I caught sight of an interesting article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago by Jane Black called "The Churning Point." It's about local farming in Maryland and the opportunities for dairy farmers to produce goods from their milk on premises--a creamery, that is. Once the milk is converted to cream or, say, cheese, it is then a processed product. Is that local farm then a farm or a processing (pseudo-industrial) facility? Does the environmental law protecting that land promote this processing or restrict it? Which is better, the farmland or the cream?
The case isn't clear cut. Ergo, it's an interesting article.
The zoning and tax benefits offered to local farmers and to land preservation locales thus becomes a bit tricky -- should those local farms, and their lands, be used to preserve the landscape or to promote the local foodshed?
Local food advocates have a good argument that the whole point of building a more viable local foodshed is for the sake of environmental health -- dealing with pesticides, herbicides, fossil fuel use, water pollution, and such, on the one hand (land issues); working on health, purity, freshness, and such, on the other hand (human health issues); plus your standard list of possible economic, community-value, and trust issues that also help form the foundation of local food movements.
But land preservation advocates have a different argument that also rests on legitimate reasoning: they want to maintain the health of the land by preventing over-use, by resisting road development, by asking for more green space and less building construction, and so on.
I understand this issue as a confrontation between expressions of different environmental ethics. (If you've read the prior agro or enviro posts at this blog, you would've already guessed that I'd say that.) The land preservation ethic holds human activity outside the realm of environmental practice. Humans should tread lightly, that is, and leave things as they were before we got here. The farm-use ethic holds agricultural activity as part of environmental practice. Humans are part of and use ecosystems as part of their (our) daily lives, and the environmental questions before us are how best do to so -- not whether or not to do so.
True, the way I've just summarized it makes me lean to the agro-ethics side (the land use, not land-use-avoidance, part). This would make it seem that I come down firmly on the side of the cheese-maker who wants to build a new conversion facility on premises, introduce new roads that can handle the traffic, set up a shop to sell his wares, and mitigate the new water-runoff problems that would likely follow. But I don't think the case is as simple as such a summary might suggest. What fascinates me here is that the economic, legal, cultural, and environmental aspects are so thoroughly intertwined--and that questions of environmental ethics, of how we perceive the place of humans in our ecosystems, shape each of those contexts. Picking out just one, and basing an argument on that, doesn't seem satisfactory.
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I want to have my cheese and eat it, too. :-)
There's much to be said for limiting overuse of the land, and encouraging the local foodshed probably helps. There's no way the megadairy near where my parents lived in central California could sell cheese on site; the awful smell of the feedlot-style dairy sheds/pens persisted for miles around. Encouraging small farmers, organic farming, and local outlets for the food helps the land, the critters, and the consumers. A bit of extra infrastructure seems like a small price to pay.
That's not to say that overuse shouldn't be prevented. For example, I'm not as distressed by the concept of domestic animals grazing where bison once did, as the fact that they're often encouraged to overgraze. I remember driving along a road in eastern Utah ranching country where a property boundary intersected the road. On one side of the fence was brown, grazed grass. On the other side was desert. The land had been grazed to dirt. One good soil-stripping windstorm, and it would probably STAY desert for a long time. Should that rancher really have the right to do that kind of damage to the land?
Everyone agrees organic dairy farms producing their own products is a good idea. The main sticking point in this issue is that the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation (MALPF) has decided to allow the creamery to be built even though it isn't allowed through current zoning. Now the farmer is now forced to carry MALPF's banner (and legal cost) so that his case will open the door for allowing creameries of this size across the state regardless of long standing zoning laws. The Long Green Valley Association's (LGVA) charter requires that they challenge any commercial development that isn't allowed by law. They are fighting MALPF for disobeying zoning regulations (not the farmer as is portrayed in the press) for granting the approval for this facility - even though it is prohibited in zoning. If the legislature changes the laws to allow this, then there won't be anything to fight. I feel bad for farmer and his family. They are being used as pawns by MALPF in a larger state fight. Also, his neighbors have been there since 1854 - they are dairy farmers and I think they understand what it means to live in a rural area (many folks have said they are new to the area and are just relocated city slickers). If everyone had followed the rules to begin with, there wouldn't have been any uproar. We all want locally grown organic, but we also need to follow the current laws in doing so.