Ours is an age of great material progress--an era of technology. Never has the human race enjoyed such an abundance of wealth, resources, and economic power. Yet a huge proportion of the world's citizens are still tormented by hunger and poverty, while countless numbers suffer from total illiteracy.
Why has social progress lagged behind the sweeping advances of technology? The answer lies in our moral values. Morally and ethically, our treatment of the land--and I include earth, water, and air--is scandalous, unethical, sinful, and tragic.
We cannot separate technology from moral values. To reject moral values is to attempt to build a society that is alien to God. The alternative is to set up false gods, which can only destroy the religious liberty and the material well-being of the citizens.
Our values will ultimately determine how we respect and treat the land. If land is just a commodity, we will abuse it in our greed to make a profit. If land is just a means to make money, then we will lose sight of its ultimate purpose. But if land is a gift from God, then we will give that land the dignity and the sacredness that God has given it.
Our economic system has little respect for land as a God-given resource. We seldom think that land must serve the needs of all God's people, not just a few. Why are there countless millions who do not have enough to eat? Why are there so many poor and dispossessed people in our world? Thirty-five million Americans fall below the poverty line, and the statistics are even worse in the Third World.
At the heart of this debate is the land. Who owns the land? Do we use it for the few, or is it for all people everywhere? Every piece of land carries with it a mortgage for the social needs of others.
LAST YEAR THE John Hancock Insurance Company, which has some $2.4 billion worth of farm investments but has no written conservation policy, foreclosed on a farm near Millville, Minnesota. Hancock rented it to an area farmer who tore up 27 years of conservation work. The farm had been protected by terraces, hay strips, waterways, and contours, which cut soil erosion to less than three tons per acre per year. The Wabasha County Soil Conservation Service estimated a soil loss of 35 to 40 tons per acre per year following the destruction of the safeguards to the land.
Twenty-seven years of model conservation practices were destroyed in a matter of hours. The 270-acre farm was transformed from a showpiece to a massive plowed field ready for straight-row corn and soybeans. Terraces were plowed and strips and most waterways demolished. The formerly well-kept farmstead now stands abandoned and overgrown with weeds.
About a year ago, I conducted a confirmation service at a church in Audobon, Iowa. After the ceremony one of the families invited me to come to their farm home, seven miles from the church, for supper before returning to Des Moines. It was a beautiful evening, and the sun was just setting. I will never forget those seven miles along the highway that overlooked the fertile, spacious farm land. The land was being readied for corn and soybeans.
I looked at that beautiful scene. To the casual onlooker it would have been delightful. But for me it was demoralizing. There was nothing green as far as the eye could see. The farmers were plowing and tilling the land from fence row to fence row. All the hills were under cultivation. Soil conservation was very evidently not a priority. Much of that land should not have been plowed. Erosion was rampant, or was soon to be. The spring rains, the summer rains, the fall rains would carry away tons and tons of that rich soil, that land, that earth.
The tragic end result could only be accelerated erosion. U.S. farms lose an average of nine tons of soil per acre annually. New topsoil is created at the rate of only four tons per acre annually. William H. Greiner, director of the Department of Soil Conservation in Iowa, once said, "Farm[ed] in the most careless way, valuable topsoil will last only about one-third of a century. Using the best soil conservation system, the original soil lasts 22 centuries, with more produced to take its place."
And the soil that is washed off the farm and into the rivers and streams is not only a loss to agriculture, it becomes a health hazard as well, for it contains chemical residues from herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. The people and the animals that drink that water, the fish that swim in it--all are the unwitting health casualties of agricultural sins.
SOIL EROSION IS a serious problem in an age of population increases and food scarcity. In Iowa, a state that produces 10 percent of the U.S. food supplies and 20 percent of its food exports, agronomists note that for every bushel of corn produced, two bushels of soil are lost. Iowa is in danger of losing more than half of its crop land from water erosion alone. The implication for consumers--higher prices--and for the world's hungry--food scarcity--are enormous. Soil erosion is a problem that affects both urban and rural people, even though the former have little or no contact with the land. What they don't know can hurt them as the future catches up with the present.
