Farming in the Future: The Triple Bottom Line

Farming in the Future: The Triple Bottom Line[i]

John Ikerd[ii]

American agriculture is in crisis. Contrary to common belief, a crisis is not necessarily a bad situation. Webster defines crisis as “a crucial time or state of affairs whose outcome will make a decisive difference, for either better or worse.” The crisis in American agriculture today is reflected in the disappearing middle-class of farmers. Within this crisis, are great risks, but also, great opportunities. Whether the ultimate outcome of this crisis is for better or worse is yet to be determined.

As “Agriculture of the Middle,” a national project, describes it, American farms have followed two new paths over the past several decades.[1] On one path, small-scale, diversified farms have thrived by successfully adapting to marketing food products directly to customers. On the other path, giant corporate agribusinesses have established contractual arrangements with large, specialized producers to produce bulk commodities for both domestic and global markets. The traditional full-time family farm has been left with little choice other than to choose one of these two paths – or the path out of farming.

According to the 2002 Census of Agriculture, farms with sales of over $500,000 per year, by most accounts large farms, accounted for just three percent of total farm numbers, but sixty-three percent of total value of agricultural production.[2] Farms selling less than $100,000 per year, which most would agree are small farms, accounted for eighty-five percent of all farms but only ten percent of total value of agricultural production. This left the farms in the middle, those with sales of between $100,000 and $500,000 – not too large, not too small – with only twelve percent of the farms and twenty-seven percent of total value of production. And, the 2002 census simply confirmed the trend of the past several decades. The middle-class of farming is quickly disappearing.

Most of the farming middle-class operates in the space between producing commodities under corporate contracts and producing food products for direct, niche markets. By 1997, sixty-three percent of the large commodity producers already were specializing in single commodities and were producing under corporate contracts.[3] The percentage today is likely much higher. And as of yet, very few of the farming middle-class have been willing to accept producing for direct markets or niche markets as real farming. They seemingly would rather give in to corporate control or get out of farming than to admit to having to get smaller to succeed.

The consequences of the disappearing middle are critical, not just to the future of farming in America, but also to the future of America. The trend toward large-scale, specialized, corporately controlled agriculture is heralded by the agricultural establishment[iii] as the only means by which American producers can remain competitive in an increasingly global marketplace. The new high-tech, biotech, vertically integrated global food chains require large-scale, specialized commodity production systems. Consumers demand consistent quality, low priced foods, and a vertically integrated, industrial agriculture in the only means by which this demand can be met, so we are told. Its advocates believe this path to the future is dictated by the impersonal forces of free-market economics, and thus, is inevitable, because it will be enforced through the discipline of farmers’ economic bottom lines. If farmers expect to survive, they are told, they have no other viable choice.

However, the trend toward an increasingly industrial agriculture, with its ever-greater specialization, standardization, and consolidation of control, has provoked increasing environmental and social concerns. Residents of rural communities have voiced increasing concerns regarding pollution of groundwater and streams with pesticides and fertilizers from specialized cropping systems and with the manure runoff from large-scale confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Agriculture has become the number one non-point source of stream pollution in the US,[4] and a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is attributed largely to agricultural pollution sources.[5] The agricultural establishment typically denies all blame for these problems, but no one can reasonably deny the reality of growing public concerns regarding the ecological impacts of agricultural industrialization.

The industrialization of agriculture also has decimated America’s rural farming communities. As farms became larger, farm families became fewer, and fewer farm families meant not only fewer dollars spent on clothes, hardware, and haircuts in town, but also, fewer children in schools, fewer families in church, fewer people to volunteer for fire departments, for town council, and for other public services. Larger farms also typically by-passed their local communities when buying machinery, fuel, and production inputs and when selling their products. They could get a “better deal” by going straight to the manufacturer of processor. As a result, many of the most economically depressed areas in the U.S. today are agriculturally dependent counties.[6] The agricultural establishment may argue that the abandonment of rural American is inevitable, but no one can reasonably deny that the disappearing middle-class of farming is destroying many rural communities.

