deficiencies.

Comment By Susan Duncan, 2-09-08

My articles are posted on the "Bozeman" page of New West. I can only write from my own experience. I don't know everything so I encourage you to add how things look to you wherever you live whether it agrees with what I see or not. We learn by sharing our viewpoints. So, what's going on where you are?

The comments section is open to anyone. Large landowners are welcome to "say their piece" as one of many voices. I have no control over the unwillingness of large land owners to do so. Their reticence has allowed them to become almost invisible in the growth discussions now going on. Around here, it has been like pulling teeth to get them to put together a counter proposal that says what they want instead of shooting down every proposal that is offered. In my opinion, ag has not done a good job of public relations. They are suffering the consequences.

The measures that have been attempted to control "growth" have largely been based on competition. Why didn't those measures work? One side wants to control the behavior of the other. Dollar values run roughshod over a broader sense of values. The results have been pitting "good guys" against "bad guys". The rancor produces lots of heat, little enlightenment, and not nearly enough progress. That's what I have been covering so far.

The next few articles will discuss a cooperative approach - why its needed, how we get there individually (a completely different thought process than is typical), and how we get there within our own communities through developing a community wide understanding of the specific place we live in.

And then on to myth busting. Today, the perceptions of agriculture and the West are tied up in all sorts of myths that generate expectations (both urban and rural) that cause problems. Let's sort that out. This column could go on for a long time. Hang in or drop out whenever you like.

Each place is unique and has its own characteristics. If you learn how to become one with the place you live in, you can learn how to embed yourself in any place you move to. I have lived and worked (out in the field in resource management) in Salem, Oregon; Monticello, Utah; Lancaster, Valyermo and Quincy, California, Missoula, Billings, and Belgrade, Montana. I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis and worked for the City Planning Dept. in Columbia, Missouri for a while. Each place was unique - not only geographically, but in the types of people that lived there and their attitudes.

The issue of growth is impacting the entire West. Some places have made extensive efforts to curb growth (Oregon's urban growth boundaries), save open space (Boulder's publicly owned open space), Larimer County Colorado and TDR's, and none have been as successful as most people would like. Prescott Arizona bought up a 25,000 acre ranch just to get its water rights. The pressures of growth are enormous. The impacts huge. The effect on how we live in the future????

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-09-08

I must say that, as is usual with Rosemary, I have no idea what she's saying here. It seems she is saying that landowners have no obligations to community, to the public, or to the land itself, and so to hell with what the rest of us think about land.

Oh, by the way, however, keep the government subsidies flowing.

That's what we refer to in Wyoming as the "give us money and go away" syndrome.

Well, this attitude is one of the "myths" about agriculture and landownership in this country that needs busting.

Acceptance of such obligations (mostly obligations of stewardship) consequent to landownership are certainly part of what it is to understand the particular places where we live. Part of that understanding is realizing that no parcel of property is ecologically isolated from land as a whole and that what the landowner does with his or her property affects land and people elsewhere.

Unfortunately, agri-culture eschews this ecological understanding. That's one reason why so much damage has been done to land and community. It's also one reason why I find "cooperative" processes with ranchers and farmers so pointless.

Comment By Rose Mary, 2-10-08

I appreciate your comments, Susan ~ thank you.

I am sure that as far as you are concerned large landowners are welcome to join the conversation. But if you have read the comments such as those posted by Robert Hoskins perhaps that might give you at least an indication of why they might find participation to be a total waste of time?

Most of those largest parcels are owned/operated by ranchers, not farmers, who are also working 24+ hours a day this time of year trying to save their annual "crop" (AKA calving/birthing for those of you unfamiliar with what it takes for them to produce that "crop" each and every year, come bitter cold or shine or blizzards). I have no idea if or how many might ever frequent this site, of course.

I understand why you made the comment saying that "... ag has not done a good job of public relations". But once again I must ask the question: how many of the rest of the population who are engaging in conversations such as this one view their own private investments in the same light? You are correct: "One side wants to control the behavior of the other." But until such time as all the folks at the table, so to speak, are willing to forego groceries on the table and shoes on their kids' feet, health care and the ability to care for the aged amongst them and throw their own assets and investments into the pot, it is my opinion that it is extremey self-righteous to expect land owners to ignore the value of the dollar when it comes to their largest and most important (to them) lifetime investment, an investment made with great sacrifices and expense over a great number of years.

"For The Public Good" rings hollow since land owners all know that The Public was not so Good about showing up for the party when the payments were due or the fences needed fixin'. How many others participating here are donating how much of what they own to The Public Good?

If you'd like for me to send you a volume order of "The Little Red Hen" I'd be happy to do so!

Most of these land owners became "one with the place (they) live in" a long time ago and have worked not only the land but a wide variety of other 48-hour-per-day jobs in order to own the land and be "one with the place (they) live in". They have all put their money where their mouths are. Perhaps those who covet what they do not own should do likewise? For many of these land owners reaching that break-even point is their annual ultimate goal.

