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The
Leopold Center is part of a national effort to help
“America’s disappearing middle”—midsize farms and related
agricultural and food enterprises.
Leopold Center director Fred Kirschenmann helped assemble a
multi-state task force that began meeting in 2003. The group
has obtained funding for its initial activities – an
“Agriculture of the Middle” web site and several concept
papers—from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and
Education program and the Johnson Foundation.
A white paper, “Why Worry About the Agriculture of the
Middle?” highlights the concern for midsize farms because
they make up the largest share of the nation’s “working
farms,” farms where the chief source of income and primary
occupation is farming. The paper points to polarizing forces
– growth in markets for very large and very small farms – as
a real threat.
“These polarizing forces threaten to ‘hollow out’ rural
America in many regions by transferring many of the
agricultural economic activities that have sustained rural
communities, impacting agribusiness viability, job creation
and the maintenance of local tax bases,” the report states.
“And because these are mostly farms that have been in the
family for several generations (and good land stewardship is
a high priority since the land is seen as part of the
family’s heritage and local ecological knowledge has been
handed down from one generation to the next), these farms
represent considerable social and ecological capital that
greatly benefit the American landscape.”
Members of the task force include researchers from nine land
grant universities. Leopold Center associate director Mike
Duffy collaborated with Kirschenmann and other members of
the task force to write the white paper.
Get the paper from the Leopold Center web site [PDF]
Go to the Agriculture
of the Middle project web site. |