More recently, concerns have focused on the economic future of industrial agriculture, on whether American commodity producers can compete in a global economy. Quoting from a recent USDA report, “A decade ago, a scenario in which the value of U.S. agricultural imports would someday exceed that of U.S. exports seemed farfetched.[7] Today, the improbable has become probable. Since 1996, the agricultural trade surplus has shrunk from $27.3 billion to $10.5 billion. Although U.S. agricultural exports continue to rise, imports are increasing nearly twice as fast.” These rising imports are not for coffee, bananas, or exotic foods that can’t be produced in the U.S. Instead, Americans increasingly are eating imported basic foods, particularly vegetables and fruits. The USDA analysts went on to concede that if current trends continued, the current trade surplus would become trade deficit by the end of the decade.

The inability of American farmers to compete in world commodity markets should come as no surprise. Costs of farmland and farm labor in other major exporting countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, and China, are a fraction of land and labor costs on the U.S. And increasingly, multinational agribusinesses are investing their capital and applying their technologies in those places where their production costs are lowest, which increasingly is some place other than the U.S. Increasing environmental restrictions on large-scale, industrial agriculture in the U.S. is often cited as an additional reason for agribusiness corporations to locate their production operations elsewhere. And, rural residents are becoming more, rather than less, concerned about their environment.

University of California economist, Steven Blank outlined the economic logic of this loss of competitiveness in his recent book, The End of Agriculture in the American Portfolio.[8] The recent WTO agreement to liberalize world trade in agricultural products even further (July 2004) adds even more credibility his prediction that American eventually will be forced to abandon production of agricultural commodities in favor of higher valued uses of land and labor.[9] Realistically, America is not going to completely abandon agriculture, but at some time in the future, we could easily become as dependent of the rest of the world for our food as we are today for our oil. For many of us, at least, this is cause for concern.

Most economists, including Blank, see nothing to be concerned about in the disappearing farm middle-class or the end of American agriculture. To economists it is a just a matter of corporations minimizing their costs of production. American consumers will benefit from lower cost food and workers in other countries benefit from new employment opportunities. Displaced American farmers will have to find other employment, doing something in which they can compete in a global labor market. They claim that American farmers have been able to compete in the past only because of protectionist farm subsidies and removing these subsidies will result in a more efficient allocation of land, labor, and capital. Higher profits for corporate investors will more than offset losses in U.S. farm income, leaving the American economy stronger than before.

However, I think there is something terribly wrong in American agriculture today. The disappearing middle-class and the ultimate end of American agriculture may make economic sense, but it just doesn’t make common sense. The basic problem is economics today simply does not deal with many of the real issues that affect real people. Economists don’t consider the social consequences of destroying a person’s occupation, of changing their social status within their family, their community, within society, or of diminishing or destroying a person’s self-esteem. Especially in farming, a person’s occupation may largely define their sense of self worth. In addition, economics doesn’t deal with ethical issues, such as stewardship of the land and of nature. Economics remains silent on whether it’s morally right or good for those of the present to benefit at the expense of those of the future, but speaks loudly through economic incentives to do so.

To most economists, if the economy is bigger the economy is better, regardless of the consequences for social equity or environmental justice. But, I simply don’t believe that a bigger economy necessarily results in a better society or that a more economically efficiently agriculture is necessarily a better agriculture. I don’t believe the demise of family farms, the degradation of the rural environment, and the decay of rural communities can be so easily justified as simply declaring them the inevitable consequences of a free market economy, which we must blindly trust because, as if by divine decree, it somehow makes us all better off.

But, why would anyone pay any attention to me? The agricultural establishment – the recognized experts on agriculture and economics – tell a completely different story. If farmers adopt the new technologies, if they are willing to take their place in the corporate global food chain, and if they continue to work hard and work smart, they will succeed. Those of us who are concerned about the corporatization of American agriculture are simply out of touch with reality, they say. We are labeled as twenty-first century Luddites, who oppose all technological progress, or at least as naively nostalgic for a return to farming of the past. So, why should anyone pay any attention to me?