The soil is being destroyed from two directions. First, prime agricultural land is being converted to non-agricultural uses. Second, fair and marginal agricultural lands are being eroded by wind and water because of poor conservation practices.
The heart of the matter is that some farmers or potential farmers are being forced from prime land to marginal land by urban developers and then, caught in a cost-price squeeze, they try to work the poorer soil to produce at a level comparable to better soil. Thus they use more chemicals and heavier equipment and set aside conservation practices such as contour plowing, terraces, shelterbelts (windbreaks of trees), and grass waterways. In addition, farmers are getting lower prices for their farm products and paying higher prices for seeds, fertilizers and other chemicals, land, and equipment, and high interest rates when borrowing money. The result is bankruptcy and accelerated erosion.
THERE ARE EXPLOITERS of the land, and there are nurturers of the land. The exploiter's goal is money, profit. The nurturer's goal is health--health for the land, individual, family, community, and country.
The exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce. The nurturer asks a much more complex and difficult question--how much can be taken from it without diminishing it. The exploiter does not serve others. The nurturer serves land, household, community. It is the tragedy of rural America that today the exploitive mind holds sway over the land.
The exploiters are not only the landowners or managers. We have fallen prey, as a people, to the notions that "bigger is better," that machinery is better than human labor in any place or occupation, that the measure of people is their material possessions. The unrestricted right of people to extend and use their property in whatever manner they choose is unethical and sinful.
Wendell Berry writes, "The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistications of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land. As many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interests, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition."
Do we work in harmony with the earth, with the land, with the soil, or do we struggle to dominate the earth? The issue in land use is whether our most precious resource--the land--is to be put to its best and proper use for the benefit of future generations, or whether the richest soil is to be exploited to make the "fast buck," letting the future be ignored.
Too often in our capitalist economy, land has become a commodity to be traded, an opportunity for investment, and no longer a public trust. "As a consequence," Jack Nelson explains, "rural America is a colony of corporate America." Soil conservation is a part of the struggle between those who uphold the family farms and those who advocate the corporate system.
The land is God's. We are God's stewards on the land. The land must benefit everyone. The land should be distributed equitably, and those who till the land should be given a just price for their product.
FAMILY FARMS ARE best able to practice good forms of stewardship conservation. But we have reduced the number of farms in the last 40 years from seven million to less than two million. The decline in the number of moderate-sized farms in this country and the mounting evidence of poor resource conservation raise serious questions of morality and public policy.
As teachers and as pastors, we bishops felt we could not remain silent while thousands of farm families are caught in the present crisis and are losing their homes, their land, and their way of life. In the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter on the economy, we suggested guidelines for both public policy and for our own personal efforts, hoping to help shape the future of American agriculture.
Moderate-sized farms operated by families on a full-time basis should be preserved and their economic viability protected. There is real social value as well as an economic value in maintaining a wide distribution of land ownership. This principle, initiated by Thomas Jefferson and upheld by Abraham Lincoln in the 1863 Homestead Act, is foundational to our democracy.
Rural communities are important for the democratic future of our country. Rural interdependence gives us a rich plurality of social institutions, enhancing personal freedom and contributing to the vitality of rural communities. I propose, in light of these moral values, that we call for a New Homestead Act, which would allow farmers to keep their homesteads plus 40 acres if they went into bankruptcy. And these same farmers would receive an opportunity to buy back their land.
Such an act would raise the consciousness of the human tragedy of farm foreclosures. The public conscience must be aroused. We must focus the rural debate in human terms.
Save the land! Now is the time for action. We have a moral duty to uphold the family farm. Though we are uncertain, perplexed, hesitant, we must be about our task. In the Lord's vineyard, it is necessary to work with eagerness, zeal, and tenacity. Do not remain silent! The sin of omission is just as grievous and as serious as the sin of commission.
Maurice J. Dingman was the Catholic bishop of Des Moines, Iowa when this article appeared. This article was excerpted from a speech delivered at the Eastern Iowa Conservation Tillage Show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in January 1986.
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