By JAMES KROHE JR.
Reinventing agriculture in Illinois

In this article James Krohe Jr. examines Illinois farms and agriculture from a multitude of perspectives and challenges us to debate what is really at issue: not what kind of farms Illinois will have in the next century but what kind of farms it wants. This is the fifth article in a series on economic development sponsored by The Joyce Foundation.

CONSIDERED in all its parts, Illinois agriculture is the state's major industry. It is a fruitful hybrid of rich natural resources, applied science, entrepreneurship in the private sector and policymaking in the public, and it is all geared toward the production of as much food per acre as possible. Indeed, Illinois' mechanized, hybridized, fertilized, computerized agriculture is Illinois to much of the world. That harvest can be summarized in a few facts. Since the turn of the century, Illinois farm acreage has dropped by 10 percent and the number of farms has declined by 80 percent while its output of major cash crops like corn has soared. The farmer hours per acre required to raise that corn has been slashed by three-fourths, while yields have more than trebled. For these reasons, economists John Bowman and John McQuown (see "Illinois: Riding the wave of economic change," October 1983) pronounced agriculture the "high tech superstar" of Illinois industry.

But during the 1970s, new facts suggested that this star might be dimming. The amount of land used to grow crops fluctuates with the markets, but the long-term trend continued a downward side. Prime farmland was being converted to nonfarm uses at a rate of 1,000 acres a year in the late 1970s, and topsoil was being washed off all but the flattest fields at rates up to 10 times faster than nature could replace it. Farm population shrunk as farm size swelled and the market for farm labor evaporated. The costs of farming - fertilizer, fuel, interest rates, all driven in one way or another by higher costs for energy — were going up faster and more consistently than were grain prices. Long accustomed to the vagaries of weather, Illinois farmers in the 1970s were baffled by the vagaries of the economic climate.

Illinois agriculture is clearly changing. But Illinois agriculture has always been changing. More accurately, Illinois agriculture is always being changed. For as Bowman and McQuown point out, Illinois' farm industry did not just happen. It was invented, the result of the application for profit of technology to a natural resource under conditions imposed, however haphazardly, by politics. What was invented can be reinvented; the question facing Illinois as it moves into the next century is not what kind of farms it will have, but what kind of farms it wants.

Farmland

Farming begins with land. A modern farm may be seen as a manufacturing plant which has land as its basic capital. Neither farmland conversion nor soil erosion are problems new to Illinois; most of the state is built on converted farmland, and Illinois prairie soils have been enriching the Louisiana delta for decades. However, the late 1970s brought a newly urgent sense of limits to debates about what had heretofore been seen as a limitless resource.

Since "farmland" is any land used for farming, the definition is as much economic and technological as physical. Illinois farmers have been "making" farmland since their arrival — cutting trees to make wooded tracts plowable, draining swamps to make wetland plantable, building roads to make unreachable tracts accessible and more exotically using hydroponics to make "land" from water. Land also moves out of agricultural production, usually following broad trends in grain prices; many of today's "natural" wooded tracts in southern and west central Illinois are in fact grown-over farm fields abandoned in the 1920s and 1930s.

Urbanization of farmland is a more lasting change; one can't clear a shopping mall for spring planting. Experts agree that land conversions in urbanized counties are often significant locally, but that the effect on the state's total farm capacity is slight.

A similiar sanguinity prevails about soil erosion. While some Illinois fields are eroding hopelessly, many of the most productive fields are not, if only because they are flat. The impact of soil losses on the productivity of such prime land will take decades to show itself at current rates. Indeed, even the most pessimistic projections show food production increasing in Illinois at least through the 1980s in spite of land conversions and soil erosion.