First, I am an economist, and have been one for more than thirty-five years. I have been a professor of agricultural economics at the major state agricultural universities in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Missouri. I grew up as a farmer – on a small dairy farm in Southwest Missouri. I was member of the Future Farmers of American, and I believed in the future of farming. I also have been a businessman. My younger brother and I operated a small restaurant during my last year in high school and I worked in management for three years for a major meat packing company – Wilson Foods – after graduating from college. Perhaps most important, I spent three-fourths of my life and half of my professional career believing, teaching, and preaching the very things that the agricultural establishment is extolling today. I know where these folks “are coming from” because I have “been there.”

I used to tell farmers that they were going to have to either “get bigger or get out.” I told them they were going to have to become sharp financial managers, smart personnel managers, and astute marketers, because the only farmers with the future were those who saw farming as a business, rather than as a way of life. I cautioned farmers to separate farm business from family business, and not allow family matters be an economic drag of the farm. I believed the family farm was of the past, not of the future. I was an unabashed advocate of farming for the economic bottom-line – period.

However, during the farm financial crisis of the 1980s, I began to feel that something was terribly wrong in American agriculture. I began to question whether there was really a future in farming. Many farmers had borrowed heavily at record high interest rates to expand production to meet booming export demand during the 1970s, only to see exports dry up, commodity prices plummet, and record farm profits turn into disastrous farm losses. The agricultural establishment at the time chastised these farmers as poor managers who should have known better than to borrow so much, or at least should have know how to survive the inevitable hard times of farming. However, I discovered that the farmers who were in the biggest financial difficulty were those who had been doing the things that the agricultural establishment – including me, and my economic colleagues – had been telling them they should do. It would have been easier to deny it, and many did, but I came to realize that I had been much more a part of the farm problem than a part of the solution.

I had an opportunity, during these hard times, to sit across the table from several farm families in trouble and try to help them find some way out – short of suicide. I was working in Georgia at the time, a state with many delinquent federal FmHA farm loans. Farmers who wanted to borrow a little had been “encouraged” to borrow a lot – the conventional wisdom being that small farms couldn’t survive. In talking with these farmers, these real people, I began to understand that a family farm is much more than a business. The true family farm is a part of the family and the family is a part of the farm; the two are inseparable. Losing a family farm is like losing a member of the family, or losing one’s self; perhaps, that’s why the thoughts of so many farmers turned to suicide at the prospect of losing their farm.

Equally important, I learned that most true family farmers were not in severe financial difficulty, even though all were feeling a financial squeeze at that time. Many family farmers had not followed the advice of us so-called experts. They were not overly specialized; they had maintained some diversity of enterprises, and some enterprises were still profitable. They had minimized their dependence on costly chemical inputs and farm equipment, so their cost-price squeeze wasn’t quite so tight. They had not bought land to expand their operations, so their debts were more manageable. The farmers we economists had branded as laggards – resisters of new technologies and new ideas – were at least coping with one of the most severe economic farm crises of the century.

I began to realize that I too needed to confront some cold-hard realities. I eventually concluded that we economists, and other agriculturalists, were the ones who were out of touch with reality. We had been trying to transform farming into something that it was not and could not be. We had treated the farm as if it were simply a factory without a roof and fields and feedlots as if they were biological assembly lines. We had encouraged farmers to specialize, standardize, and consolidate, as if farming were a manufacturing process, simply transforming inputs into outputs.

However, I was beginning to understand that a farm is not a factory, plant and animal production are not mechanical processes, and thus, real farming is fundamentally different from working on an assembly line or managing a factory. Farming isn’t just about minimizing costs or maximizing profits; it’s about nurturing and caring for living things – plants, animals, people, and even the wild things of the fields and forests and living things in the soil. The family nurtures the farm and the farm nurtures the family, and the family nurtures, and is nurtured by, the biological and social community.

Luckily, at about this time, something called sustainable agriculture was making its way onto the national agricultural scene. The more I learned about sustainable agriculture, the more I realized that it might answer my growing questions concerning why the agriculture I had been promoting wasn’t working. But more important, in sustainable agriculture, I felt I might find a reason to believe again in the future of farming.

