The Vanishing Farmland Crisis: Critical Views of the Movement to Preserve Agricultural Land (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780700631384)

The 1979 publication Where Have All the Farmlands Gone? by the National Agricultural Lands Study painted a bleak future for American farmlands. Threatened by encroaching construction and soil erosion, these lands were seen as endangered--and as the direct prelude to a nation-wide shortage of both food and fiber. The NALS report, to which eleven federal agencies contributed, argued that land-use planning and control must be employed to protect valuable farmland from "urban sprawl."

First published in 1984, this collection of essays by a distinguished group of economists, including Theodore W. Schultz, Julian L. Simon, and Pierre Crosson, takes issue with the belief that croplands need governmental protection. Rather, the collection as a whole supports two theses: 1) shrinking farm acreage is not a serious problem, and 2) individual choices by landowners in a free market setting result in better-organized land use than would governmental land-use planning and regulation.

Author: John Baden
ISBN-10: 0700631380
ISBN-13: 9780700631384
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Language: English
Published: 10/08/2021
Pages: 184
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.38d