the $40,000 tractor didn’t pay for themselves on the 100-acre farm. And for many years, small equipment didn’t pay either, as land prices rose and crop prices fell. Equally romantic now may be the large farm, or, at the very least, starting a large farm and having it serve its debt or give even a moderate return on equity. But whether a farm is large or small, the means to make it pay for itself are the same. The farm must produce more income relative to expenses. Since U.S. farms, in general, have pushed yields to the upper limits of the soil’s capacity, the answer must involve lower costs. And the way one lowers the cost of fertilizers, equipment, fuel, pesticides, and herbicides is to use less or to use none at all. So-called biological farming techniques, once considered frivolous or idealistic, were recommended for serious consideration by Bob Bergland, Secretary of Agriculture during the Carter administration. Bergland said that organic farming could rebuild soil fertility while lowering the costs of production. The way to farm with a minimum of fossil fuels and chemicals is to farm more intelligently: to know the land, the crops, the pests, and the cycles, and to develop a farming technique that uses nature instead of fighting it. That kind of knowledge cannot be applied mechanically; it must be derived from experience. As long as farmers could replace labor with machinery and fertility with fertilizers, the green revolution could proceed apace. Farming could make the huge productivity gains it has during the past fifty years. With the peaking of the mass economy, much of what the farmer learned is no longer useful in adapting to a time of rising resource prices. The knowledge that is required now is not how to wring more out of the soil but how to obtain suitable yields with less. If you are using pesticides, you want to know what will kill aphids or whiteflies. If you wish to eliminate pesticide expense, you have to know how to attract ladybugs. Learning to use fewer resources per acre will require large farms either to add more trained personnel or to begin a gradual reduction in farm size in order to be worked intelligently. Farmswill slowly become smaller because it will be easier for a smaller farmer to make money than a giant farmer. And as this happens, a vast new field of agricultural technology will open up. In countries where geography or demographics prohibit large holdings, there is already a demand for such technology. In the United States, the need for downsized machinery will be slow in building, since land ownership patterns can only change gradually over decades. Nevertheless, American companies are feeling the impact of this changing demand, particularly in their export sales. While International Harvester staggers toward a possible bankruptcy, Kubota has aggressively pursued the small and intermediate-size tractor business, a market American manufacturers largely ignored while concentrating on air-conditioned, cab-over rigs equipped with televisions, lasers, and telephones. The conclusion that small farms work better than large farms has recently been confirmed by the Department of Agriculture. In a 1981 study, it found that in the Corn Belt the most efficient farms were those of 640 acres, but that over 90 percent efficiency could be attained by farms of 300 acres. On wheat farms, the most efficient were found to be ones with 1,476 acres, but, again, 90 percent efficiency could be accomplished on 232- acre farms. By contrast, in some developing countries, the most efficient farms have between 2 and 5 acres. In both cases, the most efficient farm size is one that can be worked by a family that owns its land, or at least receives the fruits of its work and production. Whereas the U.S. farmer can afford the machinery to work 640 acres, the farmer in India must cultivate largely by hand. Each case reflects a different ratio of mass to information, but a proper one for the land and economy in question. T1 here is also a social ecology to adhere to in an informative economy. This is the way people relate to their greater environment, what philosopher James Ogilvy refers to as our ‘neo-nature,’ the human-made environment around us comprised of cities, institutions, employers, neighborhoods, and laws. Our relationship to that environment must also change. For example, as the economy begins to contract, there already has been a marked change in the relationship between unions and business. During the expansionary stages of the mass economy, growth required a ‘who gets what?’ bargaining strategy. Unions and big business were fighting over the spoils by using each other’s withdrawal from participation—strikes or lockouts— as bargaining chips. Now that real contraction has set in, both business and unions recognize that their survival depends on the other. Recent union settlements, for the most part, have been characterized by a ‘who gives what?’ approach, whereby each side is making concessions to the other in order to get what both need: jobs, profits, and survival. For example, Uniroyal has created a council composed of workers and management that will engage in an ongoing discussion of the company's finances, marketing, and corporate planning. Unions also have been granted the right to make presentations to Uniroyal’s board of directors, in return for which they gave up cost-of-living allowances for three years, which would have increased salaries by $25 million. Timken, the ball-bearing manufacturer, has agreed not to relocate to a new plant in the Sun Belt, in exchange for an eleven-year-no-strike clause in the new union contract. Colt Industries, McLouth Steel, Pan American Airways, Continental Airlines, United Airlines, and Western Airlines have agreed to open their books to unions in return for pay freezes or cuts. To cope with rapid economic change and the need for workers and management alike to keep abreast of new developments, Japanese management rotates employees through different jobs, avoiding the overspecialization so common to U.S. business. The advantages of rotating personnel through a corporation are threefold: first, a worker does not solely identify with one part of the company but sees himself or herself as part of an integrated whole; second, crossfertilization of staff develops better channels of communication among departments, eliminating battles over turf; third, people who feel they can move through and about an organization will be more likely to stay with that company, which eliminates costly turnover while building employee experience, flexibility, and loyalty. Rotating people so that they accumulate generalist skills provides them with a sense of learning and development and maintains for them an atmosphere of being in an information-rich environment where one is constantly challenged by new ideas. For an informative economy to succeed, we must inform each other about what we do and how we work. In a booming and expansive economy, there may be complex interrelationships between individuals as entities in an economy, but there is no real dependence because economic growth provides an abundance of new wealth. When an economy stabilizes or contracts, our individual condition and standard of living come to rely much more heavily on the actions and decisions of others. This is the kind of behavior seen in a flood or natural disaster: hardship brings all together under a common purpose that supersedes the petty differences that may have formerly existed. We are not undergoing economic disaster, but instead are experiencing a slow but inexorable change in our national wealth, a shift from mass to information. To be informed is to learn. It is no accident that the world’s leading technology company, IBM, spends $500 million per year in training, educating, and reeducating its employees. In the informative economy, learning will be essential for all healthy economic activity. This learning results from paying attention to the feedback provided by the environment to the economy. By ignoring it, we risk a bust, both personally and nationally. By paying attention, we can adapt. Writer Paul Hawken lives in New York City. This article is from Sustainable Communities, published by Sierra Club Books, 730 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109. Copyright 1986 by Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe. Reprinted with permission. Artist Bruce McGillivray lives in Portland. Spanish Tapas Bar Friday 4 pm - 7 pm Little dishes of savory seafood, pastries, marinated and roasted et cetera Portland's Best Take-away Foods Salad/* Entrees • Pastries Intelligent Wine Selection Open Seven Days A Week 9 am - I I pm Thursday-Saturday IO am - 5 pm Sunday • 9 am - 7 pm Monday-Wednesday Everett Street Market *2310 NW Everett, Portland • 223-2 121 advertise in the Clinton St "Quite simply, the Best." Oregon Magazine, Dec. 1984 "Selected the Best Seafood Restaurant on the Oregon Coast." N. W. Best Places, 1986 Edition 1287 S. Hemlock Cannon Beach, OR 436-1179 Dinners Nightly from 5:30 pm Closed Mondays Clinton St. Quarterly 39
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