The Case for Land Redistribution

The New Republic, June 19, 1971

IT’S HARD FOR PEOPLE in cities to appreciate the need for land reform in the United States. Most of us have been so cut off from the land that, through ignorance, we accept present landholding patterns as desirable or inevitable. They are neither.

What are the advantages of giving land to the few instead of the many? Efficiency is supposed to be the main one: big farms, we’re told by agribusiness spokesmen, can produce more food at less cost and thus save the consumer money. That same thinking underlies Soviet collectives. What’s overlooked is that in societies where tractors are relatively inexpensive to own or rent, economies of scale contribute to agricultural abundance only marginally. Beyond a certain point, there’s nothing gained by having one vast farm in place of several smaller ones. In fact, small farms are often more productive per acre because their owners work harder and take better care of the soil.

Large farms in America are efficient at some things — they excel at tapping the federal Treasury and exploiting hired labor. Take away these privileges and the small farmer looks extremely good. As for saving the consumer money, the chief reason food prices have remained relatively low is not large-scale efficiency, it is intense competition. Allow a handful of agribusiness giants to gain control of the market and prices will assuredly rise a lot more than they have.

There is, furthermore, the question of how much efficiency, and what kind, is desirable. American agriculture is, if anything, too efficient; its chronic problem is not underproduction but surpluses; it is the only industry where people are paid not to produce. The argument that ever-increasing agricultural efficiency is a desirable national goal is, therefore, unsound.

Moreover, what kind of efficiency are we talking about? When a large grower increases his profit margin by replacing farm workers with a fancy new machine, he’s not doing anybody but himself a favor. The farm workers, now unemployed, drift to already overcrowded cities, where no jobs await them either. Welfare rolls and social tensions rise — transferring to society the ultimate cost of “efficiency” on the large farm.

If the advantages of large landholdings (except to those who own them) are scant, the harmful effects are legion. Several have already been noted: the impoverishment of millions of rural families, and the migration to cities of millions more, with little education or hope of improvement. We expect poor Americans to lift themselves up the economic ladder, yet by cutting them off from productive land ownership we knock out the bottom rungs.

The vitality of community life in rural America has also suffered because of maldistributed land. Main Street businesses are not appreciably aided by large absentee landowners who purchase their supplies in distant cities, or by underpaid migrants who buy nothing, or by sharecroppers forced to shop at the company store. A study in the 1940s by Walter Goldschmidt, a California sociologist, found that communities in small-farm areas have a more sizable middle class, more stable income patterns, better schools and more active civic groups than do communities where large land-holdings predominate.

A recent incident in Mendota, California — a town surrounded by large farms — helps explain why. A group of citizens wanted to establish a special taxing district for construction of a hospital, the nearest one being forty miles away. Three agribusiness giants that owned more than half the land in the proposed district opposed the plan, and killed it. Two of the companies were based in other California cities, and the third — Anderson Clayton — was headquartered in Houston.

Protection of the environment also tends to be less of a concern to large corporations — who’ve been despoiling the American landscape for the better part of two centuries — than to farmers who live on their land. Companies farming for tax or speculative reasons, for example, seek to maximize earnings over the short run. They can milk the soil, deplete the underground water supply or poison the land with pesticides, knowing full well that they will eventually sell. Resident farmers who hope to pass on their land to their offspring cannot be so careless with nature’s gifts. Moreover, small-scale farming lends itself much more readily than does large-scale monoculture to biological pest control — a technique that must increasingly be adopted if we are to avoid ecological disaster.

If there’s little to be said for large landholdings on social or environmental grounds, neither can it be said that they are inevitable. Land concentration in America, particularly in the South and West, is not the result of inscrutable historical forces, but of a long train of government policies, sometimes in the form of action, often of inaction. English grants to large landholders in the colonial South, and Mexican grants in the West, could have been broken up at several convenient historical moments, but were allowed to remain intact. Vast expanses of public lands were given away in large chunks to speculators, rather than in small parcels to settlers. Tax and labor laws, reclamation projects and government-financed research, have encouraged large-scale corporate agriculture, to the detriment of independent small farmers and landless farm workers. On top of all this have come the government’s ultimate reward to big landholders: cash subsidies, mainly for being big.

WHY, THEN, DO WE NEED land reform in America? About the only thing that can be said for large landholdings is that they exist, and in the spirit of free enterprise ought to be left untouched. This is the strongest argument in favor of leaving things as they are. Land, however, is not like other forms of wealth in our economy, which we allow to be accumulated without limit: it is a public resource, it is finite, and it is where people live and work. Free enterprise does not merely imply the right to be big. It also implies the right to start. As corporate farms become increasingly integrated with processors and distributors, as they advance toward the technological millennium in which ten-mile-long fields are sowed and harvested by computer-controlled machines, the right to get a start in agriculture will be obliterated – as it almost is today. Americans must decide whether they want the rich to get richer or the poor to have a chance. Agriculture is one of the few places where the poor can have a chance. If it is closed off, if the profits of the few are given precedence over the needs of the many, the consequences can only be unpleasant.