Why would it be so hard to understand that they might be appalled that those resting on their laurels on the sidelines, so self-righteously, seem to think they should have an equal voice in what-happens-next as far as those enormous investments are concerned? It is an unequal request or requirement that is being demanded by those wishing to make these determinations unless they, too, wish to place all their major investments and assets on the top of the table for redistribution to non-contributing parties. Are they willing to bargain away their kids' education or their own retirement benefits and health care? I do not hear anyone saying that they are. Do you?

What is being "discussed" is what you (generically speaking) want to do with what these land owners own. And, in my opinion ~ which is shared by many other large parcel land owners ~ what you (again generically speaking) are offering in return is nothing-for-something.

If "The Public" wishes to own and control the land it should be purchased, not taken without just compensation ~ just compensation to be determined by Fair Market Value at a price/terms/conditions acceptable to the seller. Fair Market Value is always determined by what a buyer will pay and a seller will accept under circumstances not clouded by distress, threats or intimidation. When that happens both buyer and seller get up from a closing table with grins on their faces. That is never true when one party wishes to take and expects/demands/makes the other party give. Isn't that fact proven on the every playground at every kindergarten, every day?

As I believe I mentioned when I commented on one of your previous articles, the land I own was zoned long before I purchased it 34 years ago, as is the entire county, rural and urban. Zoning here is coupled with area master plans (which I personally helped draft/complete in my own neck of the woods). But neither zoning nor neighborhood participation in a master plan has eliminated even one "NIMBY". The NIMBY attitude never changes and is most aptly described as "I've got mine so close the doors on the next guy who wants one next door." If the rules they wish to implement now had been in effect when they got theirs they would not be where they are ... they would have no house to live in, here or elsewhere. Throughout the West it is apparently very easy for people to forget their "lot" might have been a farm or a ranch before their own home was built to accommodate their own arrival within the West.

The issue of growth is not only impacting the entire West, it is impacting the entire nation, the entire world.

It seems to me that in order to address the issue of growth in any manner ~ be that under the label of "smart growth", "growth control", or any of the other politically correct catch phrases commonly used ~ then one must acquaint themselves with factual data concerning population growth, which is, after all, the root of the evil, is it not?

"Growth", however labeled, is caused by the increase in population throughout the West, the nation and the world. If you want to make it "smart" I guess you educate those people born each and every day? ... and if you want to "control" it what do you do? Kill the babies born or see to it they are not born at all like China has done?

If you want to see the actual numbers of the "growth" that is having this huge impact all you have to do is visit the U.S. Census Bureau website located at http://www.census.gov/. One of their press releases posted waaaay back in October of *2006* on that site states that the nation's population was expected to reach the 300 MILLION mark on October 17, *2006*, saying:

" This comes almost 39 years after the 200 million mark was reached on Nov. 20, 1967. The estimate is based on the expectation that the United States will register one birth every seven seconds and one death every 13 seconds between now and Oct. 17 (*2006*), while net international migration is expected to add one person every 31 seconds. The result is an increase in the total population of one person every 11 seconds."

REPEAT: "... AN INCREASE IN THE TOTAL POPULATION OF ONE PERSON EVERY 11 SECONDS" !!!

And those numbers do not even reflect increases, GROWTH acceleration, since that time!!! Nor do they reflect "undocumented" immigrants and/or their children who have continued to flood our nation at an even more astounding rate in the last year or two!

For those who want to know "the rest of the story" regarding the "growth" within our nation, on January 31, *2008*, the Census Bureau announced the production of the first Comprehensive Atlas in more than 80 years. This is the first general population and housing statistical atlas published by the Census Bureau since 1925, presenting data from 1790 through 2000. The maps reveal the relationships among our nation’s people and the states, cities and counties where they have chosen to live. In short, the book tells the story of our nation — its past, present and future. Full information about this Atlas can be found at http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/ . How long it will take for them to add the years 2001 through 2008 one never knows.

Are the "pressures of growth ... enormous"? ... "The impacts huge."? Of course they are!!! But to blame developers and home builders, or land owners or land planners or zoning for not "... curb(ing) growth ..." is ludicrous! And if any plan initiated by anyone fails to recognize the FACT that population growth is The Root of The Evil we love to hate it is predetermined to fail. You can sure lobby and argue eternally about whether or not homes-for-the-folks will be built "up" or "out" but if any of us think that sterilizing the land and/or overly restricting the density of homes built upon it will serve as "growth control" mechanisms, in my opinion we will be lying to ourselves. Each of us can always BUY our own land and, if our private property rights are not taken from us by actions seemingly being promoted by many who have commented here, as the owner of that land we can freely elect to sterilize it if we wish to do so. If we have our private property rights taken from us that will never again be true.

