Newspapers seem to be telling us that every cornfield is threatened by a Dairy Queen. This media barrage about the crisis of our “shrinking” farmland can be traced to the 1979 publication of Where Have All the Farmlands Gone? by the National Agricultural Lands Study. The NALS report, to which eleven federal agencies contributed, argued that land-use planning and control must be employed to protect valuable farmland from “urban sprawl.” This volume, a collection of essays by a distinguished group of economists including Theodore W. Schultz, Julian L. Simon, and Pierre Crosson, takes issue with the belief that croplands need governmental protection. In opposition the collection as a whole supports two theses: 1) shrinking farm acreage is not a serious problem, and 2) individual choices by landowners in a market setting result in better-organized land use than would governmental land-use planning and regulation. Published for the Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, Montana

Tim Lehman examines the political battles over public policies to protect farmland from urban sprawl. His detailed account clarifies three larger themes: the ongoing struggle over land use planning in this country, the emerging environmental critique of m