Agriculture series ends with a nod to small farms

Photo: Emil Dimatchev

Thomas Jefferson ended the Food and Agriculture in the Rockies lecture series on Monday, February 22 with Bonnie Lynn-Sherow’s talk entitled “The Mythological Power of the Family Farm.”

A talk by Zoë Wick, one of the student State of the Rockies researchers from last summer, preceded the talk. Each summer, the State of the Rockies Project hires six student researches for ten weeks. The students’ findings are published in the Annual Report Card every April. The lecture series is part of their mission to engage the community in important issues affecting the Rockies region.

Wick briefly presented some of her research on family farms conducted last summer. She said there has been a decrease in farm employment over a long period of time, even though there has been a small upswing since the 1970’s. The age of farmers is increasing, as are the number of female and minority farm operators.

This new interest in farming may be a “return of the small but beautiful movement” inspired by our third president, Thomas Jefferson, according to speaker Bonnie Lynn-Sherow.

According to Lynn-Sherow, a Kansas State University professor, President Jefferson’s vision for the family farm as part of an ideal republic has inspired both farms’ strong image in the American psyche and, ironically, their declining existence.

Jefferson pictured farmers that were educated, white, morally superior, landowning men running diversified farms independent of the government, Lynn-Sherow explained. These ideals formed the basis of “Agrarian Fundamentalism.” 

To this founding father, Lynn-Sherow said, land was what made America great. 

“We had a lot of land, not a lot of money, and not a lot of people,” she said. As Americans grew richer, however, and people spread very quickly into those lands, Jefferson’s notion of inexhaustible lands and the inability of humans to harm the environment soon showed itself as “an erroneous belief.”

Jefferson’s vision has yielded mixed results, Lynn-Sherow said. She said farmers have grown too dependent on government subsidies and large corporations like Monsato. She also believes that Jeffersonian thought contributed to settlers inheriting “a sense of entitlement to the land” that led Native Americans to be pushed off of it. 

Lynn-Sherow described Jefferson’s beliefs about using public education and science to improve farming techniques, but also the independence of farmers. This tied together two very different functions- the public and the individual- which heightened the issue of whether land should be public or private. 

“This linking led to farmers working themselves out of a job and right out of mainstream politics,” she said.

Lynn-Sherow said that although Jeffersonian ideals have had some problematic consequences, some positive aspects of the movement are returning. People are looking for a “usable pathway to our food,” or multiple places we can go to get our food, including local farms and other more natural sources.

“Organic farming didn’t exist in Jefferson’s day because synthetic agriculture didn’t exist in Jefferson’s day,” she said.

Lynn-Sherow expressed some hope for the new farm bill that will be created this year, which she hopes will contain incentives for small farms.

Interested students can visit www.coloradocollege.edu/stateoftherockies for more information on the State of the Rockies Project. The State of the Rockies Project is now accepting applications for its 2010 summer researchers.