I returned to Missouri, my home state, to work with farmers interested in this new kind of farming. My first understanding of sustainable agriculture was that of a balanced approach to farming. Missouri had a highly successful extension program back in the 1950s that focused on balancing farm profitability, soil conservation, and family living; it had been called the Balanced Farming program. The program had been driven by the need to increase farm income, but without degrading the land or the quality of family life. Sustainable agriculture, on the other hand, was being driven more by the environmental concerns being raised by a profit-driven, industrialization of agriculture. But, the needs for farm income and for a desirable quality of farm and rural life were still there.

People were beginning to understand that an agriculture that degraded the land and polluted the natural environment simply could not sustain its productivity over time. People were also beginning to understand that an agriculture that couldn’t meet the needs of society – not just as consumers, but as farmers, rural residents, and people in general – would not be supported by society, and thus, was not sustainable. And, everyone still understood that agriculture had to be profitable, at least periodically, if farmers were to survive financially. So, farming sustainably was about finding balance and harmony among the ecological, economic, and social aspects of faming. Certainly, it was about meeting the needs of the present while leaving opportunities for the future, but to me, it was more just a common sense way to farm.

Through my work with a new breed of farmers, I discovered the second path to the future of agriculture. Admittedly, most of these new farmers have smaller farming operations than do their conventional, industrial counterparts. Their farms also tend to be more diverse, often integrating crop and livestock production. And, many of these farmers market directly to local customers, through farmers markets, community supported agricultural organizations (CSAs), roadside stands, and on-farm sales – often to loyal customers whom they know personally.

The new crop producers may label their products as organic, natural, biodynamic, holistic, ecological, or simply rely on being local as a market advantage. Producers of meat, milk, and eggs may further distinguish their products as humanely raised, hormone and antibiotic free, free-range, or grass-fed. But, these new farmers are set apart from commodity producers, not so much by size, or products, or markets, as by their philosophy of farming and their philosophy of life. The size, products, and markets are simply a reflection of their philosophy. They are farming not just for profits; they are farming for better overall quality of life – and many are finding it.

I now have new hope for the future of farming in America because of what I see in these new American farmers. Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of speaking as 35-40 different venues a year, and most of those were conferences attended by what I call sustainable farmers. In truth, we never know for sure whether a farming system is or isn’t sustainable, but these farmers balance economic, ecological, and social considerations in their decisions. These conferences range in size from a few dozen people to a few thousand, but there are at least six conferences in North America that average over 1200 attendees a year. The larger of these conferences tend to draw a very high proportion of farmers. Many of these conferences draw 400-500 people and the number with 100 or more are too numerous to count. I never pass up an opportunity to visit with farmers wherever I go and most of what I know about sustainable farming today, I have learned from farmers.

The second-path farmers I have met along the way are very different from the first-path farmers, with whom I had worked previously. First, second-path farmers are much more diverse, with respect to age, gender, education, and income. Second, more families, including children, attend sustainable agriculture conferences, and the whole family participates, often as presenters and well as attendees. Third, these new farmers willingly share ideas and information; they are trying to help each other succeed. Perhaps because of the other differences, these second-path farmers tend to be much more hopeful, if not optimistic, about the future than are their first-path counterparts. Sustainable farmers are on a new frontier of farming, and life is rarely easy for the pioneers on any frontier. They face many frustrations, and some failures, along the way, because no one really knows how to do what they are doing. But, more and more of these new farmers are finding ways to succeed. And, they define success not just in terms of profit, but in terms of quality of life, which includes social, ecological, and economic bottom lines.

There is a crisis in American agriculture. The traditional farming middleclass is disappearing. But, within this crisis, there is an exciting opportunity to create a new middleclass of farming. I have struggled to understand the realities of an agriculture gone wrong. I have searched for logical reasons to hope for a brighter future for farming. And, I have reached the conclusion that only realistic hope for the future of farming in American is along second-path – toward a more sustainable agriculture.