Technology is a substitute for soil. Higher yielding crop varieties, more deadly weed killers, irrigation and other improvements have led to increases in output per acre which so far have outpaced the decline in both acreage and topsoil. Nor have such improvements ceased. Though applications of conventional fertilizers, for example, have started to yield diminishing returns (depending on the relative price of corn and fertilizer), new genetic engineering may increase returns once again. This new agricultural

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engineering (whose techniques are only now beginning to be applied to major crops experimentally) holds the promise of crops tailored to specific cultural conditions — crops which use sunlight and water more efficiently (water is the single biggest factor in corn yields) or mount their own defenses against insect pests.

One needn't postulate Star Wars-like breakthroughs to predict that productivity curves on Illinois farms will continue their upward curve, at least in the short term. There exists a sizeable reservoir of unrealized yield increases based on existing knowledge which can be tapped. Yields vary on Illinois farms having similar soil by a factor of two or three. Those bushels are the difference between the average farmer and the most efficient. As average and below average farmers learn gradually to exploit more fully the machines, chemicals and seed types already at hand, experts agree that their yields will continue to rise.

Earl Swanson is a specialist in farm production economics with the University of Illinois' College of Agriculture at Urbana. Of yield trends he says, "I'm optimistic." Swanson describes a "catch-up" period of roughly 40 years for new technologies to spread from the labs to the farm field in explaining why Illinois farmers will continue to profit tomorrow from discoveries made yesterday. "It won't be easy" to maintain productivity increases, Swanson admits. "It will be more expensive, for one thing. But I believe in the 'induced innovation' hypothesis" (better known since Roman times as "necessity is the mother of invention").

Swanson believes that fears about soil losses are, if not exaggerated, at least ill-focused. "It's popular for administrators to talk about the yield curves going down, because they've got to increase their research budgets," he explains. Soil erosion causes more immediate and vexing problems in Illinois, in the form of silt-choked lakes and streams polluted by chemicals which hitchhike on soil particles washed off farm fields. "Of the environmental and the productivity aspects of soil erosion," Swanson concludes, "I believe that the environmental aspect is by far the more important in Illinois."

Not all experts share Swanson's optimism. The disagreement varies more or less in proportion with the length of the future one envisions. Folke Dovring, one of Swanson's colleagues at the university, has noted that if one extends the trend curves showing diminishing land on one hand and increasing output per unit of land on the other, they will cross eventually — at a point at which all of Illinois will be fed from a single windowbox. Dovring's point is that increased yields have limits, and that until those limits are more clearly understood, prudence in the preservation of the land resource makes better policy.

Yield increases, all agree, are contingent upon continued improvements in farm technology; this will be especially true after the 1980s when the reservoir of new yields from current technologies is exhausted. Illinois agriculture was a high tech industry decades before most city dwellers had heard the term. The technology transfer system which has made Illinois farmers among the most knowledgable in the world — the interlocked system of federal research labs, land grant universities and county extension advisers, along with a parallel private system comprised of seed, chemical and equipment manufacturers — is the pride of Illinois agriculture. But the level of public commitment to ag research and extension services has been eroding at both state and federal levels in recent years. In 1983, for example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) devoted only $700 million out of a $42 billion budget to research — 1.6 percent of the total.

Budgets for the USDA's Northern Regional Research Center (NRRC) at Peoria have been routinely cut, with the cuts subsequently restored by a solicitous Congress. 1979 was typical when then-20th District Congressman Paul Findley noted with sarcasm the fact that two of the NRRC's research teams (one working on a new flour made from corn germ, the other a toxic metals remover made from corn starch) were being given awards for their outstanding research by the same administration which proposed research budget cuts of 20 percent. Said Findley, "That is like the fellow who kept saying, 'Nice doggie' to a barking dog while he reached around to find a rock to throw at him."

The direction as well as the magnitude of ag research has been questioned. Critics worry that basic research has been slighted in favor of applied research (often funded because of pressure from farm state congressmen) aimed at boosting production of specific commodities at the expense of promising work in generalized fields such as genetic engineering.

