Thoughts From Elsewhere
Stuff happens.
Not always in Vermont, or even the U.S., and not always with the traditional “local angle” that attracts the casual eye, but perhaps relevant to life here anyway. No state is an island, and the rest of the world affects us whether or not we realize it.
For instance, from the Rural Blog, which describes itself as “a digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism from and about rural America, from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky,” comes news that could provide some economic hope for the Vermont countryside.
Turns out that the sluggish economy could be good news for agritourism, which is the fancy term for paying to visit (and maybe even stay overnight at) a farm. Down South, at least, the tourist farms are busy.
“I think the main reason for the boom is the economy,” Blake Brown, an extension agricultural economist at North Carolina State University, told a reporter for the Southeast Farm Press. ” People are finding that visiting farms provides a relatively cheap excursion close to home.”
It isn’t that Vermont has to be introduced to agritourism. Though the term doesn’t seem to be used much in the state (the Department of Agriculture, Food and Markets web site just calls it “tourism”) it may have started here. The Department’s web site lists 50 farms that welcome tourists.
That’s a tiny percentage of the 6,984 farms in the state (from the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2007 Census), so if the demand for agritourism increases, Vermont obviously has enough potential supply to meet it.
But for some farmers, switching from food production to tourism is a difficult adjustment. The typical farmer thinks or him or her self as the producer of a necessity, not the provider of a recreational amenity. And as Barbara Berst Adams, author of The New Agritourism: Hosting Community and Tourists on Your Farm, wrote, farmers who invite paying guests onto their property take some risks.
It seems that one of the new fads in agritourism is getting married on the farm. The happy couple and/or their families sometimes pay handsomely for the privilege, but Adams warned that “crowds can sometimes surprise farmers new to agritourism. People need bathrooms, first-aid kits and a place for trash. City kids don’t seem to know the goats aren’t video games – they can bite back. And liability coverage for both the bride and groom and the farmer really are issues that need to have been dealt with ahead of time.”
But according to that story in the Southeast Farm Press, agritourism is “the one segment of agriculture that seems to be flourishing right now.” Probably even the most traditional farmer would rather make money than not.
Right now, the farmers most obviously not making money are the milk producers. Only about a thousand dairy farms are left in Vermont, but they still account the vast majority of the value ($493,926,000 of the $673,713,000 in that same 2007 census) of farm products sold in the state.
Right now, though, the price of milk is down and dairy farms are losing money. Besides, improper though it may be to say so aloud in these parts, Vermont is not really the best state for producing milk. Dairy production is far more efficient in the West and Southwest than in rocky, hilly, cold Vermont. The real question is probably not whether dairy farming will survive, but what will replace it: other farms or commercial/residential development?
Maybe farms. That 2007 census actually showed an increase of 413 farms from the previous census in 2002. Most of these new farms were quite small, and few of them were dairy farms. Increasingly, Vermont farmers are growing fruits and vegetables, raising beef cattle, llamas, vicunas, yaks. And perhaps opening their farms to paying guests.
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From the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development comes a survey showing that the happiest people in the world live in Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. They were the top three in “life satisfaction,” which seems to be OECD jargon for “happiness.”
The U.S. placed 11th, also behind Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Norway.
What’s their secret up there in northern Europe? Well, all of the top three countries are prosperous, offering their citizens ample opportunity to live comfortably and even opulently. But as Thomas Kostigen pointed out in his column in MarketWatch (a decidedly pro-business web site), the happy citizens of all three countries have something else in common: They are heavily taxed. Like their northern European neighbors, the Danes, the Finns, and the Dutch pay some of the highest taxes in the world. The Danes actually pay almost two-thirds of their income in taxes.
And they’re happy?
Apparently so.
And who among us will have the temerity so to inform Gov. Jim Douglas and his associates who think “tax” is a four-letter word?
Now, before anyone concludes that the path to happiness in America requires following this particular Nordic policy, a few caveats are in order, (starting with the acknowledgment that Holland is not really Nordic). First of all, surveys about relatively imprecise qualities such as “happiness” should be greeted with some skepticism. Asking someone whether she or he is happy is not like asking whether he or she is going to vote for Smith or Jones. The question is open to interpretation; the answer is subjective and debatable.
Besides, cultures are different, and what makes one people happy in one place would not necessarily make another people happy someplace else. Americans tend to be more aggressive, more mobile, less community-oriented and more ornery, perhaps more curious, and almost surely more materialistic than Europeans, especially the northern Europeans. Many Americans, it seems, would not be content to live comfortably or even opulently. They want it all. Now. No doubt the same is true of some Finns. But not, it seems, as many.
(Although the U.S. is not the richest country, either, but 15th in per capita income according to the International Monetary Fund, behind many of the “happier” countries)
So what pleases the Helsinkians and the Copenhagenites (that’s their city skyline by night above) might not please as many Burlingtonians or Rutlanders (not to mention Dallasites).
But these caveats are cautions, not dismissals. There might well be valuable lessons in the high tax-high happiness relationship worth emulating, at least to some extent. The great enemy of happiness is stress. We have it more than they do, largely because our tax bills are lower. Americans stress comes from worrying about paying medical bills, saving for retirement, wondering about being able to afford to send the kids to college.
There are no such worries in northern Europe. Health care is free, higher education is free or very cheap, a decent retirement is assured. Public transportation is extensive and comfortable, so far fewer people have to drive themselves through city traffic every day to go to work (and those who choose to drive anyway have less traffic to bother them).
They pay for this, of course. Higher taxes leave them with less discretionary income. This doesn’t seem to prevent most of them from living in comfortable (if slightly smaller) houses with all the modern conveniences, and having all the latest electronic gizmos (they invented some of them). Maybe they don’t eat out as much (perhaps a small sacrifice; when did you last hear anyone rave about Finnish cuisine?).
And maybe – just maybe – the Finns, Danes, and Dutch are happier because they know that all their fellow-citizens live in reasonably stress-free comfort. It is possible, in other words, that simply living in an equitable society leads to happiness.
Is that a subversive thought?
Tags: agritourism, happiness
