Scouring the landscape in today’s high-income countries, we find automation success stories like the ones described earlier in this paper, as well as major challenges. There is a danger that automation will not happen quickly enough to enable farmers to maintain their competitiveness in a high wage, labor-scarce, world. Farmers can respond by shifting their production into less labor-intensive crops. However, more affluent consumers will demand fresh, locally-grown fruits and vegetables, as well as specific qualities like organics, environmentally friendly production practices, fair trade, and possibly better labor practices, all of which tend to increase labor demands compared to field crops where automation is more advanced. Prices of these fresh fruits and vegetables will rise, causing farmers to think twice about abandoning production as wages rise while intensifying pressure on public and private researchers and policy makers to accelerate the development of labor-saving technologies and deploy the necessary digital infrastructure to run it, including in remote rural areas. Policymakers will need to keep an eye out for undue concentration of power in the supply of these new technologies and devise adequate policies to ensure competition . Third, a technologically advanced AFS requires a technology-savvy workforce, with more engineers and people capable of working with increasingly complex technologies. As agricultural and food processing technologies become more IT intensive, so do human capital demands all along the AFS. To some extent, developments in IT can help respond to human capital shortages; viz. bar codes in supermarkets and hamburger buttons at fast-food restaurants.
Nevertheless,round pot the numbers of workers with little education who pick themselves a living wage will diminish. As new technologies become available for relatively easy-to mechanize crops and routine tasks, the farm workforce will move out of those crops and tasks into ones that have not yet been mechanized and are non-routine . A major policy challenge is to prepare the future farm workforce for technological change while also ensuring that employment opportunities expand as new technologies release workers from crop production. There is no magic bullet to guarantee that automation, human capital formation, and new job creation move apace. It is undeniable that the future holds far-reaching changes in mechanization and automation in developing and developed countries alike. Without it, agriculture and the AFS generally will not be able to keep up with rising food demands and a declining farm labor supply. Inevitably, many farms and farm workers will have difficulty adjusting. Some farms and farmers, particularly larger, wealthier and better educated ones, are in a far better position to experiment with and adopt new labor-saving technologies, including advanced robotics. And some farmers and farm workers, particularly older ones, will have a difficult time shifting to new commodities and tasks; the more technology-savvy farm workforce of the future is likely to be younger and better educated than current workers. Decoupling social insurance from employment, as proposed in Packard et al. , could be a worthwhile social insurance model to mitigate adverse consequences of this transition and avoid the introduction of ineffective agricultural and food policies.
The need for greater food system resilience, highlighted by the COVID-19 experience, would also be better served by food trade diversification instead of a reversal to protectionism and food self-sufficiency. Yet, without successful social insurance schemes to help mitigate the adjustment costs and rapid ramp up in agricultural education and extension, the ongoing evolution in the agricultural labor force is bound to raise inequality as well as anti-trade sentiment, including in agri-food. Many agriculture advocates support land-use laws that can strengthen the protection of rural lands. Their argument is that when farms and ranches are converted to housing, agricultural production declines, biodiversity suffers, energy use increases, and society suffers an aesthetic loss . There are a number of planning tools that have been adopted in California to protect farms and ranches. Many counties have adopted land use elements such as urban growth boundaries to contain development within an urban zoning scheme without threatening associated rural and natural areas . As a planning element, a UGB is one way to manage unplanned growth and urban sprawl that has historically encroached upon agricultural and rural lands . In addition, California passed the Williamson Act to discourage the conversion of agricultural land to other uses by reducing property taxes on qualifying land. The state reimburses local jurisdictions for a portion of the taxes that farmers and ranchers would otherwise have to pay . Farmers and ranchers enroll in Williamson Act contracts for a period of 10 years. The Williamson Act has been an important land management tool for close to half a century, and has successfully contributed to the conservation of agricultural lands, open spaces, and rural communities throughout the state . Research on public opinion regarding rural–urban issues generally falls into two groups.
