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Newspapers seem to be telling us that every cornfield is threatened by a Dairy Queen. This media barrage about the crisis of our “shrinking” farmland can be traced to the 1979 publication of Where Have All the Farmlands Gone? by the National Agricultural Lands Study. The NALS report, to which eleven federal agencies contributed, argued that land-use planning and control must be employed to protect valuable farmland from “urban sprawl.” This volume, a collection of essays by a distinguished group of economists including Theodore W. Schultz, Julian L. Simon, and Pierre Crosson, takes issue with the belief that croplands need governmental protection. In opposition the collection as a whole supports two theses: 1) shrinking farm acreage is not a serious problem, and 2) individual choices by landowners in a market setting result in better-organized land use than would governmental land-use planning and regulation. Published for the Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, Montana
Most people in the United States believe that our environment is getting dirtier, we are running out of natural resources, and population growth is a burden and a threat. These beliefs according to Simon, are entirely wrong. Why do the media report so much false bad news about these? And why do we believe it? Those are the questions distinguished scholar, Julian Simon set out to answer in this book.
Desperate to connect with his native Galloway, Patrick Laurie plunges into work on his family farm in the hills of southwest Scotland. Investing in the oldest and most traditional breeds of Galloway cattle, the Riggit Galloway, he begins to discover how cows once shaped people, places and nature in this remote and half-hidden place. This traditional breed requires different methods of care from modern farming on an industrial, totally unnatural scale.As the cattle begin to dictate the pattern of his life, Patrick stumbles upon the passing of an ancient rural heritage. Always one of the most isolated and insular parts of the country, as the twentieth century progressed, the people of Galloway deserted the land and the moors have been transformed into commercial forest in the last thirty years. The people and the cattle have gone, and this withdrawal has shattered many centuries of tradition and custom. Much has been lost, and the new forests have driven the catastrophic decline of the much-loved curlew, a bird which features strongly in Galloway's consciousness. The links between people, cattle and wild birds become a central theme as Patrick begins to face the reality of life in a vanishing landscape.