The issue of how much to spend on ag research, and what to spend it on, is a subject of considerable relevance in Illinois. The state is the home not only of the NRRC (one of four such centers run by the USDA nationwide) and the University of Illinois' College of Argiculture (which is generally regarded as among the preeminent ag research institutions in the country) but also the site of the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station. Don Holt, an agronomist who is its newly appointed director, describes the station as the "R & D arm" of the Illinois agriculture industry. Holt has compared the annual cash sales of that industry with his budget, with enlightening results. "Most industries invest 3 to 6 percent of their annual cash sales in R & D," he points out. Investment of public funds in farm sector research amounts to 0.3 percent or less. "This is in spite of the fact that all sorts of studies show that the return on ag research is extremely high, anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent."

Counting spending on ag research not just from state and federal but also from private sources (including the farmers themselves, through grain checkoff programs which divert a tiny percentage of sales to research) would change Holt's arithmetic but not the validity of his broader point that ag research is underfunded compared to other industries. In 1977, for example,

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low-departed dean Orville Bentley imposed an ambitious expansion of the research capacity of the UI ag college under the banner, Food for Century III. As originally approved, the plan called for spending $114 million over 10 years for construction and equipment. Unfortunately, Food for Century III and the recession arrived together. To date roughly $40 million has been spent (mostly in the first two years). For the moment, the General Assembly has decided that it does not have the resources to attend to the needs of both the present and the future. The reasons are not hard to divine. Robert Goodman, a plant pathologist at the university, has observed that since basic research often shows no immediate reward, such work is "sometimes the easiest to put off until economic conditions improve." Nor is there much of a political constituency for basic ag research outside the ag community; as Holt points out, the general public, whose cheaper food bills may reasonably be regarded as the ultimate benefit of ag research, does not associate money spent on research with money saved at the supermarket. Public spending on ag research is usually justified in the name of that public benefit. But the lure of profit in agriculture has always been a powerful stimulus to innovation in the private sector as well. John Deere was not working on a government grant when he perfected the steel plow, the first output of the firm bearing his name which has grown into the present industrial giant. It is impossible to calculate the figure exactly, but it is generally believed that at least half of the ag research is funded with private sector money. A typical recent example: United AgriSeeds Inc., a private crop research firm based in Champaign, last fall received $15 million (a substantial part of which was obtained in the form of venture capital from a Boston financial firm) to build a research center and buy two small seed companies. Indeed, in certain crucial fields such as the use of genetic engineering to create improved crop varieties, private labs are believed to be a step or two ahead of the universities. Some of the research being done on campuses is being paid for through grants from industry, a trend which is expected to accelerate. For example, it was announced in the summer of 1983 that the U of I was one of five universities chosen to participate in a $10 million research program underwritten by Standard Oil of Ohio; the money will endow an academic chair and fund a Center for Crop Molecular Genetics and Genetic Engineering.

In an era of shrinking public resources, infusions of research funds from any source is welcomed by ag scientists. However, underwriting firms typically are granted patent and other rights as a condition of their support. In a future in which information will be as vital to agriculture as summer rain, the concentration of knowledge in the hands of a few, large corporations has unsettling implications.

The trend toward corporate underwriting of ag research reveals a fundamental truth: If the future of Illinois agriculture depends on the answers uncovered by researchers, those answers depend on who asks what questions. A particular farm technology begets a particular kind of farm, and a particuar kind of farmer. Flat farmland is highly valued at least in part because large equipment can maneuver across it easily. And modern equipment and chemicals, not to mention marketing and financial planning, pose management problems for today's educated farmer which would have baffled his grandparents. Farmers still have to work hard; the difference is that much of that work is now done with the brain rather than the back.