There are additional reasons why it’s time to reform landholding patterns in the United States. Frederick Jackson Turner talked seventy years ago of the frontier as a “safety valve” for urban discontent. If ever the cities needed a safety valve, it is now. Urban problems are virtually insoluble; city residents seem on the verge of a mass psychic breakdown. The exodus from the countryside must not only be stopped, it must be dramatically reversed.

One approach to the problem of population dispersal is to build new communities on rural lands now owned by speculators. This will undoubtedly happen, but it’s far from enough. It is much more important to revive existing rural communities, and to do so by enabling greater numbers of people to live decently off the land. There is no shortage of people who want to remain on the land, or return to it, if they could do so at higher than a subsistence level. Many Mexican-Americans, blacks and Indians would be among them. So would many whites who have become drained, physically and spiritually, by city living. The difficulty is that the frontier is long gone. That’s why reform, as opposed to the giving away of unsettled land, is essential.

Land reform is also needed to increase the number of people in the United States who are free. This may sound silly in a country that presumes to be a breeder of free men. Yet ever-increasing numbers of Americans are not really free to assume responsibilities or to make major decisions affecting their lives. They work for large corporations or government bureaucracies or on assembly lines. They are not their own bosses, not proud of their work, and not motivated to exercise their full rights as citizens. Farming has traditionally been a bastion of the independent small businessman who won’t take guff from anybody and who prides himself on the quality of his work. But now farming, too, is becoming computerized and corporatized. Its executives wear silk ties and share the attitudes of other wealthy executives; its workers are powerless, dispensable hirelings. If agriculture goes the way of the auto industry, where will our independent citizens come from?

American land policy should have as its highest priority the building of a society in which human beings can achieve dignity. This includes the easing of present social ills, both rural and urban, and the creation of a lasting economic base for democracy. A second priority should be to preserve the beauty of the land. Production of abundant food should be a third goal, but it need not be paramount and is not, in any case, a problem.

TO ACHIEVE these goals a multitude of reforms should be carried out. First and most importantly, small-scale farming must be made economically viable, so that present small farmers can survive and new ones get started. Unless that is done, there is no point in changing landholding patterns to favor smaller units.

There’s no secret to making small-scale farming viable; it can be accomplished by eliminating the favors bestowed upon large farms. Federal tax laws that encourage corporate farming for tax-loss and speculative purposes should be changed, even if this means closing the capital gains loophole. Labor laws should guarantee a minimum wage to farm workers equal to that of other workers, and should make the knowing employment of illegal aliens a crime punishable by imprisonment. This would put an end to one of the large landholders’ major competitive advantages —their ability to exploit great numbers of poor people — and allow self-employed farmers to derive more value from their own labor.

Subsidy programs, too, should be revised to the disadvantage of big growers. When farm subsidies began during the New Deal, they were intended to help the impoverished small farmer. But because they were pegged to total marketings and acreage rather than to personal income, they wound up lining the pockets of the wealthy. If farm subsidies are continued — as they should be in order to stabilize farm income — they ought to be strongly weighted in favor of smallness. No farmer should receive subsidies for crops grown (or not grown) on land in excess of a certain acreage, and payments should be graduated downward, somewhat like an income tax in reverse. Per unit payments to individual farmers should decrease, in other words, as the number of subsidized units increases. Alternatively, subsidies could be completely detached from crops and related to income instead. Farmers could sell on the open market, with federal payments making up the difference, if any, between earnings and a minimum livable income.

Also essential to the future viability of small-scale farming is some protection against conglomerates. There is no way a small farmer can compete against an oil company, or against a vertically integrated giant like Tenneco which not only farms tens of thousands of acres but also makes its own farm machinery and chemicals, and processes, packages and distributes its own foods. Such conglomerates aren’t hurt by a low price for crops; what they lose in farming they can pick up in processing or distributing or, for that matter, in oil. The small farmer, on the other hand, has no outside income and no tolerance for soft spots. What he needs is legislation that would prohibit corporations or individuals with more than $50,000, say, in non-farming income from engaging in farming — in effect, a forceful antitrust policy for agriculture.

ONCE SMALL-SCALE farming is made viable, the second major area for change involves redistribution of land — the kind of peaceful social restructuring that the United States imposed upon Japan after World War II and has urged upon dozens of other nations in Asia and Latin America.

The guiding principles behind redistribution are that land should belong to those who work and live on it, and that holdings should be of reasonable, not feudal proportions. These are not revolutionary concepts; America recognized them in the Pre-emption, Homestead and Reclamation Acts, and is merely being asked to renew that recognition.

