Farming Magazine - May, 2009

COLUMNS

Opinion: A New SPIN on OI’ TJ

Americans like to turn nouns or adjectives into verbs (like “impact” or “finalize”), but, even more, we like to create acronyms like POTUS (president of the United States) or SCOTUS (Supreme Court) or FLOTUS (First Lady), all of which neologisms supposedly started out as Secret Service lingo, but escaped into general usage like the kudzu vine, a USDA African import for specific erosion control purposes that escaped from bureaucratic management and has since eaten half of North Carolina. The Heifer International organization invented WILD, which I hope inaccurately describes Women In Livestock Development, and now there’s SPIN, which almost, but not quite, stands for Small Plot Intensive farming, because SPIF wouldn’t be a recognizable word, except maybe as spiffy, which has a whole different meaning. Americans like to organize, too, as visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 19th century, so there’s an organization—SPIN Farming—with a Web site, and, of course, a motto: “Goodbye lawn, hello SPIN farm.”

If SPIN succeeds—and I think it will because it has tapped into an emerging groundswell of attitude and action in the suburbs, where more than half of Americans now live—it will, ironically enough, shift the future of American farming by degrees away from the high-efficiency, high-productivity, commercial-industrial model that has been furnishing the ever-less expensive food urbanite voters have been demanding from their politicians, and more toward the original Jeffersonian direction of his vision for the future of an agrarian republic, every yeoman/voter with one foot in the country on his own little farm and the other in town with his own little trade or business or profession, each sole-proprietorship, free-enterprise operation complementing and subsidizing the other. A really successful SPIN would even solve the ag half of the illegal alien problem.

If you were paying attention in history class you’ll remember that Alexander Hamilton’s vision of an urban, industrial American—with wage earners buying their food—won out over Jefferson’s agrarian-proprietor concept by the mid-19th century. A Roger Kennedy book, “Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause,” describes the failure of TJ’s effort to see the trans-Appalachian South develop into a patchwork of small, owner-operated farms and businesses, and not the commodity-crop plantations that eventually dominated and established the model for ever-larger production units after the Civil War, as 1970’s-era Ag Secretary Earl Butz illustrated with his “get big or get out” advice to farmers. On his death in February of last year, activist groups like EarthFirst eulogized (my own little neologism, there) him as the man who killed the family farm.

The TJ view of things wasn’t his, or even SPIN’s, brand-new idea, but rather a deeply entrenched belief and expectation of Americans long before they fought a war (who says wars never accomplish anything?) to become Americans and not English subjects. Thus, when you open your copy of “City: the End of Urbanism” by Douglas Rae, you’ll find an 1824 Amos Doolittle description of the preindustrial, pre-tenement city of New Haven, Conn., laid out two centuries earlier in eight urban squares surrounding a ninth, which is still the city common: “Almost every house is furnished with a piece of ground sufficiently large for a good garden … the inhabitants pride themselves very much on the cultivation of their gardens.” You’ll also find an 1824 map, on which the eight original perimeter squares of the 1637-1638 layout have each been subdivided (in the late 1700s) by new streets into four smaller squares, on which the actual buildings still occupy only a tiny percentage of the acreage. It was a large deep lot, low-density urban design, of the sort decried by modern planners as sprawl, driven by the intent to furnish every household with a substantial food-growing area. Similarly, Timothy Dwight II, son of the Yale College president, had written two years earlier, describing how “the houses have courtyards in front and gardens in the rear … with fruit trees, flowers and culinary vegetables.” The American version of SPIN, it turns out, was invented in the 17th century, not the 21st. It had earlier western European antecedents; historians like Lewis Mumford describe how much garden space there was inside the walls of medieval western European cities, while eastern Europeans, to this day, prefer compact urban settlements with off-site gardens in the zone that planners like to call “the urban-rural joint,” and the larger farms (a daily commute required) further out.