The relationship between technology and farm type is crucial and not widely understood. Inevitably, modern farm technology has also begotten particular kinds of problems. In a paper prepared for the U. S. Senate Agriculture Committee in 1980, Swanson and colleague Steven Sonka confirmed the obvious, namely that farm technology had eliminated much of the drudgery which used to be the price paid for life on the land. But beyond that? Swanson and Sonka:

Shifting to a structure of production more heavily dependent on purchased inputs has increased agriculture's sensitivity to yearly income shortfalls. And specialization, which in many instances required the development of specific innovations to be feasible, has tended to concentrate production both geographically and in terms of practices and genetic materials commonly used. These developments also tend to intensify the vulnerability of production to adverse weather or unforeseen calamities such as diseases or insects.

Thus plenty has been purchased at the cost of increased risk, instability and — factors not mentioned above by the authors — environmental damage on and off the farm. In recent years critics have pointed out that the postwar farm policy whose principal aim has been merely expanded production is short-sighted. Organic farming advocates such as Robert Rodale have been criticizing both the means and ends of U.S. agribusiness for years; the chorus swelled more recently with the voices of hunger activists, environmentalists and dissident groups of small, mostly marginal farmers of the sort who comprise the tractorcaders of the American Agriculture Movement.

It wasn't until such criticism took official form (such as the attempt by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency in the mid-1970s to set state erosion control standards as part of its clean water program) that the farm community began self-examination in earnest. Bob Bergland, President Carter's agriculture secretary, proposed in 1980 a new standard for the evaluation of federally funded ag research. He proposed barring funding for research whose results might threaten "social stability, our natural resource base, the environment, national security, or the economic well-being of a significant number of citizens." A farm technology aimed at boosting productivity alone, Bergland thus implied, had encouraged the exodus to the cities, increased soil erosion and chemical contamination and increased dependence on imported petroleum.

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Bergland's concerns were echoed across Washington. The 1977 farm act set up a National Agricultural Research and Extension Users Advisory Board to provide independent views on the proper ends of such work; that board has since set as its top priority to "restore and protect" soil and water. In 1983 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy criticized the shift from basic to applied research for farms. All of these recommendations, in their different ways, deal with the need to redefine — indeed, to reinvent — U. S. agriculture in a future in which productive resources will be in shorter supply.

Farmers seldom wait for wisdom from Washington on any question. Prodded more by market forces than by bureaucrats, a great many Illinois farmers have begun to reinvent corn and bean farming on their own. The shift to reduced tillage systems since the late 1970s has surprised experts in Springfield and Urbana by its rapidity. Such systems require fewer field trips, and thus save fuel — and topsoil. Such methods require new equipment, new techniques, new assumptions, many of which are being fully tested in the field for the first time by the farmers themselves. It is sometimes said that the best farmers are about five years ahead of the ag colleges when it comes to new ideas; if one wants to know what the future of farming in Illinois will be like, it seems, one needs only to find a farmer and ask him.

Markets

Through the 1980s at least, the problem facing Illinois grain farmers will not be how to grow grain so much as how to sell it. U. S. farm production has not only outstripped farmland and soil losses but U. S. appetites. The rate of growth in domestic demand for food is flat, rising only with population. Normally the demand for food increases as income increases and people shift toward more expensive foods such as meat and dairy products. But there is a limit to such shifts, a limit which seems to have been reached in the U. S. Indeed, there is even an apparent countertrend, as people conscious of the suspected health risks from the consumption of animal fats have reduced their meat consumption. Dietary changes by the U. S. consumer have cost the farmer sales of millions of bushels a year — a loss which falls disproportionately on the Illinois farmer, whose corn and beans are used largely to feed livestock.

New uses for Illinois farm products occasionally emerge. The small but growing use of corn-derived ethanol as a gasoline octane booster is one. A more substantial breakthrough occurred in 1980 when Coca-Cola announced that it would use a corn fructose sweetener instead of sugar in its

Prodded more by market forces than by bureaucrats, a great many Illinois farmers have begun to reinvent corn and bean farming on their own

soft drinks; other major bottlers have since followed Coke's lead, with happy effects on the stock prices of A. E. Staley and Archer-Daniels-Midland, the two Illinois-based corn processing giants.

