Contributing to community With respect to the contributions that smaller farms make to local economic and social stability, Halweil points to the well-known William Goldschmidt study. He surveyed two communities in California and found that smaller farms in a community made a much more positive contribution than did larger farms. Halweil also asserts that modest-sized farms are critical for local ecological stability. Smaller farms, whose operators may have fewer time constraints, tend to maintain greater diversity than larger operations, which makes them more resilient and productive. We know that sound ecological management cannot be carried out through centralized planning.
Every ecological neighborhood is unique.
People need to live on the land long enough and intimately enough to learn how to manage each neighborhood in an appropriate way. Surely, it is time to reexamine the prevailing notion that all we need to do to make farming profitable is to get rid of a few more farmers, fuse the remaining producers into corporate value chains through contracts, increase the U.S. share of the export market, and further enhance our production technologies. It is time for us to reassess the impacts of our industrial agriculture model. At the Leopold Center, we want to make these issues part of our discussion to fashion a new vision for agriculture for the 21st century. We don't have the answers but we want to raise the questions.