Rural America needs more farmers to regain social cohesion, farmer-columnist says

"Every opportunity in rural America is predicated upon smaller farms, more people on the land farming," farmer and New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg told Brian Mann of upstate's North Country Public Radio over the weekend.

Klinkenborg, who grew up in rural Iowa, said much of rural America needs "more people to form a society; there is no society in so much of rural America." He said farming in 600- to 1,000-acre tracts is useful for commodity farming and raising corn for ethanol, "but it doesn't make sense for actual food and it's not the best practice for the soil."

Klinkenborg writes an occasional, short column called "The Rural Life," usually drawn from his five-acre farm in New York's Columbia County, but he told Mann that he's "clearly not a farmer in any real sense. ... The real point is to be engaged in the life and death cycle of a farm, to be engaged in growing your own." He said the most important part of his rural life is living with animals. "Most Americans have given up that experience," he said. "It's a shame, because living with animals teaches you a huge amount about the boundaries of being human."

Klinkenborg said a main function of his column is to speak to the many people in New York City who dream of having a farm. "I'm there as a kind of proxy in life for a lot of people," he said. As an editorial writer, he said, his main rural mission is to write about "the choices we've made about how we grow food," many of which he said are not really choices, but "programmatic decisions" made by corporations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Click to read and listen)