The market for corn fructose did not exist a few years ago, because corn fructose did not exist. Since its development in the early 1970s, however, corn sweeteners have captured 78 percent of the national market for caloric sweeteners in soft drinks — 5.55 billion pounds worth in 1982.

As the success of corn fructose sweeteners demonstrates, one way to survive saturated markets is to invent new ones. No prudent observer would make bets about which specific crops Illinois farmers may be raising 10, 20 or 50 years hence. Like farmers everywhere, Illinois farmers have been willing to shift from crop to crop in pursuit of the opportunities of the market. Soybeans, a staple of Illinois' larder, were virtually unknown as a field crop 50 years ago. A century and a half ago, cotton was grown commercially in parts of Illinois. Work proceeds on building a marketing system for hay, which has been scarce on Illinois farms since the shift away from draft animals and toward cash farming. And work continues in labs and on demonstration plots across Illinois on the cultivation of exotic plants such as the milkweed or the Jerusalem artichoke which might someday have commercial value as food, forage, even chemical feedstocks.

It may yet develop that the figure of Illinois agriculture will hinge, not on new products, but on new ideas. Spurred by the global energy crisis, a few thinkers in the late 1970s proposed novel ways of thinking about farms. A farm doesn't grow food, they pointed out, but energy in the form of food. Farms are in fact sprawling energy conversion systems by which we harvest the sun's energy. That harvest of energy currently powers animal machines almost exclusively, including our own.

But what if that energy were convertible into other forms? Farmers themselves have taken the lead — burning cobs to dry grain, converting manures into methane to warm barns, brewing corn into alcohol to run tractors.

So far such efforts have been experimental and limited. But the promise of growing energy was real enough to convince the USDA in 1980 to designate Peoria as the site of one of two national centers for agricultural energy research. The USDA labs at Peoria were among the pioneers in biomass energy research, exploring the possibilities of converting grains into fuel alcohol as early as the 1930s. It has been estimated that by 1990 U.S. farmers could produce all the energy they need to run their farms, and that after 1990 they could produce a surplus which could be sold off the farm, as they now sell grain.

Ecologist Barry Commoner is one of those to suggest a new role for farms as energy factories. Speaking in Springfield in the fall of 1982, Commoner discussed the results of a study he had headed which showed what happened when a typical Illinois farm switched from growing corn and soybeans to sugar beets. The analysis showed that the farm could produce the same amount of carbohydrates and protiens now needed to feed livestock, plus half again as much carbohydrates in the form of simple sugars which could be fermented into fuel alcohol. Such a crop shift nationwide, Commoner calculated, could enable U. S. farms to

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feed all the livestock they now feed plus supply a fuel alcohol industry capable of replacing 20 percent of all the gasoline now consumed in the U. S. As a result of recapturing a part of the transportation energy market lost when horses were replaced by cars, farm income would double by 1995. "Farmers used not only to feed the vehicles of transportation," Commoner reminded his audience, "they grew them."

Such a transformation would require a conscious policy, including coordination and planning among disparate sectors of the economy (in this case the farm, auto and petroleum industries) not used to doing either. Such a policy has been aggressively pursued in Brazil where 92 percent of all the new cars sold in a recent month were equipped with alcohol-burning engines; indeed, the Ford Motor Co.'s Brazilian Escort model are available only with alcohol-burning engines.

Exports

For the moment, however, Illinois farmers still tend to view the problem of surpluses in terms of too much of a crop rather than the wrong crop. The preferred remedy remains that used by their great-grandfathers in the 19th century, when excess corn was sold (usually in the form of whiskey or bacon) for export to St. Louis or New Orleans.

