Jon Meikle, a small-scale farmer and farmland preservation activist, believes that the loss of farmers and farmland in the U.S. are some of the most costly casualties of global economic competition.

Jon and his brother operate a 400-cow dairy farm, established by their father seventy years ago, and grow 1500 acres of row crops in Cache County in northern Utah, just East of Brigham City and the Great Salt Lake.

Jon Meikle

Jon is passionate about preserving farmland. "We have watched urban sprawl eating up our lands," he says. "USDA has released data confirming that since the 1990s we have lost 3.2 million acres of farmland each year in this country. There is also a human side to this – not only are we losing the land, but also the stewards who for generations have taken care of the land. Farmers have a sense of community, a sense of place, and feel responsible for agricultural resources, yet we are losing them at a rate of more than 500,000 a year."

"America was blessed with an abundance of natural resources. But there's a train wreck coming down the road. In 50 years, America will find itself with 520 million people, double what we have now. You have world population going up, and natural capital, including arable agricultural land, going the other direction. In order to produce the food we eat, we have to find a way to compensate those who produce the bounty for us. Niche markets and sustainable approaches to better utilize our existing resources have merit. But with the path we are on moving toward free trade and pure corporate competition, we are not organizing a world that will feed us in the future."

"We place so little value on the natural capital we have inherited in this country. Who in this country is taking responsibility to see that we pass on to future generations a sustainable agricultural base? People get excited when you talk about open space, but farmland is much more than open space. It is also a resource we need to think about in terms of wildlife habitat, air filtration, groundwater recharge, aesthetic values, and global food security. In the final analysis, cheap food in America is not cheap. The real cost of cheap food in the grocery store is the loss of natural capital."

As farms have grown in size in order to compete in the commodity markets, natural cycles that supported agricultural productivity in the past have broken down or been replaced. "No place is that more visible than in the hog industry, where 25 producers control more than a quarter of the hogs produced in this country," says Jon. "We are essentially destroying the biodiversity that once characterized the family farm. Hog waste is no longer turned back into the soil as fertilizer, making us more dependent on energy-rich chemical fertilizer."

"It seems here in the U.S., we no longer view land as a natural resource, but as a commodity to be bought and sold. Profit is the name of the game – not consideration of the land itself, or the stewards who care for it."

In response to these concerns Jon and Wendy Fisher, director of the non-profit group Utah Open Lands, have organized a statewide grassroots effort for farmland preservation. "I started out with a county grassroots organization concerned about the loss of agricultural land in Cache County," says Jon, "but I felt that in order to get anything done we needed to move to a state level." For the last 5 years they have been working with a legislative committee, first to bring recognition to the problem, and then to advance legislation.

The legislation they are promoting would allowing counties to impose a tax in order to be able to purchase development rights from willing farmers and protect agricultural land from development. Unfortunately, the proposal has failed three years in a row. Although on the last attempt it passed out of the state House, it was killed in the Senate where a majority of the legislators derive their income from real estate. As of 1999, the legislative committee that developed the proposal was officially disbanded.

"Had we passed the legislation, it would have been a tremendous accomplishment. Nonetheless, the level of awareness in the state is much higher than when we started, leading some landowners to donate easements to our organization in Cache County. If we are going to protect farmland however, we have to come up with funding to give farmers and landowners another option besides development. Without a funding mechanism, essentially all we can do is sit on the sidelines and watch it disappear."

The most effective and quickest solution to the loss of farmland is improving farmers' profitability. "Family farmers" Jon says with personal knowledge, "would not part with their natural resources if they could remain profitable, and show their children there was a future in farming."

Jon Meikle
Milky Way Dairy
4650 North 1000
East Smithfield, UT 84335
Tel: (435) 563-5241

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