I am not suggesting that all farms of the future will be small, although I believe most will be smaller than the middleclass farms of today, and virtually will be smaller than are the largest farms of today. In sustainable farming, size, large or small, is not an objective; size is a consequence of farming sustainably – in harmony with community and nature. Sustainable farmers of the future will earn far more profit for each pound of product they produce, because they will put far more value into each pound they produce. Their farms won’t need to be as large to generate a middleclass farm income, or more accurately, an upper-class farm quality of life.

Neither am I suggesting that middleclass farms of the future will be as small as most direct niche market producers of today. The “agriculture of the middle” project is but one of many current public and private initiatives attempting to move sustainable agriculture beyond the farm gate and into the food system, by expanding opportunities for accessing higher-volume food markets. Many independent food processors and retailers are beginning to realize they face the same threats from a corporately controlled, global food system as do independent family farms. They are becoming more open to forming alliances with groups of local farmers to create a new sustainable food system. Such alliances provide more sustainably produced food to more caring customers, creating new opportunities for larger farm operations, as well as more opportunities for small farms. The critical challenge in accessing high-volume markets is to maintain the integrity of the system, not just the integrity of food quality and safety, but also, integrity of relationships – among eaters, retailers, processors, farmers, and through farmers, with the land. A new sustainable food system could be a key element in restoring the middleclass of farming.

I am not trying to shove the idea of sustainable agriculture down anyone’s throat. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. As long as it’s sustainable, it will result in a more desirable quality of life. You can call it practical farming, balanced farming, true family farming, or common sense farming, if you don’t like the ecological or sustainable labels. Perhaps, the basic ideas would be clearer to today’s middleclass farmers, if we referred to it as farming for the triple bottom line.

The business concept of a triple bottom line first came to widespread attention in corporate management circles in the late 1990s and has since gained in popularity among businesses of all types.[10] Managing for a triple bottom line suggests managing for balance among the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of business performance, rather than maximizing profits or growth. Triple bottom line managers recognize that businesses lacking social and ecological integrity are not economically viable over the long run; their costs eventually increase and customer loyalty declines. So they focus on conserving non-renewable resources and protecting the environment, and on being a good neighbor and good corporate citizen, as means of maintaining long run profitability.

In many situations, they find that by paying more attention to social and ecological performance, they can actually improve economic performance, even in the short run. They may find ways to transform wastes into economic inputs and to increase production while using fewer costly, non-renewable resources.[11] They may also find ways to reduce labor costs and create new markets by developing and maintaining better relationships with their workers, their customers, and others in the communities in which they operate.[12] In general, they improve their efficiency in converting ecological and social resources into economic advantages.

However, triple bottom line management has its legitimate skeptics. Businesses have always claimed to be good neighbors and good corporate citizens, but such claims have rarely been allowed to take precedent over maximizing corporate profits.[13] Even Monsanto and DuPont, for example, have “sustainable agriculture” programs. In such cases, the triple bottom line becomes little more than a public relations strategy. On the other hand, Ray Anderson, of Interface Inc., a large carpet manufacturer, is a well-known exception to this strategy of deception. Anderson travels the country proclaiming the benefits of triple bottom line management and provides his corporate financial records as compelling evidence that even a large publicly owned corporation can be profitable as well as socially and ecologically responsible.[14] In the food business, Paul Dolan, former CEO of Fetzer, the sixth largest winery in the U.S., is a prime example of a triple bottom line manager.[15] New Season Markets in Portland, OR, a locally owned, five-store modern supermarket chain managed by Brian Rother, provides another example of a food business managed for triple-bottom-line.[16]

So, managing for sustainability is not just for small farmers and niche marketers, it is a successful business strategy for some of the most successful large businesses in the U.S. However, the true triple bottom line manager, large or small, must be willing to give as high a priority to being a good neighbor and being a good steward of nature as on being a profitable business. At times, this means that profits will be less than if the manager had been willing to pollute a little more or exploit a little more to cut costs or increase sales. The true triple bottom line manager must realize that his or her advantage and uniqueness is in the integrity of the business – in its commitment good citizenship and stewardship – not in short run economic efficiency. If that integrity is ever compromised for the sake of efficiency, the uniqueness is lost and the market advantage is gone. True triple bottom line management requires a faith that valuing right relationships, among people and with nature, is the right strategy to succeed in business.

