CHAPTER 4 THE "URBAN SPRAWL" AND SOIL EROSION SCAM This chapter tells the saga of the most conclusively dis- credited political-environmental fraud of recent times. This case may serve as a model of many similar issues for which the full story has not come to light, and in which there does not exist a public confession by the official agency involved that the original scare was entirely false. The heart of this issue is that many persons, in the name of "environmentalism", want to prevent other people from building houses on farmland near them. Under the guise of preventing future food shortage, they mobilize the powers of public authori- ty to attain their private goals. That is, the famine-protection claims are simply a smoke screen for property owners who want a bucolic view, we can infer. But whatever the motives, this phony scare campaign steals taxpayers' money and prevents young couples from getting the housing they want. As I was preparing this debate, the following appeared in the Washington Post: (September 10, 1992, pp. Md 1, 7): "State Preservation Program Stems Loss of Farmland to Development...The easement program was enacted...not only to curb development...but also to help keep the state partially self-sufficient in food production...Loss of farming...also means more food must be imported from out of state, which can drive prices up". These and similar programs in a score of other states are justified with the proposition that the U.S. is losing farmland at an unprecedented rate - that population growth produces urban sprawl, that highways pave over "prime farmland" and recreational land, and that the farmland is needed to stave off hunger in the future. Those assertions have now been wholly disproven -- and acknowledged to be so by the U.S. Department of Agriculture which originally raised the alarm. That is, even the original purvey- ors of the false facts about the "vanishing farmland crisis" agree that the widely-reported scare was without foundation. For more details, see Easterbrook (1986) and Simon (1990). The relevant data are as follows: Figure 4-1 shows that of the 2.3 billion acres in the U.S. as of 1987, all the land taken up by cities, highways, non- agricultural roads, railroads, and airports amounts to only 82 million acres - just 3.6 percent of the total. (Frey, forthcoming). Clearly there is very little competition between agriculture on the one side, and cities and roads on the other. Fig 4-1 Concerning the trends: from 1920 to 1987, land in urban and transportation uses rose from 29 million acres to 82 million acres - a change of 2.3 percent of the total area of the U.S. (Frey, forthcoming). During those fifty-four years, population increased from 106 million to 244 million people. Even if this demographic trend were to continue - in fact, population growth has slowed down - there would be an almost unnoticeable impact on U.S. agriculture (see Figure 4-2). Fig 4-2 About 1980, headlines like these began to appear in the newspapers: "The Peril of Vanishing Farmlands" (The New York Times), "Farmland Losses Could End U.S. Food Exports" (Chicago Tribune), "Vanishing Farmlands: Selling Out the Soil" (Saturday Review), and "As World Needs Food, U.S. Keeps Losing Soil to Land Developers" (Wall Street Journal). The new stories asserted that the urbanization-of-farmland rate had jumped by a multiple of three from the 1960's to the 1970's - from less than one million acres per year to three million acres per year. This assertion was wholly untrue, as we shall see. Indeed, even the original purveyors of the false facts have 'fessed up and now agree that the widely-reported scare was without foundation. Several scholars - including William Fischel, Clifford Luttrell, Fraser Hart, and I found that the 3-million-acres-a- year rate was most implausible, in light of various sets of data from other sources and given the nature of the surveys from which the NALS estimate was drawn. We also got help from H. Thomas Frey, a geographer who had been the keeper of the urbanization and other land-use data for the Economic Research Service of the USDA for many years. All sides agreed that in 1967 the total urban and built-up area in the United States (excluding highways, railroads, and airports) was between 31 and 35 million acres. It was also agreed that the rate of urbanization was slower in the 1960's than in the 1950's. Yet the Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS) said that over the ten years from 1967 to 1977, there was a 29 million acre increase in urban and built-up land. That is, over the course of more than two centuries, in the process of reaching a population of about 200 million people, the U.S. built towns on between 31 and 35 million acres. NALS now asserted that suddenly in the course of another 10 years, and with a population increase of only 18 million people, the urban and built-up areas increased by 29 million acres (almost none of it due to transportation) -- a near-doubling. To put it differently, the long-run trend in the decades up to 1970 was about one million acres of total land urbanized per year - not increasing but rather constant or slowing. The Soil Conservation Service in conjunction with NALS then announced that the rate then jumped to between 2 and 3 million acres yearly from 1967 to 1975 or 1977 (depending on which version you read). There were two bases given for the 3 million-acre number and NALS shifted from one to the other when either was criticized: 1) A small-sample re-survey of part of the 1967 "inventory" of sampled farms, done by the Soil Conservation Service. (A similar inventory had previously been done in 1958.) 