It is that very threat, that very fear, that is NOW serving as a force to make those of us who have previously freely elected for our own reasons to keep our land open and undeveloped to fast-track NOW toward the development of it. Those who are independently wealthy and can afford the risk of satisfying The Public Good at our own expense, without regard for our own future financial well-being, are few and far between.

Whether or not growth is "smart", it IS and it will continue to BE ~ short of even more radical "growth control" by gov.org than that already practiced in China.

In a nation such as ours with a large portion of the general population vested in the Right To Life I find that solution very unlikely, don't you?

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-10-08

Well, Rosemary, since you don't believe the public has a right to be involved in the management of "your" land, I suggest you and other landowners restore to the public purse the billions of dollars of public subsidies that you have taken over the last century. I mentioned some of those subsidies above, and I won't repeat them.

As a taxpayer, I see those subsidies as public investments in private enterprise, and that makes me a shareholder with the right to have a say in what happens on private land. Simply because you and other landowners don't like it won't stop me from "interfering."

I suggest that instead you learn to consider yourself a citizen of a body politic with obligations to that community rather than as someone who just takes and takes and gives nothing in return.

Comment By Rose Mary, 2-10-08

Your comments, Robert, are a prime example of how ignorance is never bliss except to those who wallow in it and spew out hatred with a self-righteous mean anger that surely should be eating you alive from the inside-out if it's not.

Interference, as you call it, can be a goal unto itself ~ so enjoy every minute of it!

I did notice however that you chose not to list what all you have given and given to anyone other than yourself ~ nor have you listed all the freebies coming from gov.org that you belly up to the bar to relish with delight.

Please start with that "giving" list. That would be a dandy way to illustrate your superiority.

Although it is absolutely none of your business, in the interest of furthering your education let me share one fact about me, my land, and my personal and business operations of all kind and nature upon my land: I have never ~ ever ~ received one of those government subsidies that you love to stamp on the forehead of everyone who owns land and/or who operates a business of any kind on the land they own.

2/3rds of the nation's farmers receipt NO subsidies and I know of no subsidies paid to ranchers on a regular basis except for disaster aid and most of that amounts only to a somewhat reduced interest rate on operating loans that they are obligated repay. Many times urban business owners are able to borrow operating capital at their local bank at a lesser rate than those disaster loans incur and there are many restrictions regarding who can even apply for that reduced interest rate ~ IF such a program is even funded after the politicians have taken their bows at the microphone.

On the other hand, without even professing to feed the children throughout the world ~ or even the children in their own neighborhoods ~ in the last 10 or 12 years alone local, state, and federal governments have spent more than $10 BILLION in taxpayer money subsidizing more than 50 new major-league stadiums and countless minor-league facilities. And this trend is only accelerating: a single project such as the new Nationals stadium in D.C. is costing taxpayers a once-unthinkable $600 MILLION or more.

At the same time, those who are making their living playing games in those subsidized facilities are being paid MEGA-MILLIONS to do so, as are those who hire, fire, and promote them. Yep. Glamorous state-of-the-art facilities WE are paying for, while baseball teams (for instance) moving into new parks raised ticket prices by an average of 41% in their first year in their new homes, with some teams as much as doubling ticket prices.

Please tell me, Robert, how many farmers or ranchers you know who are making MEGA-MILLIONS ~ and then tell me how many of them you know that have raised their prices by 41% in their entire lifetime, much less in just a one year period of time.

So what's your druthers to go with your Sunday beer fest, Robert? ~ baseball? ... football? ... basketball? ... hockey?

Unfortunately, you don't get either fries OR a burger to wash down with your booze ... but I am sure if you "interfere" long enough in your charming ill-informed manner you might could get that too ~ ya think? As a taxpayer, do you see those subsidies as public investments in private enterprise that makes you a shareholder with the right to have your personal say in what happens?

If so, why don't you run that idea past George Steinbrenner and report back to us at your earliest convenience.

Or do you only reserve that self-righteous hypocrisy for land owners in rural areas?

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-10-08

Susan and others

Well, Rosemary has just shown us her true self, one that certainly won't be missed when she dies.

It is unfortunate, but quite frankly, far too many landowners are like Rosemary: selfish, arrogant, greedy, offensive, despicable, and other words that I can't use on NewWest.

It's impossible to come to any sort of agreement with such unsavory and loathsome people.

RH

Comment By Craig Moore, 2-10-08

Robert, I would miss both you and Rose Mary if you were to die. Both of you have important perspectives on the West and our environment. Vastly different, but both important. As human beings you both have endured much and survived. That richness of experience can't be shared beyond the grave.

Comment By Rose Mary, 2-10-08

Thank you, Craig.

Comment By Robert Hoskins, 2-11-08

Well, Craig, is this your version of "Sympathy for the Devil"? Don't think it's what Keith and Mick had in mind.

This article was printed from www.newwest.net at the following URL: http://www.newwest.net/city/article/redefining_urban_and_rural_agriculture_loses_without_planning/C396/L396/