Sustaining Cultivation 507so that we can survive. But that’s going to have to happen in the next five to ten
years, or the opportunities will be gone. Then I think the other, the tremendous
hurdle, is education of consumers and citizens in general about the value of farm-
ing the way we do.’
In other words, unless the dialogue of practical agriculture widens well beyond
its current confines, the cultivation of broad agricultural sustainability is unlikely
to come to pass anytime soon. As Brad noted, part of that broadening has to take
place among farmers and others in the farming community, such as university
researchers, government officials, bankers, agricultural implement dealers, agricul-
tural implement makers, seed suppliers and commodity groups like the Iowa Corn
Growers Association. Although Brad rightly worries that there is still much polari-
zation here, much of the success of PFI has been exactly in its ability to invite the
participation of others in the farming community into its conversations, into its
knowledge cultivation, through the attractions of the group’s dialogic approach.
PFI has had the greatest impact on its local state university, Iowa State. It can be
no accident that Iowa State in 1989 established the Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture, which is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading research and
extension centres in sustainable agriculture. It can be no accident that in the fall of
2001 Iowa State University enrolled students in the nation’s first graduate pro-
gramme in sustainable agriculture.^8 PFI has also made connections with many of
Iowa’s traditional agricultural organizations, such as the Iowa Farm Bureau, with
which it jointly hosts a series of field days every year to farms that are implement-
ing sustainable practices. At its 2003 annual meeting, PFI hosted a session, led by
a rural banker, on the role of bankers in sustainable agriculture. PFI understands
what I earlier called the ‘wonderful’ quality of dialogue: that the inclusion of each
additional voice in a dialogue encourages consideration of whomever else is miss-
ing, leading to the even greater widening of participation.
But Brad also pointed to another, equally important dimension of broadening
the dialogue of practical agriculture: the ‘tremendous hurdle’, as he put it, of
involving those who eat and use what farmers produce in the discussion over what
agriculture has become and what it could instead be.
To overcome that hurdle, to encourage the broader relevance of agriculture, we
will have to consider the arguments for why agriculture is irrelevant. I think we can
divide these arguments into three general sorts, what we might call the emptying of
agriculture, the swamping of agriculture, and the obsolescence of agriculture. All
three of these arguments, I believe, are misleading.
The emptying of agriculture is probably the most familiar of the three, and it
goes like this. Ours is now an urban world. Some 75 per cent of Americans live in
urban areas, and 25 per cent in rural areas, the reverse of how things stood 100 years
ago. True, worldwide, some 53 per cent of the human population remains rural.^9
Each year, however, the rural percentage drops, as more and more of the human
more and more find their fortunes where the real fortunes seem always to be made:
in cities. And those who remain in rural areas, particularly in the wealthy countries,