CHAPTER 9
TWO BOGEYMEN: "URBAN SPRAWL" AND SOIL EROSION 
CHAPTER 9:  TABLE OF CONTENTS
Soil Erosion
Afternote: How Environmental Con Artists Work Their Claims

   This chapter tells at length the saga of the most conclusively 
discredited environmental-political fraud of recent times. 
   Since the 1970s, many well-intentioned people have worried 
that population growth produces urban sprawl, and that highways 
pave over "prime farmland" and recreational land. This fear 
proved to be groundless. The purpose in giving so much detail 
here is that this case may serve as a model for many similar 
issues about which the full story has not come to light, and in 
which there is not a confession by the official agency involved 
that the original scare was entirely false. 
   The heart of the matter is that many, in the name of 
"environmentalism" and under the guise of preventing future food 
shortage, want to prevent people from building houses on 
farmland. They are again mobilizing the powers of government to 
attain their private goals.  That is, it may well be that the 
famine-protection claims are simply a smoke screen for property 
owners who want a bucolic view.  But whatever the motives, this 
phony scare campaign steals taxpayers' money and prevents young 
couples from getting the housing they want. 
   Three recent examples:

   March 6, 1991: A Washington Post editorial comments 
approvingly on a bill coming before the Maryland General Assembly 
that will prevent "suburban sprawl" in the name of "protecting 
farmland."  
   March 28, 1991, front page banner headline in the Press 
Enterprise, Bloomsburg, Penn.:  "Farm Preservation:  $100M 
Mistake?"  The State of Pennsylvania is spending $100 million to 
"purchase development rights to prime farmland in an effort to 
shield it from development."  
   September 10, 1992, Washington Post (pp. Md 1, 7):  "State 
Preservation Program Stems Loss of Farmland to Development...The 
easement program was enacted...not only to curb development...but 
also to help keep the state partially self-sufficient in food 
production...Loss of farming...also means more food must be 
imported from out of state, which can drive prices up." By this 
point in the book, the reader should be aware that these 
arguments in support of the preservation program are the worst 
sort of economic nonsense.
   These and similar programs in 17 other states are founded on 
the assumption that the U. S. is losing farmland at an 
unprecedented rate, and that the farmland is needed to stave off 
hunger in the future.  Both those assertions have now been wholly 
disproven -- and acknowledged to be so by the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture, which originally raised the alarm.  That is, even 
the original purveyors of the false facts about the "vanishing 
farmland crisis" agree that the widely reported scare was without 
foundation.
   The relevant data are as follows:  
   Figure 9-1 shows that of the 2.3 billion acres in the U.S. as 
of 1987, all the land taken up by cities, highways, non-
agricultural roads, railroads, and airports amounts to only 82 
million acres - just 3.6 percent of the total.  Clearly there is 
very little competition between agriculture on the one side, and 
cities and roads on the other.
Fig 9-1 old 16-3
   Concerning the trends: from 1920 to 1987, land in urban and 
transportation uses rose from 29 million acres to 82 million 
acres - a change of 2.3 percent of the total area of the U.S.  
During those fifty-seven years, population increased from 106 
million to 243 million people. Even if this trend were to 
continue (population growth has slowed down), there would be an 
almost unnoticeable impact on U.S. agriculture, just as in past 
decades (see figure 9-2).  
Fig 6-y old 16-4
   Concerning the notion that the U.S. is being "paved over," as 
of 1974 the U.S. Department of Agriculture's official view was 
that "we are in no danger of running out of farmland."  But then 
there occurred a bizarre incident in which the failure of the 
press and television is undeniable and inexcusable.  Even the 
original purveyors of the false facts have 'fessed up and now 
agree that the widely reported scare was without foundation.  
   Headlines like these began to appear in the newspapers about 
1980:  "The Peril of Vanishing Farmlands" (The New York Times) 
and "Farmland Losses Could End U.S. Food Exports" (Chicago 
Tribune).  "Vanishing Farmlands:  Selling Out the Soil" (Saturday 
Review), and "As World Needs Food, U.S. Keeps Losing Soil to Land 
Developers" (Wall Street Journal). They asserted that the 
urbanization-of-farmland rate had jumped by a multiple of three 
from the 1960's to the 1970's, from less than one million acres 
per year to three million acres per year.  This assertion was 
wholly untrue, as we shall see.
   Several scholars - including Fischel, Luttrell, Hart, and me - 
found that the 3-million-acres-a-year rate was most implausible 
in light of data from other sources, and given the nature of the 
surveys from which the estimate was drawn by the National 
Agricultural Lands Study (NALS), an organization set up by the 
Department of Agriculture together with other existing government 
entities.  We also got help from H. Thomas Frey, a geographer who 
had been the keeper of the urbanization and other land-use data 
for the Economic Research Service of the USDA for many years.   
Everyone agreed that in 1967 the total urban and built-up area in 
the United States (excluding highways, railroads, and airports) 
