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- Info
Effects of urbanization on agricultural activities
| Author: |
Berry, David |
| Date: |
1978 |
| Periodical: |
Growth and Change |
| Abstract: |
Expansion of urban, suburban, and exurban development into agricultural landscapes and
other rural settings has prompted much public concern over land use. Alarming estimates of the loss of farmland have been suggested, as have startling visions of extensive idling of farmland in anticipation of future urban development or because of intolerable spillover effects from nearby urban development. To sustain this concern over declining agriculture in urban regions of the country there appears to be an association between increases in population and losses of farmland in states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. A number of suggestions for land use controls and open space preservation programs have been put forth to alleviate the conflicts between agricultural activities and urbanization. These proposals have, unfortunately, been formulated on the basis of very little hard knowledge, on anecdotal information, or on evidence recycled from planning reports prepared for other regions which often do little more than list the types of conflicts one might find. Consequently, many public programs have only limited chances for success in their goal of preserving farmland. For example, differential assessment of farmland, originally thought to provide tax relief to farmers pressured to sell their land to speculators or developers as high taxes forced them out of farming, has proved to have little influence on the continuation of farming on the rural-urban fringe. Prominent among the reasons that farm preservation programs focused solely upon urban pressures may have only a slight effect on maintaining the current landscape is the pivotal role played by economic factors not directly related to urbanization. Such factors include: (1) the retirement of marginal farmland which could not compete with more productive areas under existing price and cost configurations; (2) the technological revolution in farming from the 1920s or 1930s through the 1960s that brought about mechanization of farming, new hybrid plants, new pesticides, new fertilizers, and so on, which have reinforced the competitive disadvantages of regions with poorer soils; and (3) the rapid and dramatic price and cost increases in the early 1970s which have led to increases in corn and soybean acreage even in areas with less productive soils. In this article I shall provide some statistical evidence on the nature of urban pressures on the agricultural landscape which manifest themselves both directly and indirectly. The study area-the Middle Atlantic States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania-is experiencing population decentralization, suburbanization, and declines in the amount of land in agriculture. The region is thus well suited to the investigation of recent conflicts between urbanization and agricultural landscapes.
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