The Environmental and Social Costs of Improvement 41and Dinuba in the San Joaquin Valley. These were matched for climate, value of
agricultural sales, enterprises, reliance on irrigation and distance from urban areas.
The differences were in farm scale: Dinuba was characterized by small family
farms, and Arvin by large, commercialized farms. There were striking differences
between the two communities. In Dinuba, there was a better quality of life, superior
public services and facilities, more parks, more shops and retail trade, more diverse
businesses, twice the number of organizations for civic improvement and social rec-
reation, and better participation by the public. The small farm community was a
better place to live ‘perhaps because the small farm offered the opportunity for
“attachment” to local culture and care for the surrounding land’ (Perelman, 1976).
A study of the same communities in the late 1970s reaffirmed these findings (Small
Farm Viability Project, 1977).
Recent years have brought severe financial crises for family farmers. They were
squeezed by debt and low product prices. Many thousands lost their businesses.
Many others did not see this as a problem, but as desirable. It was widely perceived
to be the way to agricultural prosperity. Michael Perelman (1976) quotes a Bank
of America official who said in 1969 ‘what is needed is a program that will enable
the small and uneconomic farmer – the one who is unwilling or unable to bring
his farm to the commercial level by expansion or merger – to take his land out of
production with dignity’.
Small farmers were widely taken to be economically inefficient. But their loss
has been a severe loss to rural society. Linda Lobao’s study (1990) of rural inequal-
ity shows the importance of the locality that Goldschmidt illustrated. The chang-
ing structure of farming has brought a decline in rural population, increased
poverty and income inequality, lower numbers of community services, less demo-
cratic participation, decreased retail trade, environmental pollution and greater
unemployment. The decline of family farming does not just harm farmers. It hurts
the quality of life in the whole of society. Corporate farms are good for productiv-
ity, but not much else: ‘this type of farming is very limited in what it can do for a
community ... we need farms that will be viable in the future, correspond to local
needs and remain wedded to the community’ (Lobao, 1990).
Wendell Berry, the influential poet and farmer, has long drawn attention to what
happens during modernization. Agricultural crisis is a crisis of culture: ‘A healthy
farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among people
soundly established on the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of
the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such
a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We
now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another genera-
tion to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility
now perishing with them, we will lose it altogether.’ (Berry, 1977)
One indicator of the crisis is the suicide rate among farmers. In the Midwest,
suicide rates among male farmers were twice the national average during the 1980s
(Gunderson, in FW, 1991). Some 913 took their own lives between 1980–1988,
producing annual rates higher than for any other documented occupation.