The same impulse to find distant markets now operates on a global scale. Illinois already sells much of its feed grains abroad. FarmWeek is the newsletter of the Illinois Farm Bureau. A reader of a typical issue (this one was published in December 1983) would find stories about projected corn exports for 1983-84, Common Market tariffs on corn gluten feed, South Africa's plans to boost its own corn exports, a recent grain purchase by the People's Republic of China, the need for expanded credit to poor countries to spur buying of U. S. commodities and an updated forecast of this year's Brazilian soybean crop.

A consensus exists among Illinois' agricultural leaders that expanded exports rather than subsidy, is the preferred solution to the problem of surplus. Illinois ag director Larry Werries, for example, seems to be seen as often at trade fairs in Brussels or Tokyo as he is in Springfield; he insists, so far without contradiction, that Illinois does more overseas marketing than the USDA. At their 1983 annual convention, delegates to the Illinois Farm Bureau endorsed a pro-export program which called (among other things) for a revolving credit program to finance foreign grain purchases (a plan also favored by Werries) and increased marketing.

But are exports a panacea? While export demand is expected to grow more quickly than domestic demand through the 1980s (3-4 percent per year perhaps abroad compared to 1.5 percent or less domestically) that growth rate is still hardly vigorous. And capturing that new 3 percent or 4 percent won't be easy. Harold Guither, agriculture policy specialist at the U of I, explains why: "There's a conflict between export policy and domestic price support policy. You need prices to be low for one, high for the other." Europe, with its tradition of food scarcity, has opted for high domestic prices to keep its farmers on the land, and so must resort to export subsidies and protectionist tariffs to enable those farmers to sell abroad — a continuing sore point in relations between the U. S. and Europe.

A low price policy is obviously appealing to domestic supermarket shoppers as well as foreign grain buyers. But low, unsubsidized prices require high production if the farmer is to turn a profit. And high production requires higher risks, expecially for medium-sized farms. The problem in recent years is that U. S. farm policymakers have tried to satisfy all their fractious constituencies according to the market conditions of the moment. When export demand was strong in the mid-1970s, government price support and set-aside programs were pared as part of a shift back to a market-oriented agriculture; when farmers responded so enthusiastically to a demand which subsequently dried up in the early 1980s, the government responded with the most expensive set-aside program ever — Payment-in-Kind, or PIK. As Don Holt puts it, "We don't have consistent policies."

Consistency will not be easily won, even in Illinois. As noted, both the Illinois Department of Agriculture and the Illinois Farm Bureau have taken pro-export, anti-price support, pro-market-forces positions. The Farm Bureau generally represents the state's larger, more prosperous farmers — the ones best able to compete. But the Illinois Farmers Union opts for the protection of farm income through subsidy. And the Illinois chapter of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) has offered a radical critique of the high production-high export policy. Speaking before a U. S. House subcommittee hearing in Springfield in 1982, an Illinois AAM spokesman called the above course "as bankrupt as many of our farmers" and "ecologically

For the moment, Illinois farmers still tend to view the problem of surpluses in terms of too much of a crop rather than the wrong crop

unsound, economically hazardous, and politically dangerous."

Even pro-exporters warn that the world market, though vast, is also vastly complex. While domestic demand is stable, demand abroad is subject to a dozen volatile factors. Markets vary according to the weather, here and in competing grain belts. Demand varies with income (the sluggish demand of recent years can be traced to global recession), foreign embargoes and tariffs (the European Economic Community's tariff on U. S. corn gluten feed has reduced both sales and the patience of U. S. corn growers), the output of domestic farm sectors, the strength of the dollar abroad, the availability and cost of credit to foreign customers (the weakening of OPEC, ironically, has reduced credit flows to the Third World which financed much of their demand for U. S. products during their late 1970s buying binge).

Looking past the next 20 years, it would appear that the global market will be subject not only to unpredictable fluctuations, but also to limits. Growth of both demand and population tend to flatten as incomes rise in developing nations, while domestic farm output tends to go up. Some experts predict a leveling of global demand as early as the 2030s or so.