2) The 1977 sample inventory. Seymour Sudman and I then showed that there were so many flaws that both sources should be considered totally unreli- able. The flaws included a huge error that put the right numbers in the wrong columns for huge chunks of Florida. Various government agencies were mobilized by the USDA to rebut our criticisms, but we successfully rebutted them. Then the scare seemed to die down a bit, but not before the private American Farmland Trust was organized in 1980 from former employ- ees of NALS. Annually it now spends a couple of million dollars a year to "protect" the U.S. from the danger of vanishing farm- land, and gets money from the United Fund charity drives. Then the bombshell: In 1984, the Soil Conservation Service officially issued a paper by Linda Lee that completely reversed their own earlier scare figures and confirmed the estimates of the critics. The accompanying press release made it super-clear that the former estimates were now being retracted. "[T]he acreage classified as urban and built-up land was 46.6 million acres in 1982, compared to 64.7 million acres reported in 1977." Please read that again. It means that whereas in 1977 the SCS had declared that 64.7 million acres had been "lost" to built- upon land, just five years later SCS admitted that the actual total was 46.6 million acres. That is, the 1977 estimate was fully fifty per cent too high, a truly amazing error for some- thing so easy to approximate and check as the urbanized acreage of the U. S. With unusual candor, the USDA press release added, "The 1982 data, which correlate closely with data from the 1980 U. S. Census of Population [the census was not available at the time of the argument described above, but later fully corroborated Frey's estimates based on prior data], are considered accurate because of the availability of better maps, more time for data collec- tion, many more sample points, and better quality control." The press release continued: "The 1977 estimate thus appears to have been markedly overstated." Even earlier, an "official" Congressional Research Service report (Dunford, 1983) had reported the situation correctly: "National Agricultural Lands Study indicated that almost three million acres of agricultural land was annually converted to relatively irreversible nonfarm uses between 1967 and 1975...Subsequent analyses and more recent empirical evidence have not supported these results...In conclusion, the most recent reliable information indicates that the conversion of farmland to urban and transportation uses occurred at about half the rate indicated in the National Agricultural Lands Study" (p. CRS-v). The putative figure of 3 million acres per year from the NALS has been repudiated by subsequent analyses and more recent empirical evidence." (p. CRS-10) This 1983 report completely confirmed the criticisms that others and I leveled at the NALS claims. Table 4-1 shows the estimates from NALS and three subsequent estimates from other official sources. And Figure 4-3 shows a revealing graph drawn from a recent official program; the falsity of the 1977 National Resources Inventory estimate, which the Department of Agriculture continued to defend for long, is immediately apparent. Table 4-1 and Figure 4-3 The entire "crisis" was hokum. This was not a regrettable but understandable exaggeration of a real problem, but a non- problem manufactured by the Department of Agriculture and some members of Congress out of whole cloth under the guise of concern about food production for the starving world. The crisis was created for the benefit of a) the so-called environmentalists, and b) people who own homes that abut on areas which might be developed into housing developments, and whose vistas and ambi- ence might thereby be affected. The connection between the farmland scare and prevention of housing construction has been documented for California by Frieden (1979). But what about the fertility of the land used for human habitation and transportation? Even if the total quantity of land used by additional urban people is small, perhaps the new urban land has special agricultural quality. One often hears this charge, as made in my then-home town in the 1977 City Council election, The mayor "is opposed to urban sprawl because `it eats up prime agricultural land.'" But in fact, as new cropland is created, and some old cropland goes out of use, the overall ef- fect - for example, between 1967 and 1975, the period at which the scare was directed - the average quality of cropland in the U.S. has improved. The idea that cities devour "prime land" is a particularly clear example of the failure to grasp economic principles. Let's take the concrete (asphalt?) case of a new shopping mall on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The key economic idea is that the mall land has greater value to the economy as a shopping center than it does as a farm, wonderful though this Illinois land is for growing corn and soybeans. That's why the mall investors could pay the farmer enough to make it worthwhile for him or her to sell. A series of corny (yes, yes) examples should bring out the point. If, instead of a shopping mall, the corn-and-soybean farmer sold the land to a person who would raise a new exotic crop called, say, "whornseat," and who would sell the whornseat abroad at a high price, everyone would be delighted. The land clearly would be more productive raising whornseat than corn, as shown by the higher profits the whornseat farmer would make as compared with the corn-and-soybean farmer, and as also shown by the amount that the whornseat farmer is willing to pay for the land. A shopping mall is similar to a whornseat farm. It seems different only because the mall does not use the land for agriculture. Yet economically there is no real difference between the mall and a whornseat farm. [Both ignorance and mysticism enter importantly into conven- tional thinking about farmland. For example, one hears that "Once it's paved over, it's gone for good." Not so. Consider the situation in Germany, where entire towns are moved off the land for enormous stripmining operations. After the mining is done, farmland is replaced, and the topsoil that is put down is so well enriched and fertilized that "reconstituted farmland now sells for more than the original land." Furthermore, by all measures the German stripmined area is more attractive and envi- ronmentally pure than before (Raymond, 1984, p. 246). It is relevant that the press did nothing to uncover the scam, or even to report it when it had been revealed. Even the press-release reversal and "confession" did not evoke coverage even though the original scare story was a front-page headliner for the Chicago Tribune and a cover story for news magazines. Nor did the farmland crisis then vanish for lack of factual support. The false news continues to reverberate, as noted above. SOIL EROSION Soil erosion is a related and parallel story. The scare that farmlands are blowing and washing away is a fraud upon the public similar to the urbanization fraud. In the early 1980's there was a huge foofarah about the terrible dangers of farmland being ruined. In a Jan. 11, 1983 speech to the American Farm Bureau Federation the President of the United States said, "I think we are all aware of the need to do something about soil erosion." The headline on a June 4, 1984 Newsweek "My Turn" article typified how the issue was presented: "A Step Away from the Dust Bowl." (It may or may not be coinci- dence that the soil-erosion scare took off just about the time that the paving-over scare seemed to peter out in the face of criticism.) More recently we have such statements as that of vice president Albert Gore, Jr., about how "eight acres' worth of prime topsoil floats past Memphis every hour", and that Iowa "used to have an average of sixteen inches of the best topsoil in the world. Now it is down to eight inches" (1992, 1). My oppo- nent Mr. Myers makes much of supposed soil erosion in his writ- ings (Ambio; 1991) But the aggregate data on the condition of farmland and the rate of erosion do not support the concern about soil erosion. The data suggest that the condition of cropland has been improving rather than worsening. Theodore W. Schultz, the only agricultural economist to win a Nobel Prize, and Leo V. Mayer of the USDA, both wrote very forcefully that the danger warnings were false. Schultz cited not only research but also his own life-time recollections starting as a farm boy in the Dakotas in the 1930's. Table 4-3 shows data from soil condition surveys which make clear that erosion has been lessening rather than worsening since the 1930s. But even a Nobel laureate's efforts could not slow the public-relations juggernaut that successfully co-opted the news media and won the minds of the American public. Table 4-3 The USDA press release of April 10, 1984 cited above con- tained a second quiet bombshell confession: "The average annual rate of soil erosion on cultivated cropland dropped from 5.1 tons per acre to 4.8 tons per acre." That is, erosion was lessening rather than getting worse, exactly the opposite of what NALS had earlier claimed. But newspapers and television either did not notice or did not credit these criticisms. Even after the USDA admitted that the newer data clearly show that the danger was not as claimed, nothing appeared in print (to my knowledge) to make the public aware of this new non-danger and of how the public was misled. The main bad effect of soil erosion is not damage to farmland, but rather the clogging of drainage systems, which then need costly maintenance; the latter is many times as costly as the former (Swanson and Heady, 1984).