was between 31 and 35 million acres. It was also agreed that the 
rate of urbanization was slower in the 1960's than in the 1950's.  
Yet NALS said that over the ten years from 1967 to 1977, there 
was a 29 million acre increase in urban and built-up land.  
   That is, over the course of more than two centuries, in the 
process of reaching a population of about 200 million people, the 
U.S. built towns on between 31 and 35 million acres.  NALS 
asserted that suddenly in the course of another 10 years, and 
with a population increase of only 18 million people, the urban 
and built-up areas increased by 29 million acres (almost none of 
it due to transportation) -- a near-doubling.
   To put it differently, the long-run trend in the decades up to 
1970 was about one million acres of total land urbanized per 
year, and constant or slowing down.  The Soil Conservation 
Service in conjunction with NALS asserted that the rate then 
jumped to between 2 and 3 million acres yearly from 1967 to 1975 
or 1977 (depending on which version you read).     
   There were two bases given for the publicized 3 million-acre 
number; NALS shifted from one to the other when either was 
criticized:  1) A small-sample re-survey of part of the 1967 
sample "inventory" of farms, done by the Soil Conservation 
Service.  (A similar inventory had been done in 1958.)  2)  The 
1977 sample inventory. Seymour Sudman, an expert in research 
design, joined me in a technical analysis showing that there were 
so many flaws in both the 1975 re-survey and the 1977 survey that 
both should be considered totally unreliable.  The flaws included 
an incredible boo-boo that put the right numbers in the wrong 
columns for big chunks of Florida. 
   Various government agencies were mobilized to rebut our 
criticisms.  USDA had claimed that farmland was decreasing, to 
support the idea that farmland was being urbanized.  But we 
showed that farmland was in fact increasing. 
   NALS then got the Census bureau to produce a similar 
adjustment for the U.S. as a whole.  The result:  "The latest 
data show a national decline of 88 million acres in land in farms 
between 1969 and 1978--an annual rate of 9.8 million acres," 
wrote The Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.
   Analysis of the adjustment showed it to be as full of holes as 
Swiss cheese.  And eventually the Census of Agriculture revealed 
detailed data on the appropriate adjustment showing that land in 
Illinois farms and in cropland had, as we said, indeed increased 
from l974 to 1978. 
   After publication of these results, the scare seemed to die 
down a bit, but not before the private American Farmland Trust 
was organized in 1980 from former employees of NALS.  Annually it 
spends a couple of million dollars a year to "protect" the U. S. 
from the danger of vanishing farmland.  
   In 1984, the Soil Conservation Service issued a paper by Susan 
Lee that completely reversed the earlier scare figures and 
confirmed the estimates by our side.  And the accompanying press 
release made it clear that the former estimates were now being 
retracted.  "[T]he acreage classified as urban and built-up land 
was 46.6 million acres in 1982, compared to 64.7 million acres 
reported in 1977."  Please read that again.  It means that 
whereas in 1977 the SCS had declared that 64.7 million acres had 
been "lost" to built-upon land, just five years later SCS 
admitted that the actual total was 46.6 million acres. That is, 
the 1977 estimate was fully fifty per cent too high, a truly 
amazing error for something so easy to check roughly as the 
urbanized acreage of the U.S.  
   With unusual candor, the USDA press release added, "The 1982 
data, which correlate closely with data from the 1980 U. S. 
Census of Population, [the census was not available at the time 
of the argument described above, but later fully corroborated 
Frey's estimates based on prior data] are considered accurate 
because of the availability of better maps, more time for data 
collection, many more sample points, and better quality control." 
The press release continued:  "The 1977 estimate thus appears to 
have been markedly overstated." 
   A Congressional Research Service report summarized the 
outcome:  "National Agricultural Lands Study indicated that 
almost three million acres of agricultural land was annually 
converted to relatively irreversible nonfarm uses between 1967 
and 1975...Subsequent analyses and more recent empirical evidence 
have not supported these results...In conclusion, the most recent 
reliable information indicates that the conversion of farmland to 
urban and transportation uses occurred at about half the rate 
indicated in the National Agricultural Lands Study.... The 
putative figure of 3 million acres per year from the NALS has 
been repudiated by subsequent analyses and more recent empirical 
evidence."  This report completely confirms the criticisms that 
others and I leveled at the NALS claims.  Table 9-1 shows the 
estimates from NALS and three subsequent estimates from other 
official sources.  And figure 9-3 shows a revealing graph drawn 
from a recent official program; the falsity of the 1977 National 
Resources Inventory estimate is immediately apparent.
Table 9-1 - DELETE?
Fig 9-3 jp. 17 from ERS Bulletin 629
   The demolition of the NALS estimates - and the conclusion that 
urbanization of farmland is not a social problem - is not 
welcomed by either environmentalists or by "specialists" in the 
field.  William Fischel wrote this after a 1988 conference on the 
subject:

