WASHINGTON, D.C. --Twenty years ago the federal government issued a breathless report called the
National Agricultural Lands Study that predicted that the United States was in grave danger of running out of
farmland. "Ten years from now," the report concluded, "Americans could be as concerned about the loss of the
nation’s prime and important farmlands as they are today over shortages of oil and gasoline."

Anyone out there lay awake nights these days worried about the shortages of oil and gasoline? Anyone had to
wait in line for an hour at the gas pump lately, like you did in 1979? In those days, remember, a lot of Very
Smart People said oil would be somewhere north of $100 a barrel by now, and it was axiomatic among Very Smart People that we simply had to have a comprehensive and government-directed energy policy, and a Synfuels Corporation to dig up the Rocky Mountains so we could crack oil shale at a cost of $50 a barrel. And if you said all of this was nonsense in 1979, that oil would be $12 a barrel today, the men in the white coats would
have carted you away.

It is worth remembering frothy predictions like this because while the energy crisis is a distant memory,
the vanishing farmland crisis is back. It is now said to be under threat from "sprawl" (a term still lacking
a rigorous definition), and it is axiomatic among Very Smart People that we have to do something drastic about
it, like prohibiting farmers from ever converting their land to any other use.

Reality check time: The 1997 United States Department of Agriculture Census of Agriculture is not yet in
print, but it is already available (thanks to the Vice President) on the Internet. What do we find? We find
that total cropland nationwide is down by 3.5 million acres between 1992 and 1997, but we find that
harvested cropland--the land on which actual food is grown--increased by 14 million acres between 1992 and
1997.

The real wonder of farmland trends is that there is still so much farmland in production. Farm prices, and
farmland values, have been falling steadily for 15 years. The inflation-adjusted price of oranges, for
example, has fallen 20 percent since 1980, and if you are an orange farmer in Fresno County or in Florida,
and your income is eroding year by year, you might want to have the option to plant row houses instead of row
crops on your land someday. There is something more than a bit immoral and unjust for us to say to that
farmer that he must keep his land strictly in farming simply because it pleases our aesthetic tastes.

One more factoid of interest. Indur Goklany, a Department of the Interior economist, noted recently
that between 1960 and 1993, world population increased 80 percent. But the amount of world cropland only
increased by 8 percent. To the flat-earthers in the environmental movement, this could only mean that we’re
all eating less, but of course world per capita food supplies have increased more than 10 percent, and world
food prices have declined 47 percent during that period.

--Steven Hayward