Rural America dying

[ringmastery]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/01/national/01RURA.html?hp

From the Dakotas to the Texas Panhandle, the rural Great Plains has been losing people for 70 years, a slow demographic collapse. Without even the level of farmers and merchants that used to give these areas their pulse, many counties are also losing their very reason to exist, falling behind the rest of the nation in nearly every category as they desperately try to reinvent themselves.

--

Two forces common to rural America have transformed Superior.

One is the collapse of the family farm and the subsequent rise of agribusiness. A hundred years ago, more than 30 percent of American workers earned their income from a farm. Now it is a little more than 1 percent. The big farms are getting richer, fattened by federal subsidies, and the small farms are disappearing.

The United States grows more food now than it did 50 years ago, on about 25 percent less acreage, and with a fraction of the workers it once used.

The other force is the Wal-Mart effect. The day a Wal-Mart comes into a midsize town, Mr. Blauvelt said, the town newspaper loses about 40 percent of its advertising revenue. But at least the paper has a fighting chance to stay in business. For local stores, it is no contest.

[Bombtrack]

1. you should check out Edwards rural program platform

I really am confident in his ability to put rural america on the progressive path to success.

[JailBush]

2. What's "the progressive path to success"?

Many rural communities are terminally ill; there IS no progressive path to success.

[tkmorris]

3. Hmm. It's late

and as usual when it's late, I'm a tad slow. I agree with you I think though.

What makes a rural community work economically? Farming. Specifically family owned and operated ones. That is no longer practical. It isn't clear to me how family farms could ever again be a workable concern in the United States. Someone above laid out the problem: huge agricorps are churning out more food from less acreage with fewer workers than any family farm ever could.

So how does a rural community survive these days? I honestly have no idea. I have little experience with the midwest, but rural areas in the east these days are made up largely of people who either brought money into the area when they came or of people who like the lifestyle enough to commute large distances to the more industrial urban areas to work. Such people obviously cannot save most communities in the larger expanses further west.

[JailBush]

4. I'm from rural South Dakota, and one day I read an article that was so

common sensical, I don't know why I didn't think of it. The author said farming communities were originally organized to serve farms. Thus, farmers tried to live within horse and wagon range of a community.

But automobiles and paved roads mean people can now drive to Sioux Falls or Rapid City and do enough shopping to last a week or two. In fact, that's exactly what my relatives do.

When I was a kid, my relatives' farms were spaced a mile or more apart from their neighbors, but there was a thriving community. There were 4H clubs, church and rodeos. One day after I left, I visited the farm, and it was like a ghost town. I hiked for several miles across the prairies and drove for many miles along country roads and never saw another human being. It was eerie - and this was more than five years ago.

I now have just one uncle who's still farming, and he's in his 70's. The tragedy is that an unbelievable lifestyle is disappearing. Living in the middle of nowhere and working your butt off is obviously hard, but there are some fabulous rewards, too.

[Kinkistyle]

5. Internet solves half of the downside of agricultural life

I've always wanted to live a rural, countryside life, but the distance from the rest of "society" so-to-speak, is kind of a turn-off. Having high-speed broadband would solve many of those problems. Farm-work in the daytime, some surfing, e-mailing, internet shopping in the evening -- great life.

[spinbaby]

6. A quibble

"huge agricorps are churning out more food from less acreage with fewer workers than any family farm ever could."

Agribusiness tends not to have very high yields per acre--they just have more acreage. The most efficient land use, in fact, comes with small labor-intensive agriculture.

Part of the downfall of the family farmer has been because they were encouraged to take out large loans to buy spiffy new machinery and chemicals to compete with agribusiness, which they can't do because they're family farms.

Another part of the downfall of the family farmer has been government programs that work better for agribusiness than they do for the family farm.

There are still profitable family farms but damned few of them. Most farmers I know have job on the side.

[izzie]

7. It is also lack of jobs and education.

Maine has the most people getting out of high school but is lower in College people. If you took the two Southern counties in state that would be like any other NE state but it is the Northern part. People leave as their are no jobs.So as they get out of college, if they go, they leave for the 2Southern counties or out of state.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

10. Specialty farms

organic farms, etc, can be a saving grace for small family farms. Several farmers whose acreage lies near urban areas even rent out the "farm experience", a sort of glorified b&b.

