The Inner Monologue

There’s a fashionable opinion making the rounds these days. You’ve probably heard it at dinner parties, town meetings, or slipped into editorials dressed up in concern for “our rural heritage.” It goes something like this: “We need to protect farmland from being lost to housing, corporate farms, or distribution centers.” At first glance, it sounds noble—who wouldn’t want rolling fields of amber grain instead of cookie-cutter subdivisions or warehouse sprawl?

But peel back the sentiment and you find a troubling premise: that farmers, the very people who have risked their lives and fortunes to work that land, should not be free to decide what happens to it. They should not sell to the highest bidder. They should not retire on their own terms. They should not choose their own financial destiny. Instead, their future should be dictated by outsiders who bear no risk, no debt, no sleepless nights praying for rain.

The Myth of “Our” Farmland

Critics love to speak in collective terms: “We’re losing farmland.” “We must protect our agricultural heritage.” But notice what’s happening here. A farmer’s private property—land he or she pays taxes on, maintains, improves, and shoulders liability for—has been linguistically transformed into public property through the magic of rhetoric. Suddenly, it is not their land. It is our land.

But where was this collective ownership when the farmer spent thirty years hauling feed, fixing tractors, and taking out loans at 7% interest to buy seed? Where was this collective ownership when milk prices collapsed, when drought wiped out half the corn crop, or when Washington changed subsidy rules mid-harvest?

There is no “we” when the burdens are borne. But when it comes time to sell, suddenly everyone wants a seat at the table.

The Hypocrisy of the Settled Suburbanite

Here’s the most delicious irony: many of the people most vocal about “preserving farmland” are living in subdivisions built on what? Former farmland. Their three-car garages, their cul-de-sacs, their vinyl-sided two-stories with Home Depot pergolas—they all sit on once-productive fields. Their children play soccer on what was once pasture. Their favorite coffee shop, farmers’ market, or organic grocery? Built on somebody else’s sold-off acreage.

In other words, they already benefited from the exact thing they now condemn. They are not against farms becoming houses—they are against other people’s farms becoming houses. Once they’ve secured their little slice of former farmland, they’d like the drawbridge pulled up. And farmers still working the soil? They must become unpaid actors in someone else’s pastoral fantasy.

Ownership Without Control Is Not Ownership

This is the heart of the matter. If a farmer cannot sell his land to whom he chooses, if he must submit every financial decision to the court of public opinion, then what does “ownership” even mean? It’s a sham. A trap. An illusion of independence masking a reality of servitude.

Farmers would be reduced to caretakers of the landscape for the benefit of onlookers, locked into uneconomic uses of land because it pleases the aesthetic tastes of people who prefer driving past cornfields to strip malls. That’s not freedom—that’s feudalism.

The Convenient Morality of Cheap Food

Make no mistake: those crying the loudest for farmland preservation are often the same who demand cheap groceries, year-round produce, and endless variety. They like the idea of farms, but not the costs. They want “family farming” without farm prices. They romanticize red barns and silos, but only when viewed from the highway on the way to Target.

And let’s talk about corporate farming for a moment. Many people sneer at it, yet they stock their kitchens with foods only possible through economies of scale. Who will grow the wheat, soy, and corn that sustain billions if not larger, consolidated operations? Are these critics volunteering to pay triple for milk so that one more small dairy can cling to life? Unlikely. They want the fantasy of 1950s farming, subsidized by the modern farmer’s financial sacrifice.

The Real Choice: Buy It Yourself

Here’s a radical suggestion: if you truly care about farmland staying farmland, put your money where your mouth is. Buy it. Form a land trust. Write the check. Farmers don’t owe you a museum exhibit of amber waves of grain to admire as you drive by. If you want the land to stay a farm, you must shoulder the burden of ownership yourself.

Anything less is just cheap talk at someone else’s expense.

Conclusion: The Farmer Owes You Nothing

The truth is blunt but necessary: farmers are not stewards of your nostalgia. They are not unpaid landscapers hired to preserve your view from the interstate. They are entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and property owners who, like anyone else, have the right to sell what they own for the best price they can get.

If that means their land becomes a subdivision, a warehouse, or a solar farm, so be it. You don’t have to like it. But unless you’re willing to buy the land yourself, your opinion should be worth exactly what you’ve invested in their lives: nothing.