At first though, a business strategy based on right relationships may seem a bit naïve or idealistic, but on further thought, it is not. Our first thought may be that our highest priority should be on economics, but further thought will reveal that economics is but a means to a greater end, in business and in life. Historically, it was generally accepted that living was about the pursuit of happiness, not just the pursuit of wealth. Wealth, at most, was only a means to finding happiness. Our Founding Fathers were so bold as to identify the pursuit of happiness among the inalienable rights of all people. In fact, it’s only within the past century that economics has abandoned the pursuit of happiness for the pursuit of wealth.

Early nineteenth century economists, including notables such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, considered happiness to be the ultimate goal of all economic activity. Smith wrote of self-interests but he also wrote, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” [17] Ricardo, the father of free trade theory, defended the importance of trade as being important to the “happiness of mankind.”[18] Neither assumed that greater wealth was synonymous with greater happiness.

However, at the turn of the twentieth century, Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian, set about to free economics from the subjectivity of sociology and psychology, by focusing on what he called “revealed preferences” rather than “happiness.”[19] Obviously, rational persons would make rational choices, thus revealing their preferences for the things they want and need. Economists should focus on consumer choices, he suggested, and let the sociologists and psychologists worry about whether such choices actually make people happier. Pareto’s theories eventually were adopted by other economists, primarily because it allowed economics to focus on observable and measurable human behavior, rather than some intangible concept of human happiness.

In the early 1900s, another noted economist, Alfred Marshall, conceded that economics no longer dealt directly with human “well-being,” his term for happiness, but rather with the “material requisites” of it.[20] Latter twentieth-century economists, including England’s John Hicks and America’s Paul Samuelson, however, made little distinction between wealth and happiness.[21] They needed objective, quantifiable economic variables to accommodate their mathematical and statistical models. Maximizing profit, income, or wealth became equivalent to maximizing satisfaction or happiness, as far as these neoclassical economists were concerned.

Regardless of what economics suggest, our common sense tells us that wealth does not bring happiness, because happiness requires more than having lots of money to buy lots of stuff. Happiness has been a widely discussed and debated issue among the world’s greatest philosophers. The “hedonists” philosophers equated happiness to sensual pleasures. That’s what today’s economics is about – short-run, individual, material self-interests. However, another group of philosophers, including Aristotle, used the term eudaimonia for happiness. Eudaimonia is inherently social in nature – it is realized by the individual, but only within the context of family, friendships, community, and society. Aristotle’s happiness, social happiness, is a natural consequence of positive personal relationships – the individual in harmony with society. In addition, this social happiness was considered a by-product of actions taken for their own sake – not to achieve some sensory satisfaction, but actions taken because they are intrinsically right and good. In essence, Aristotle and his followers believed that personal happiness was a naturally consequence of right relationships. So it is not naïve to believe that managing a business for integrity, maintaining right relationships, and using true triple bottom line management is the key to long run business success. Valuing right relationships is the right strategy for success in business, as well as in life.

But, if farmers are to find the courage to follow the second path to sustainability in restoring the middleclass of farming, they must learn to rely on their own common sense. The agricultural establishment is not going to help farmers free themselves from dependence on costly farm inputs, machinery, and technologies upon which agribusinesses have built their prosperity and agricultural professional have built their careers. The agricultural establishment will continue to promote the conventional wisdom of farming for the economic bottom line, even though common sense tells us that triple bottom line farms are the farms of the future.

The agricultural establishment tells the rest of us that farmers must maximize production to feed a hungry world. But our common tells us that hunger in the world today is not due to a lack of food, but to a lack of concern among those who have for those who have not. The establishment tells us we must invest in technologies today to feed twice as many people fifty years from now. But our common sense tells an agriculture that is dependent on non-renewable resources eventually will run out, and asks, how then will we feed two or three times as many people as today? The agricultural establishment says a sustainable agriculture would take too much land and no land will be left for wild places. But, our common sense tells us that industrialization, not sustainable farming, is the greatest threat to wild places, that sustainability won’t require more land, just more imaginative, creative, trustworthy, caring farmers. And, what’s wrong with creating opportunities for more family farmers rather than fewer? Our common sense tells us that an agriculture that puts a priority on people and on nature is more likely to take care of people and nature, than is an agriculture that puts its priority on profits.