A convenient place to start is with enforcement of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which provides that large landholders in the West who accept subsidized water must agree to sell their federally irrigated holdings in excess of 160 acres at pre-water prices within ten years. The Reclamation Act has never been properly enforced for a variety of reasons. One is that, through one stratagem or another, large landholders have escaped having to sell their excess lands. Another is that even in the few cases where large landowners have agreed to sell, their prices have been so high, and terms so stiff, that only the wealthy could afford to buy. Occasionally, as in parts of the San Joaquin valley at the moment, pre-water prices as approved by the Bureau of Reclamation are so much higher than prevailing market prices that even wealthy persons have not seen fit to purchase excess lands put up for sale under the law.

To assure not only the sale of excess landholdings, but also their availability at prices that persons of limited means can afford, Rep. Robert Kastenmeir (D-Wisc.), Jerome Waldie (D-Calif.) and others have introduced legislation that would authorize the federal government itself to buy up all properties in reclamation areas that are either too big or owned by absentees. The government would then resell some of these lands, at reasonable prices and on liberal terms, to small resident farmers, and retain others as sites for new cities or as undeveloped open space. The plan would actually earn money for the government, since the lands would be purchased at true pre-water prices and resold at a slight markup. The money thus earned could be used for education, conservation or other purposes.

Other plans for enforcing the Reclamation Act are also worth study. For example, the federal government could purchase irrigated lands in excess of 160 acres and lease them back to individual small farmers or to cooperatives. Or it could buy large landholdings in reclamation areas with long-term “land bonds,” which it then would redeem over 40 years with low-interest payments made by the small farmers to whom the land was resold. This would amount to a subsidy for the small farmers who bought the land, but it would be no more generous than the current subsidy to large landholders who buy federal water.

Of course, land redistribution should go beyond the Western areas served by federal reclamation projects; in particular, it should reach into the South. Thaddeus Stevens’ old proposal for dividing up the large plantations into 40-acre parcels is unrealistic today, but an updated plan, with due compensation to present owners, can be devised and implemented.

ANOTHER OBJECTIVE toward which new policies should be directed is preserving the beauty of the land. Reforms in this area are fully consistent with a restructuring of landholding patterns. Thus, a change in local tax laws so that land is assessed in accordance with its use would benefit small farmers and penalize developers. Zoning rural land for specific uses, such as agriculture or new towns, would similarly help contain suburban sprawl and ease the pressure on small farmers to sell to developers or speculators. If as a result of new zoning laws the value of a farmer’s land was decreased, he would be compensated for that loss.

An indefinite moratorium should also be placed on further reclamation projects, at least until the 160-acre and residency requirements are enforced, and even then, they ought to be closely examined for environmental impact. Schemes are kicking about to bring more water to southern California and the Southwest from northern California, the Columbia and even Alaska. These plans ought to be shelved. Federal revenues that would be spent on damming America’s last wild rivers could, in most cases, be more fruitfully devoted to such purposes as redistributing croplands.

Policy changes in other areas should complement the major reforms outlined above. Existing farm loan programs, for example, should be greatly expanded so that new farmers can get started in agriculture. Farming cooperatives, which can be a starting point for workers unable to afford an entire farm, should be encouraged through tax laws and credit programs. Research funds spent on developing machinery for large-scale farming should be rechanneled into extension programs for small farmers and co-ops.

It won’t be easy to enact any of these reforms. Friends of large-scale agribusiness are strategically scattered throughout the Agriculture, Interior and Appropriations committees of Congress, and are equally well ensconced within the president’s administration. Small-farmer associations like the Grange, the National Farmers Union and the National Farmers Organization don’t have nearly the clout of the American Farm Bureau Federation, the big grower associations and the giant corporations themselves. The pro-industry land policy “experts” who formed the Public Land Law Review Commission that reported its findings last year were no friendlier to small-scale farming: they recommended repeal of the Reclamation Act’s 160-acre limitation and residency requirement, and adoption of policies favorable to large-scale mechanized agriculture.

Nevertheless, there are some grounds for optimism. Many citizens and public officials are coming to realize that rural America ought to be revived, cities salvaged and welfare rolls reduced, and they see that present policies aimed at achieving these objectives are not working. Environmentalists — who for years have pointed to the dangers of intensive agriculture and the need for prudent rural land use — are finally getting an audience. The list of organizations that have recently urged vigorous enforcement of the 160-acre limitation includes the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, Common Cause, the National Education Association, the Grange and the National Farmers Union. That’s not enough to sweep Congress off its feet, but it’s a good start.

The ultimate political appeal of land reform is that it places both the burden and opportunity of self-improvement upon the people themselves. It can give hundreds of thousands of Americans a place to plant roots, and a chance to work with dignity. Can we deny them that chance?

Third in series about land reform in the U.S.