By Denny Caneff
It's almost a cliche now, the "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" formulation to describe social relations between the genders. But it has survived because there are elements of truth to how men and women operate fundamentally differently.
That same formulation could apply to two elements of our population: "Farmers are from Mars, non-farmers are from Venus." An Epic Systems software writer can bike during lunch around rural Verona, past dairy, vegetable and grain farms, and she may think she has nothing in common with people extracting a living from the soil.
I grew up in rural Minnesota and worked on farms through college. Since then I've pretty much been a confirmed urban dweller. But I have kept a foot in each culture. I've experienced firsthand how palpable the farmer-urbanite gap can be.
I work for a river conservation organization now, and I'm reminded daily of one wedge that pries open the farmer-urbanite gap - the mess that some farmers can make of the land and water on which their livelihoods depend. But I'm aware that it's a small minority of farmers who persist in this. And I'm all too aware of the urban pot calling the farmer kettle black. We city dwellers are fully capable of our own environmental messes.
Two recent and forward-thinking efforts in Wisconsin have helped to both illuminate the farmer-urbanite gap and maybe begin to close it.
One was a series of forums, sponsored by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, looking at the future of farming and rural life in Wisconsin.
The other was the Working Lands Initiative, organized by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to make the case for how productive and viable forests and farmland are essential to the Wisconsin economy.
These forums and discussions transcended the Mars-Venus differences between Wisconsin farmers and their neighbors in places like Waukesha, Waunakee and Wausau. Some essential mutuality and common concerns became apparent.
- Food: This is the most obvious one. Sure, much of that corn and soybeans Dane County farmers are growing either gets run through animals, turned into ethanol or shipped to Thailand, and this morning's grapefruit came from Mexico. Still, if you look in your cupboard or refrigerator, you'll find that you are utterly dependent on a farmer, somewhere.
You could turn that into a nice inter-dependence by working just a bit harder to source your food from farmers in your area code. Getting locally produced food from a farm family you can know has gotten delightfully easy in Wisconsin. You, the urbanite, get fresh, safe food, and they, the farmers, get your money directly.
- Land use: Perhaps the deepest mutuality between farmers and their city neighbors is in the desire to protect rural land from conversion to something else. Everyone understands that once a hayfield is converted to asphalt, it is gone. Everyone appreciates that without good land, there is no agriculture.
On this issue, farmers might be quick to point out the hypocrisy of the urbanite. Urbanites decry the loss of farmland to suburban sprawl - the very sprawl that they fuel with their appetites for shopping malls, fast food and oversized houses on big lots.
But even this is changing, as evidenced by a push in Washington County to create a purchase of development rights program. Through PDR, non-farmers essentially pay farmers to keep their land in agriculture, permanently. This program's most vocal proponents are urbanites, including the CEOs of Washington County's two largest employers, who understand how a viable agriculture contributes to a high quality of life.
- Economic justice: On this issue there is an emerging and interesting confluence of farmer and urban interests. Farmers have forever been subject to the whims of a feast-or-famine "free market," while many of their urban counterparts enjoyed jobs for life. That simply is not the case anymore for urban workers. Farmers lament their inability to save for retirement, and now so do their urban counterparts. For decades, farmers have had a one-strand safety net of health insurance under them. The health insurance net under urban workers is getting more frayed all the time. These fundamental issues of economic fairness may become the most powerful tie that binds farmers and non-farmers.
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