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Farm size

A strategy of expanding exports has implications for farm size, the ag research agenda, even the federal budget for the next few decades. As Don Holt explains, "If we elect to compete in the world markets, the trend will continue toward large farms" because only the larger farms will be able to mobilize the land, the machinery, the new technology needed to produce on a large enough scale and at a low enough unit cost (two-fifths for small farms, according to one study) to sell in a world market that grows more efficient and more specialized each year.

However, there is a countervailing trend. Small farms not only seem unlikely to disappear in Illinois, they are sprouting like weeds. Their owners often do not come from farm backgrounds and may move into the country for reasons that are esthetic and social as well as horticultural. Such farms sometimes provide subsistence for their owners, sometimes grow fruits and specialty crops for local markets. Even those which produce conventional crops may be little more than hobbies to their owners. Unlike medium-sized farms, such operations do not provide their owners' principal incomes. The owners earn most of their income off the farm, from jobs in town. Much of the recent rise in income among farm families can be traced to this increased off-farm employment.

Such weekend farmers will not produce a major share of Illinois' agricultural output, but they may be important. Because they are not dependent on their farms for income, their owners are spared the pressure to produce, expand and produce more. The new small farm offers economic ways to exploit now-marginal lands for uses more appropriate than row-cropping — small livestock grazing, orchards, truck gardens — and thus offers means by which both the rural aesthetic and the rural population may be preserved.

It is the medium-sized farms, then, which are most vulnerable to the squeeze between rising production costs and the low grain prices which are likely to attend the market-oriented agriculture of the future. Given their often contradictory needs, it is probably impossible to devise a single farm policy which will serve the interests of the large cash grain farmer, the medium-sized farm and the small, weekend farm. "If you want to maximize production," Holt points out, "aim your support at large farms. But if you aim policy to serve the largest numbers of people, look at the small farms."

That choice poses grave dilemmas for U. S. agriculture. While Illinois farmers point with pride to the fact that it now requires only one farmer to produce the food needed by dozens of city dwellers, they are troubled by the exodus from the countryside and the collapse of traditional farm culture. There is repopulation of the countryside in Illinois, but the trend is based on the movement of nonfarming exurbanites into new rural housing.

Former ag secretary Bergland in 1979 initiated a national debate on the structure of U. S. farming whose stated aim was to preserve the family farm. Bergland's case for the family farm was economic. Grain farms tend to achieve maximum cost-efficiencies at a

It is probably impossible to devise a single farm policy which will serve the interests of the large cash grain farmer, the medium-sized farm and the small, weekend farm

size of 500 acres or so, which in Illinois comprises merely a medium-sized farm. Many family farmers will expand to double, even treble that size if they can. While expansion boosts income, however, it does not improve efficiency. Moreover, Bergland argued that the family farm is a key to economic diversity in the farm sector which, he warned, was needed to prevent the concentration of agricultural resources into fewer and fewer hands. But "family farm" is a nostalgic and cultural category as well as an economic one. As Harold Guither puts it, "Farm economic problems tend to become complicated with social and political values." Farm people tend to think of farms as production units — no one can afford to be nostalgic about one's living — while nonfarm people tend to think of farms in ecological, cultural or historical terms.

The view from the city of Illinois farming is crucial. Most of the initiatives for reform in agricultural ownership, management and land use which crowded the 1970s in Illinois — erosion control standards, corporate ownership bans, farmland preservation ordinances and the like — came from nonfarm groups. But the political context within which farm issues are decided in both Springfield and Washington is changing.

In the past, farming was viewed largely as the exploitation of a private resource for a larger public benefit. Lately, with the growth of environmental consciousness on one hand and the more recent explosion of farm support costs on the other, more people seem to view farming as the exploitation of a public resource for private benefit. John Schnittker, one of the nation's most respected farm economists, dismisses most farm aid programs as "open-ended entitlement programs, like Medicaid" which profit a few big farmers — a view which might revolutionize farm policy were it to be shared by the general public.

