Agricultural Change at the Rural-Urban Interface:
Growth, Decline and Stability
An initial reaction upon observing the replacement of a farm field with a
residential subdivision or a commercial strip mall may be sadness, followed by
resignation that eventually all farmland within the sphere of influence of larger, urban
population centers will eventually succumb to the steady, outward spread of the city.
Such resignation among agriculturalists has actually been labeled the impermanence
syndrome (Berry, 1978). A potential outcome of the impermanence syndrome, when a
farmer comes to believe there is little future for local farming and begins to make
management decisions consistent with this view, is that the productive capacity of the
farm is reduced to the point where converting farmland to nonagricultural purposes is
necessitated even if development was not inevitable. For example, the impermanence
syndrome anticipates that a farmer who perceives his/her land will likely be developed in
the next five to ten years, may chose to defer on capital investments or be less interested
in farming to maintain long-term soil quality.
A logical outcome of this perception of agricultural change and loss at the rural-
urban interface is a public debate about the future of agriculture at the RUI that is often
characterized by a sense of fatalism (Daniels, 1999). Citing declining farm numbers and
a weak national farm economy, anecdotal stories of local farmers going out of business,
and visual evidence of local nonfarm development on formerly agricultural lands, few
express much optimism in the future for viable farming operations in the RUI context
(Jackson-Smith 2000, 2002). However, while agricultural operations in these areas
certainly face great challenges from deteriorating macroeconomic conditions in farming
and local development pressures, official statistics suggest that agriculture as a whole
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Convention