It is not a matter about which reasonable people can 
differ...

The argument was advanced orally at the conference that 
the NALS data ought to be regarded merely as the "high 
estimates" of the amount of farmland conversion, so 
that the truth is somewhere in between.  This is not 
acceptable.  One does not average the results of 
scientific studies when one knows that some of the 
studies used invalid methods. 

     It is relevant that the press did nothing to uncover the scam. The press-release 
reversal and "confession" did not evoke coverage; yet the original scare story was a 
front-page headliner for the Chicago Tribune and a cover story for news magazines. 
     Nor did the farmland crisis then vanish for lack of factual support.  The false 
news continues to reverberate. 
   Did the false bad news matter?  Following upon NALS publicity, in 1980 Congress 
provided a tax break to owners who will attach a "conservation easement" to their land 
which will keep the land out of development and in agriculture in perpetuity.  And to 
ease the owners even more, some states have programs to recompense the owners the 
difference between the current market value and the value after the easement.  That 
is, as usual the public purse is being tapped to further the purpose of the special 
interest group. And in 1981 the Farmland Protection Policy Act was enacted by 
Congress. Hundreds of state and local laws restricting farmland conversion also were 
passed.  And the American Farmland Trust's 1985 Annual Report brags that in that year 
"Congress adopted...a Conservation Reserve...Conceived and championed by AFT" as part 
of the 1985 Farm Bill.  In June, 1994, the final regulations implementing the 1981 
Farmland Protection Policy Act were published in the Federal Register (Washington 
Post, July 5, 1994, A13), will henceforth govern agriculture in the U. S.All this 
legislation was based on wrong information, with no reasonable prospect of doing good 
for the nation but with much prospect of causing harm to individuals and damage to the 
nation.  So it goes in America.  
	The false bad news continues to reverberate in another way, too.  As sof 1994, 
some rich landowners with million-dollar homes individually have filed to pay the 
federal Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) their delinuent loans of as much as $15 
million.  And the government does not press the loan abuse because officials say that 
"most delinquent borrowers are victims [note that word] of a mid-1980s decline in crop 
prices, farm income and farmland values".  The farmland values fell when the land 
price bubble burst - the very bubble to which the government contributed with false 
publicity about vanishing farmland.
   The entire "crisis" was hokum.  This was not a regrettable yet understandable 
exaggeration of a real problem, but a non-problem manufactured by the Department of 
Agriculture and some members of Congress out of whole cloth under the guise of concern 
about food production for the starving world.  The crisis was created for the benefit 
of (a) the environmentalists, and (b) people who own homes that abut on areas which 
might be developed into housing developments, and whose vistas and ambience might 
thereby be affected. 
   As discussed in Chapter 6, increasingly efficient production methods are the major 
factor enabling the U.S. to "ensure our domestic food and fiber needs" [25] and yet 
use less land for crops - not because land is being "taken" for other purposes, but 
because it is now more efficient to raise more food on fewer acres than it was in the 
past.
	But what about the fertility of the land used for human habitation and 
transportation? Even if the total quantity of land used by additional urban people is 