But, why should we listen to our common sense instead of the conventional wisdom of economics? Today, we are told we must base our decisions on “good science,” rather than common sense. However, even many scientists fail to realize that good science must be rooted in common sense. Science is built upon foundational first principles, which are used to test the truth of knowledge or to prove whether something is true or false. First principles likewise must be used to test the morality of actions or to judge whether something is good or bad.[22] As Thomas Reid, nineteenth-century philosopher wrote, “All knowledge and science must be built upon principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man who has common sense is competent to judge.”[23] First principles provide a starting point, and lacking a starting point, all logic and reasoning become circular, and thus, useless. For example, first principles of algebra, called axioms or laws, are the foundation for all mathematical proofs. One such axiom is, a times b equals b times a. This may seem obvious, but that’s the nature of first principles. First principles are common sense. Thus, “good science” must be rooted in common sense.

Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, are simply second-hand opinions regarding what is true and right, something passed from person to person and from generation to generation. Conventional wisdom is based on hearsay or experiments and observations, on imperfect reflections of an unobservable reality. Common sense, on the other hand, reflects our direct and personal insights into the true nature of things. Common sense doesn’t have to be proven, and can’t be proven, because it is the foundation of all scientific proof. Our common sense reflects what we know to be true, because we sense it in the very deepest part of our being.

The agricultural establishment will tell farmers they must continue focusing on their short self-interest, on the economic bottom line. But, a farmer’s common sense tells him or her that relationships matter, within families, communities, and with society, that their happiness, well-being, and quality of life, also depends on the social bottom line. Common sense also tell farmers that stewardship matters, that leaving the land as good as they found it and showing respect for the Creator through respect for the creation is essential to happiness, well-being, and quality of life. Their common sense tells them that the triple bottom line is a better way to find business success, individual happiness, and quality of life through right relationships with people and with nature.

American agriculture is in crisis today, a crisis of the disappearing middleclass of farming. Within this crisis are risks, but within this crisis also are opportunities. Farmers of the middle today are confronted with two paths to the future of farming, the first path leads toward corporate industrialization, the second path leads to agricultural sustainability. Industrialization is driven by a continuing need for productivity and growth – by a single economic bottom line. Industrialization leaves room for fewer farmers, because farms must become larger to survive, and thus, the disappearing agriculture of the middle. Sustainability requires ecological integrity, social responsibility, and economic viability, not one single bottom line, but three. Sustainable farming makes room for more farmers, and thus, an opportunity to create a new middleclass of farming. To farm sustainably, the land must be used well, with more love and more care, and people must be treated well, with greater love and respect, and one farmer can only love so many people and so much land. The new farming middleclass must again be rooted in love and respect.

The economic bottom line is supported by the conventional wisdom of the agricultural establishment, but the triple bottom is supported by the common sense of thoughtful, caring people everywhere. Industrialization may lead to greater wealth for the few, but sustainability leads to greater happiness for the many.

I believe in the future of farming in American once again, because I believe American farmers will somehow find the courage to break free of the agricultural establishment and their conventional wisdom of farming for the single economic bottom line. I believe in the future of farming because I believe American farmers instead will follow their common sense and will farm for the triple bottom line. That in doing so, they will lead the way to happiness and quality of life, not just for farmers, but also, for the whole of society, and for all of posterity.

End Notes

[i] Presented at “Changing Agricultural Landscapes,” Sponsored by Northern Tier Cultural Alliance, Alparon Park, Troy, PA. September 30, 2004.

[ii] John Ikerd is Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO – USA. E-mail: JEIkerd@AOL.COM web site: http://www.ssu.missouri.edu/faculty/jikerd

[iii] The agricultural establishment includes agribusiness, the USDA, agricultural universities, commodity groups, and farm organizations, such as the Farm Bureau Federation.