The first group reviews support for agriculture in general, and finds broad support for farmers, farming, and what is described as an ‘‘agrarian belief system’’ . This agrarianism has several elements—the belief that agriculture is a basic occupation on which all other people depend, the belief that agrarian life is satisfying and good, the belief in the virtue and inner nobility of farmers or yeomen, and the importance of family farms . Scholars show widespread support for these ideas, but they have also found that living in a rural area, growing up or living on a farm, and having ties with farmers are associated with higher levels of support for agriculture . Visiting rural areas for recreation is also associated with support for farmers and farming . The second group of studies focuses on specific agricultural issues and policies, including public opinion studies on the impacts of farming on soil conservation and water quality, as well as policies designed to preserve farms . According to these studies, living in a rural area, growing up or living on a farm, and having social contact with farmers are associated with support for farmers and trust in their ability to farm in environmentally friendly ways. Curiously, what most of these studies do not consider is the effect of people’s environmentalism on their attitudes toward farming and urban development.SBC is an ideal area to study public opinion on conflicts over agricultural policies, land conservation, and urban development. Agriculture plays a major role in SBC in terms of resource use, employment and production. Figure 1 shows the agriculture and urban areas within SBC. According to a 2007 census of agriculture, 41% of all land in the county is used for agriculture . In 2010, SBC agricultural production was valued at $1.22 billion, which placed it 13th of 58 counties in California. California is the most productive agricultural state in the United States . In terms of economic value, fruits, vegetables and nuts dominated , with nursery products second , and livestock, poultry and their products accounting for less than 3% of the country’s agricultural production value . SBC’s population is primarily urban. The 2010 Census reported a total of 152,834 housing units in SBC, of which 93.9% were in urban areas , and 6.1% in rural areas . Growth is a perennial topic in SBC, putting pressure for conversion of farmland and natural areas bordering urban populations. Since the 1950s there has been a steady conversion of farmland,round plastic planter especially prime farmland, to non-agricultural uses, mostly urbanization . Between 1954 and 2010 the urbanized area in SBC grew 554% from 9,600 to 62,762 acres, while prime farmland decreased 20% from 83,600 to 66,568 acres, and total farmland decreased 12% from 801,689 to 706,934 acres. Disputes between environmentalists, farmers, and ranchers occur regularly in SBC . One reason is that most of the county is divided from west to east by the Santa Ynez Mountain Range, which separates the more agricultural north from the more urbanized south. This division accentuates major political battles over open space and natural areas preservation, as well as agricultural practices affecting water quality, air pollution, and biodiversity. Given the geographical disconnect in this county, people tend to assume that there are large differences in public opinion between the two areas.Based on our review of the literature and the situation in SBC, we propose two hypotheses: First, people with stronger environmental values are critical of many agricultural practices, but favor policies that prevent farms from being converted to housing. Second, people in southern SBC have stronger environmental values and less support for agriculture than people in northern SBC.
To test our hypotheses, we use the Central Coast Survey, which was administered by telephone by the Social Science Survey Center=Benton Survey Research Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, between January 11 and March 1, 2010. Details of the survey are in the survey report . Participants were selected with random digit dialing of landlines, and respondents were limited to those at least 18 years of age. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish. In total, 2508 households were contacted, and 804 interviews were completed, a cooperation rate of 32%. As is common with telephone surveys, our sample slightly over represents older respondents and women. To make the descriptive frequency distributions more representative of SBC, we used age–gender weight based on 2010 U.S. Census data . We did not use the weights for the logit models. The key independent variable in our analysis is the 15-item New Ecological Paradigm Scale . The scale was originally published by Dunlap and Van Liere , and was later revised as the New Ecological Paradigm Scale . The NEP was recently criticized by Amburgey and Thoman , who argue that the index has five dimensions that should be used separately in any analyses. We choose to use the single index, rather than the five subscales , because we need a single measure of environmentalism for our analysis. The distribution of respondents’ scores is shown in Figure 2. The scale ranges from 0 to 60 points, with higher scores indicating more pro-environmental views. In our survey, the NEP Scale had a Cronbach’s alpha of .83, indicating a high reliability. To assess the influence of people’s environmental values on their views of agricultural policy, we analyzed responses to seven survey questions, which are our dependent variables. The first questions address public policies— the Williamson Act, which provides property tax subsidies for farmers and ranchers to keep their land in agriculture; charging lower water rates for agricultural use than for residential use; requiring buffer zones around new residential developments that are adjacent to farmlands; and two alternatives for building housing to accommodate SBC’s growing population. The last question asks how people think farmers and ranchers treat our land, water, wildlife, and other natural resources. We describe these questions in detail in the following.A small plurality of respondents preferred low-density housing , followed by a preference not to build at all , with high-density housing least popular . There was a clear difference between North County and South County, with North County residents less supportive of high-density housing and more supportive of the ‘‘don’t build’’ option, while South County respondents were about evenly divided between these two options, with slightly more preferring high-density housing to not building at all. Latinos and lower income respondents were more supportive than other groups for building low-density housing in undeveloped open spaces, and were less supportive of high-density housing or not building. The second question presented residents with the same three hypothetical choices, with one important exception: The development would take place on agricultural land rather than undeveloped open space. ‘‘What if instead of building in undeveloped open spaces, the plans called for building housing on agricultural land currently being used for farming? In that case, which of these three plans would you most prefer?’’ A clear majority of respondents across all ethnic, income, and political categories in both North County and South County oppose this type of development , with a majority in each case supporting the ‘‘don’t build’’ option. This is consistent with the strong support for agriculture among our survey respondents. The dependent variables examining development preferences for both questions were three category unordered questions . We estimated multi-nomial logits for responses to these questions, again using the NEP and the agricultural experience variables as independent variables, and normalizing all coefficients with respect to the ‘‘don’t build’’ option.