small, perhaps the new urban land has special agricultural quality. One often hears 
this charge, as made in my then-home town in the 1977 City Council election.  The 
mayor "is opposed to urban sprawl because 'it eats up prime agricultural land.'"
   New cropland is created, and some old cropland goes out of use, as we have seen. 
The overall effect, in the judgment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is that 
between 1967 and 1975 "the quality of cropland has been improved by shifts in land use 
... better land makes up a higher proportion of the remaining cropland."
   The idea that cities devour "prime land" is a particularly clear example of the 
failure to grasp economic principles. Let's take the concrete (asphalt?) case of a new 
shopping mall on the outskirts of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The key economic idea is 
that the mall land has greater value to the economy as a shopping center than it does 
as a farm, wonderful though this Illinois land is for growing corn and soybeans. 
That's why the mall investors could pay the farmer enough to make it worthwhile for 
him or her to sell. A series of corny examples should bring out the point.
   If, instead of a shopping mall, the corn-and-soybean farmer sold the land to a 
person who would raise a new exotic crop called, say, "whornseat," and who would sell 
the whornseat abroad at a high price, everyone would consider it just dandy. The land 
clearly would be more productive raising whornseat than corn, as shown by the higher 
profits the whornseat farmer would make as compared with the corn-and-soybean farmer, 
and as also shown by the amount that the whornseat farmer is willing to pay for the 
land.
   A shopping mall is similar to a whornseat farm. It seems different only because the 
mall does not use the land for agriculture. Yet economically there is no real 
difference between the mall and a whornseat farm.
   The person who objects to the shopping mall says, "Why not put the mall on inferior 
wasteland that cannot be used for corn and soybeans?"  The mall owners would love to 
find and buy such land - as long as it would be equally convenient for shoppers. But 
there is no such wasteland close to town.  And "wasteland" far away from Champaign-
Urbana is like land that will not raise whornseat - because of its remoteness it will 
not raise a good "crop" of shoppers (or whornseat or corn).  The same reasoning 
explains why all of us put our lawns in front of our homes instead of raising corn out 
front and putting the lawn miles away on "inferior" land.
   Of course, the transaction between the mall investors and the farmer does not take 
into account the "external disutility" to people who live nearby and who hate the 
sight of the mall. On the other hand, the transaction also does not take account of 
the added external "utility" to shoppers who enjoy the mall. Some of this externality 
is reflected in changes in property values; some individuals will suffer and others 
benefit. But neither a market system nor any other system guarantees that everyone is 
made better off by every transaction.  Furthermore, this consideration is a long way 
from our original concern about the loss of prime agricultural land.
   Both ignorance and mysticism enter importantly into conventional thinking about 
farmland.  For example, one hears that "once it's paved over, it's gone for good."  
Not so.  Consider the situation in Germany, where entire towns are moved off the land 
for enormous stripmining operations.  After the mining is done, farmland is replaced, 
and the topsoil that is put down is so well enriched and fertilized that 
"reconstituted farmland now sells for more than the original land." Furthermore, by 
all measures the area is more attractive and environmentally pure than before.  

