Agriculture -
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our forests today-and forestry is
within the U.S. Department of
Agriculture - it could be logically
argued that forestry and related
industries, such as paper, are
part of agriculture.
In addition, a substantial
portion of the region’s
manufacturing jobs in chemicals
(1,100 jobs), machinery (6,400
jobs), electrical equipment and
supplies (3,200 jobs), and
trasportation equipment (3,400
jobs, exclusive of aircraft and
ships) exist because of the money
Washington’s farmers spend for
these products to operate their
farms.
In the non-manufacturing
realm, the Seattle-Everett area
has 26,400 transportation jobs,
12,700 communications and
utilities jobs, and 35,100 finance,
insurance, and real estate jobs.
Agriculture accounts for an
apparently unknown portion of
each of them. The impact should
be especially great in tran
sportation.
Agriculture also is responsible
for a portion of the 78,700 “ser
vices” jobs and of the 43,600
“other government” jobs outside
of education. A number of state
and federal Department of
Agriculture jobs are located in
Seattle.
Much of agriculture’s role in
creating these jobs is conjecture;
but the guesses are necessitated
by the apparent lack of hard
information about not only
agriculture, but the nature of
Seattle’s and the state’s
economic base. In the absence of
facts, it would appear that there
is more than adequate substance
to justify - if not demand - greater
interest on the part of Seattle’s
newspapers in what is tran
spiring in agriculture.
Having examined the bread
and-butter reason why
metropolitan newspapers should
re-evaluate their treatment of
agriculturally-related news, let’s
briefly examine two other im
portant reasons
THE PUBLIC NEED
With farm population shrunken
to less than five percent of the
nation’s population and the one
man, one-vote rule of the U.S.
Supreme Court, the emaciated
farm bloc is a feeble vestige of
the power it once was. And it
appears destined for still further
enfeeblement unless coalitions
are developed between farm and
agribusiness-oriented
congressmen.
Agricultural leaders now
recognize, and admonish far
mers, that farm policy will be
made increasingly by urban
dominated legislators with little
understanding of the unique
problems of agriculture.
If agriculture is unable to get
its side of the story across to the
man in the city - and that effort is
certainly severely handicapped
by the absence of farm editors on
metropolitan newspapers and by
the general disinterest of city
I
editors in “farm ” news - the
urban man very well may
awaken some morning to find
food prices really high, and a
scarcity of many of the com
modities which he now takes for
granted
This is a real danger and could
come about through restrictive
legislation (on the ecological
front, for instance) or the lack of
legislation (such as failure to
appropriate sufficient research
funds to enable agriculture to
cope with diseases and changing
technology).
Agricultural leaders, and their
few city friends who are attuned
to their problems, are becoming
increasingly concerned over the
difficulty - if not impossibility - of
presenting the case for
agriculture in the cities
Perhaps a classical example of
the need for urban knowledge of
agriculture lies in the
Agribusiness Accountability
Project’s book-length report,
“Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times,’’
released just this month in
Washington, D.C It takes the
nation’s land grant colleges and
the US. Department of
Agriculture to task for the trust
of agricultural research. Without
criticizing or defending the
report, which admits its bias, it
should be pointed out that it
proclaims: “It is the objective of
the Task Force to provoke a
public response that will help
realign the land grant complex
with the public interest.”
The Agribusiness Ac
countability Project is taking its
Lancaster Farming, Saturday. February 24.1973
case to the urban masses,
knowing that an urban press will
give abundant attention to its
“expose.” But will the urban
newspaper have people on their
staffs who have the perspective
to ask searching questions of the
Agribusiness Accountability
Project, or will even have the
interest to inquire intelligently
into the other side of the story 9 In
other words, will the issue
receive a fair hearing 9 Or will
public sentiment be stampeded to
the support of legislation which
could be contrary to the public
interest 9
A QUESTION OF INTEREST
And finally, Seattle readers
(and urban readers all over
America) are interested in farms
and farm people They will read
avidly about agriculture if -IF -
articles and features about
agriculture are written for
THEM. Of course they aren’t
interested in reading something
written for farmers, stories
which require a farmer’s
knowledge to comprehend. This
is where so many newspapers
have taken a wrong turn When
rural circulation declined and
news executives could no longer
justify a farm editor to write for
farmers, they plowed under their
farm beats.
Interestingly, editors don’t
expect an aerospace editor to wr
ite for Boeing or NASA em
ployees They don’t have an
antique automobile editor
because great numbers of their
readers restore, or own, antique
vehicles. They don’t ask the
science writer to write for
scientist subscribers, nor
education writers to aim their
features and articles at
educators All of these and the
many other specialists on
metropolitan newspaper staffs
write about these fields for that
mythical “average” reader who
they know will be engrossed with
well-presented material on the
subject
Theoretically, there is a larger
community of interest in
anculture because every sub
scriber eats and wears clothes.
Not every reader has children in
school, or gives a tinker’s verb
about the machinations of
politicians At a superficial
glance one may conclude that
the food editor fulfills the
reader’s interest in his food, but a
more careful examination
reveals that food editors as we
know them today don’t begin to
fill the vacuum between the
consumer and the farms without
which few could live for more
than two weeks
In summary, there is a void in
many metropolitan newspapers
today, a chasm which left un
bridged could contribute to
serious problems for society. A
reassessment of the importance
of agricultural news to urban
residents would appear to be not
only warranted on the basis of
reader interest, but demanded by
urban welfare.
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