That public has already begun to assert claims of priority over the use of the farmland resource. The Environmental Protection Agency's "208" program to set and enforce erosion control standards is a case in point. The willingness after years of resistance to accept the principle of so-called "cross-compliance" regulations — by which a farmer agrees to adopt soil conservation practices as a condition of his participation in tax-paid aid programs — may be attributed in part to a prudent desire to forestall a mandatory program.

Illinois farm leaders are generally agreed that the costs of federal farm programs must drop. But as long as farmers are able to outproduce demand, the only way to curb price-busting surpluses without saddling taxpayers with huge subsidy costs may be some kind of mandatory controls on what is grown or sold. The implications

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of such an epochal shift are unsettling as well as profound. The prospect of farm quotas appalls nearly everyone in the ag community, and not merely because of farmers' historic dislike of regulation. As economists Bowman and McQuown pointed out, it was individual farm entrepreneurship, not centralized planning, which has put natural resources, technology and labor into such productive combinations on the farm. But that same entrepreneurial spirit has confounded every attempt at voluntary production limits. The typical grain farmer agrees that production cutbacks to maintain price make sense for every farmer but himself — an attitude the ag economists call "the free rider syndrome." It seems possible that the choice between individual and collective good may not be entirely up to the farmer. The farm sector's traditional political weight is shifting. Every farmer who leaves the land takes a vote with him; a recent survey confirmed that fewer than a third of Illinois' congressional districts have farm populations of 25 percent or greater. That farmers have been able to exert political influence in Illinois disproportionate to their numbers is only partly the results of past pro-rural districting ("one cow, one vote") practices. Speaking of the tens of thousands of Illinoisans who've left farms since 1950, Guither says, "Many of them are still living, but not on farms. They have a sympathy for and a knowledge of farming that's much different than that of the generation that will follow them."

Many of this displaced farm population, like Guither himself, work in colleges of agriculture, farm bureaus, commodity exchanges and in seed and equipment company board rooms. They constitute a sizable (if unrecognized) and influential body of opinion shaping farm policy in Illinois. But they are aging, a trend which Guither predicts "will affect the whole question of the future direction of farm policy."

Futures

Choices made about markets today imply the kind of farm technology which will be in use tomorrow, just as a certain farm technology implies a certain structure of the ag economy. The salient point is that Illinois can, within limits, choose the kind of agriculture it wants in 2000, just as it chose in 1950 (indeed in 1850) the ag economy we have today. The short-term future, it is true, is likely to be familiar enough — output per acre will continue to outpace losses of soil, if more slowly; farms will continue to get larger, although not too much larger; there will be less land to farm, but not so much less that most people won't be able to continue not worrying about it.

Some observers expect that future policies may ratify trends already well underway, with the result that we will have to begin talking about dual Illinois agricultures — a two-tier system in which flatter prime land is intensively cropped by large operators catering to the export trade with very many more small "lifestyle" farms partially insulated from the harsh winds of the market.

And the longer term? Forecasts must be provisional, for two reasons. The first is the nature of farming itself and the increased complexity of the world economy of which it is now a part. When the U of I agriculture college began its inquiry into "Farming in Illinois: Alternative Futures for the 1980s," staff focused on what they dubbed a low supply, high demand scenario; within months of its publication in 1979, global recession gutted the export demand on which that scenario was largely predicated. Researchers who still believed in scenario-making had to learn to deal with high supply, low demand. The second reason why farm forecasts have become risky is that agriculture is in the process of redefining itself. The answers invented in the past have worked almost too well; it is the quality of the questions that need to be improved. the issue facing Illinois agriculture isn't whether to continue to invest in technologies, but to what ends technology should be directed; not whether productivity should increase, but for which crops; not whether people should continue to live on farms, but which farms and why?