SOIL EROSION
   Soil erosion is a related and exactly parallel story.  The scare that farmlands are 
blowing and washing away is a fraud upon the public similar to the urbanization fraud.  
    In the early 1980's there was a huge foofarah about the terrible dangers of 
farmland being ruined.  In a January 11, 1983 speech to the American Farm Bureau 
Federation the President of the United States said, "I think we are all aware of the 
need to do something about soil erosion."  The headline on a June 4, 1984 Newsweek "My 
Turn" article typified how the issue was presented: "A Step Away from the Dust Bowl."  
(It may or may not be coincidence that the soil-erosion scare began just about the 
time that the paving-over scare seemed to peter out in the face of criticism.)  More 
recently we have such statements as that of a vice presidential candidate, Senator 
Albert Gore, Jr., about how "eight acres' worth of prime topsoil floats past Memphis 
every hour," and that Iowa "used to have an average of sixteen inches of the best 
topsoil in the world.  Now it is down to eight inches." 
   It is important to put such isolated claims into context.  A tiny proportion of 
cropland - 3 percent - is so erosive that no management practices can help much.  77 
percent of cropland erodes at rates below 5 tons per acre each year - the equilibrium 
rate at which new soil is formed below the surface, that is, the "no net loss" rate.  
Only 15 percent of U.S. cropland "is moderately erosive and eroding about a 5 ton 
tolerance.  Erosion on this land could be reduced with improved management practices," 
though this does not necessarily mean the land is in danger or is being managed 
uneconomically.
   In short, the aggregate data on the condition of farmland and the rate of erosion 
do not support the concern about soil erosion.  What's more, the data suggest that the 
condition of cropland has been improving rather than worsening.  Theodore W. Schultz, 
the only agricultural economist to win a Nobel Prize, and Leo V. Mayer of the USDA, 
both wrote very forcefully that the danger warnings were false.  Schultz cited not 
only research but also his own life-time recollections starting as a farm boy in the 
Dakotas in the 1930's.  Table 9-2 shows data from soil surveys which make clear that 
erosion has been lessening rather than worsening since the 1930s.  But even a Nobel 
laureate's efforts could not slow the public-relations juggernaut that successfully 
co-opted the news media and won the minds of the American public.  
Table 9-2
   The USDA press release of April 10, 1984 contained a second quiet bombshell:  "The 
average annual rate of soil erosion on cultivated cropland dropped from 5.1 tons per 
acre to 4.8 tons per acre."  That is, erosion was lessening rather than getting worse, 
exactly the opposite of what NALS claimed.  But newspapers and television either did 
not notice or did not credit these criticisms.  Even after the USDA admitted that the 
newer data clearly show that the danger was not as claimed, nothing appeared in print 
(to my knowledge) to make the public aware of this new non-danger and of how the 
public was misled.  (Ask a few of your acquaintances their impressions about farmland 
urbanization and cropland erosion.)    
   The main bad effect of soil erosion is not damage to farmland but rather the 
clogging of drainage systems, which then need costly maintenance; the latter is many 
times as costly as the former. 