From a purely economic point of view, growing your own veggies, fruits and smaller livestock in your own back-yard made a lot of sense in preindustrial New Haven. Not only was food cost such a major part—well over half—of the family budget so that grow-it-yourself was innately profitable, but it offered a level of quality—freshness and variety—in contrast to what was then available for purchase, which was unchallengeable. As the 19th century proceeded and food costs dropped as a percent of income while freshness and variety of distant-provenance purchase items improved, grow-it-yourself declined in fiscal attractiveness, and indeed, Rae’s book shows late-19th century maps of then-new parts of New Haven City, where the lots are no longer big enough for home gardening. By the end of the century, suburbs with larger lots were springing up, linked to the city by street car lines, but these were upper-income enclaves with home owners little inclined to veggie cultivation. Food costs, the federal stats tell us, were down to less than half of median family income, and the new suburbanites were well above median in that respect. But, SPIN was in the near future: it arrived, under “War Garden” nomenclature, with the onset of World War I.

After Armistice Day, author Charles Pack wrote a glowing 1919 retrospective, “The War Garden Victorious.” And, indeed, WWI SPIN gardens were successful, driven by both the wartime upsurge in farmgate and therefore retail food prices; by government initiatives such as the Victoria, B.C., commandeering of all empty city lots, no reimbursement to owners, for tenement-dweller gardens; by patriotic motivations; and by the first stirrings of an urbanite back to-the-earth movement, not economically tangible, but expressing itself in such ways as the Craftsman style in mostly suburban bungalow architecture, a burgeoning environmental movement, and an urbanite generation nostalgically recalling selectively the best parts of increasingly distant farm family origins. Urban and suburban gardens lost their temporary attractiveness as post-WWI food prices fell during the 20s and most of the Great Depression ’30s. By 1934-1936, the fed bean-counters tell us, approaching the onset of WWII, food prices were down to a third ($508 out of $1,518) of the average family budget, and accounts of the Depression are more focused on stories of evicted urbanites going back to the family farm than on any predecessor of urban or suburban SPIN farming. Then came the Greer incident (the WWII equivalent of the Vietnam War Gulf of Tonkin incident); Pearl Harbor; food aid to Britain; mobilization; and higher domestic food prices bringing on rationing. Out of all this came the WWII equivalent of WWI War Gardens, Victory Gardens. These, too, went mostly fallow when combat ended.

Then the flight to the suburbs started, in dimensions that swiftly hollowed out the central cities. The “End of Urbanism” shows a chart delineating the New Haven white population shrinking from 160,000 in 1950 to 60,000 in 2000, about where it was in 1880. The flight to the suburbs reduced the city from 80 percent of the region’s population in mid-20th century back to its early 19th century 30 percent. Just as the new residents had when the city was eight squares of very large lot housing, the new suburbanites also had increasingly larger lots, rising remarkably from a 1/8-acre average in the immediate postwar years, matching the national trend wherein “by some estimates, over half of the land used for residential purposes in the U.S. between 1970 and 2000 was in lots over 10 acres, and over 90 percent was in lots of 1 acre and over,” Robert Bruegmann writes in “Sprawl.” His historical review confirms, for example, the 10-acre Vermont parcels commonly ascribed to the state’s Act 250 land-use legislation, but more accurately a derivative of earlier Health Department on-site sewage regulations. Anti-sprawl activists have been railing against the so-called “10-acre loophole” since the early ’70s, and recently ended it, but now it turns out that it’s a neat fit with SPIN farming on a larger scale than front-lawn veggie growing. With twice the acreage recommended in the famous “Five Acres and Independence,” a 10-acre parcel enables some serious crop growth, livestock management, maybe aquaculture, even a self-sustaining woodlot. It’s ironic that anti-sprawl folks are typically also grow-your-own folks, as contradictory as those two objectives now turn out to be, and it will be fun to watch them try to resolve the cognitive dissonance. Until recently, almost all such suburban lots, whether a fraction of an acre or larger, were typically used for building footprint, lawns and trees, maybe with flower gardens, but not much veggie growth. SPIN is changing that practice, as changing suburbanite perceptions now recognize both a socially approved (although economically questionable) food cost angst and neighborly approval of grow-it-yourself. After a century of what Raes admiringly calls “urbanism”—high-density, in-city housing, citizens walking to work, and stores, with little 1,200-square-foot A&P (nonperishable items only) food stores every few blocks, and mixed-socioeconomic-status neighborhood citizens constituting his “sidewalk republic”—Americans have pretty much jettisoned that model and have begun moving to a more preindustrial model, as typified by SPIN farming. Ol’ TJ would surely claim ultimate vindication and validation.

The author is an architect and former farmer.