Farming and the Natural Landscape.
Farmers they say live off the fat of the earth.
In other words, they plant, they raise, the grow food and fiber in the dirt which they either sell or feed to livestock. The same could be said of ranchers, or for that matter loggers — both who generally use and manage natural resources both for today and tomorrow. They work the land in ways that tries to tie down and maximize nuetriant uptake in plants, use science to produce more product with less impact and fewer inputs.
Farms by their very nature are quite adaptable land-use pattern. A farm can become a housing development, a forest or wilderness area, a commerical plaza, an industrial area or a highway. Or it can continue to be agriculture. For one, farms are generally large properties, with one owner. Many farms are hundreds of acres, in some parts of country that are flatter and less agriculturally productive, farms can be thousands of acres managed by a single family. That makes land transfers and wide-spread development or conservation much easier.
Farm land is generally lightly developed, as most fields are dirt that could quickly grow back up to forest if abandoned. Or paved or built over. Farming in many ways is a temporary land use, much more so then when a farm land is paved-over, subdivided, or used for other non-natural purposes. Developed land is often in many hands, and contains buildings, infrastructure, and other things that can be costly to remove.Β Farm land also is more productive to wildlife, often the home of many species of birds, deer, coyotes and other wildlife. It absorbs carbon dioxide, and is part of a healthy landscape.
1 Comment
People hardly ever think of the cost of making farmland. It mostly must come flat enough to begin with, shallow hills, valley, meadow, and bottomland. A good lot of it was brushland that had to be cleared before it could be plowed. It pains me to see it abandoned once cleared. It can lie fallow for some years, but it’s not long before it starts growing tougher weeds like goldenrod, and then, weedy little trees that all require expensive brushhogging to reclaim the space to be farmed again, even just to grow useful hay. A farmer I talked to gave it only about 5 years before that happens. I love trees and live among them, but that’s in uneven terrain not suited to being farmed, and far more interesting to me. There’s no substitute for good farmland though. Once paved over, there’s no getting it back in any practical terms. Maybe we have enough strip malls already.