AFTERNOTE: HOW ENVIRONMENTAL CON ARTISTS WORK THEIR SCAMS
   Those who perpetrated the "vanishing farmland crisis" followed the usual evasion 
strategies when confronted with the facts.  Perhaps this example will help expose the 
usual warning signs of a scam artist at work and make such hoaxes harder to accomplish 
in the future. 
   When I wrote about the sorry "vanishing farmland 
crisis" fraud for the Washington Journalism Review, my 
basic assertion that the 3 million acre figure was at 
least twice too high was attacked frontally in that 
journal by Robert Gray, head of the American Farmland 
Trust and former head of NALS.  My reply was as 
follows:
   Robert Gray has done us a large favor in his reply 
by committing himself explicitly to the statement that 
"3 million acres of rural land were lost to non-
agricultural uses annually", meaning urbanization, 
roads, and the like. This enables me to make the 
following offer:  I will wager ten thousand dollars 
with him that 1 million acres is a more appropriate 
figure than the 3 million he asserts.  If I lose, the 
money will come from my pocket; if I win, the money 
will go to a University of Maryland foundation for 
research.
  
The bet could be judged by a committee of (say) 5 ex-
presidents of the American Statistical Association and 
the American Agricultural Economics Association, or by 
an expert committee selected by those associations, 
with the Washington Journalism Review holding the 
stakes.  If Mr. Gray does not accept the bet, the offer 
is open to anyone else - journalists included, of 
course.
     
Whether or not Mr. Gray accepts the wager should be a 
fair test of whether what I write is "false", as he 
says it is.  If he does not accept the wager, perhaps 
his members and donors might consider whether NALS and 
the American Farmland Trust constitute a scam, as I say 
they are, for promulgating the phony figure of 3 
million acres.  

Of course this bet is like shooting fish in a barrel, 
because even the USDA has retreated from the 3 million 
acre figure, as stated in the article.  The interesting 
aspect of Gray's repetition of that figure is that he 
expects readers to believe him anyway. 

I am also prepared to make a cash wager on the validity 
of just about any of the hundreds of other statements 
about resources, environment, and population growth 
that I have made in my books and articles over the 
decades.  There certainly must be factual and 
theoretical errors, but luckily none of importance have 
come to light, which gives me confidence.  So how about 
it, you who shout "lies, damned lies, and statistics" 
when someone says that resources have become more 
available rather than more scarce, and that the U.S. 
air we breathe and the water we drink have been getting 
less polluted and safer rather than dirtier and more 
dangerous?  Care to put your money where your mouths 
are? 
   
Please forgive the harshness of an offer to wager.  It 
is, however, the last remaining device to bring the 
doomsayers to book on the statements that they make. 

   Gray was not, of course, willing to bet, but simply 
equivocated by offering to debate.  So my response was: 
   To Mr. Gray:  I will be happy to "debate" you under 
the following conditions:  1) The judges to be a panel 
of persons both scientifically eminent and expert in a 
related discipline -- for example, five ex-presidents 
of the American Statistical Association or of the 
American Agricultural Economics Association, or such 
persons as those associations designate.  2) You and I 
submit in writing full scientific documentation of our 
positions.  

This is the same offer I made before.  I will not 
insist on a wager.  The wager was simply to get you to 
put up or shut up.  Unfortunately, you have done 
neither.
 
You have another possibility open to you:  I have 
written that this matter is a scam, and that your 
organizations have been involved in the responsibility.  
You could sue if you believe that I have spoken falsely 
in this regard.  
 
Hey readers:  Can this fellow Gray really get away with 
avoiding the issue by crude name-calling like 
"trivializing", "theatrics", and "unprofessional"?  
When he is talking to newspeople, will no one "hold his 
feet to the fire," as you people put it?    
   
The continued disinterest of most journalists to this 
story of purposeful distortion of fact by a government 
agency and environmental organizations is 
disheartening.  The editor has received only two 
letters in response, both denouncing me.  I have 
received just one call from a journalist who thinks the 
matter newsworthy and wishes to pursue it, Howard Banks 
of Forbes.  What does this, and the events chronicled 
in my original article, say about the disinterested 
search for truth when the facts make the environmental 
movement and the press look bad?


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