There can also be tax incentives put into place so that small manufacturing businesses, etc, can take hold in agricultural regions. The fact that the Amish have, in many areas, successfully gone from agriculture to cabinetry, shows that this model can work.

[SpiralHawk]

11. One part of the solution to the farm crisis

is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). It's not the whole solution, but it is part.

http://www.chiron-communications.com/farms-1.html


"Much is at stake, and we are the keepers of the Earth."
- Lincoln Geiger, farmer

[Oberst Klink]

9. It's "Progressive Farming" that killed the family farms

"Progressive Farming" is where you farm for a profit, not for subsistance and selling your excess.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

8. We need a president who supports small towns

and small businesses. They are the backbone of this country. We must stop agricultural subsidies that only help agrabusiness. We must encourage small business start-ups. And people need to get up and protest when Mal-Wart tries to come into their county (we did here in Newton County, and it's in AR!).

[RandomUser]

13. The Wal-Mart effect is very real

And I applaud your county for being wise enough to stop them from entering.

I think agricultural subsidies to not just big corporations but small family farms are not the answer. But encouraging small business startups and diversification of a town's economy is a very wise course.

[RandomUser]

12. It's a complicated issue

On the one hand, it's true that huge agrifarms have economy of scale and efficiency, combined with new technologies that produce more with less and less land. That means there's a systemic structure that marginalizes rural family farms. With increasing technology, this pressure will only increase. Subsidizing it would only be a small stopgag measure, that doesn't address this systemic structure, and may result in skewing the economics in an unfavorable longterm manner.

Rural family farms, as they exist right now, will continue to be marginalized. And I'm not sure this is a bad thing, since propping them up with subsidies is not a longterm answer. The key is to change the systemic structure.

Family farms need to change to a more flexible, niche-oriented purpose. For example, they can fill market niches that huge agri-farms might not be able to -- such as organic foods. In addition, if they're flexibly tailored, they can capitalize on trends and fads. For example, wholemilk cheese was a fad for a while, and some farms capitialized on it in time. Small flexible family farms are more adroit, if tailored and with an eye to exploiting fads, than large agri-farms that refocuse more sluggishly, too late to take advantage of fads.

On the systemic side, new technologies can also create jobs as well as take them away. So scientific investments will pay dividends, creating jobs that can absorb any job losses created by agri-farm consolidations.

[Oberst Klink]

15. prices have to rise

to the point that it's not worth the trouble for agri business to risk their capital on.

One way to do this is to ban imigrant labor (both legal and illegal).

For a family farm to make it, you will need to pay $7 a gal for milk, for instance.

Canada has a guild system where you have to pay the guild or 'buy' the right to farm. There are corm guilds, onion guilds, milk guilds, etc. The guild controls the number of farmers and thus the price. If you want to expand your farm, you have to purchase your expansion from another farmer or appeal to the guild.

This keeps the prices up and the farmers in the black (generally).

Of course, this flys in the face of freedom. If you wanted to grow food, you should not be restriced by law.

[SpaceCatMeetsMars]

17. Nutrition and health care factor into this as well

We are developing two classes of people. Well-off people who can eat whole foods lower on the food chain and stay in better health and poorer people who eat the highly processed foods, gain excess weight and will end up costing a lot of money in future health care.

There is an article in Harpers about a guy in Vermont who opened a reasonably-priced diner that serves food made locally. The guy wants to expand as a chain. It's a great idea.

[loudnclear]

14. Good! Maybe the Native Americans can get their land back.

I'm in a bad mood this morning!

[enough]

16. The Land Institute

I hope everyone will read about and support the work of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

http://www.landinstitute.org/

I don't have time to say much about it this morning, but they are a group of very smart and serious people who have been working for a long time on how to transform the nature of agriculture.

They combine scientific research with lifetimes of experience as working farmers, focusing on moving from annual field crops to a perennial crop mix that resembles the natural mix of plants that once made up the prairie.

From the mission statement:

When people, land, and community are as one,
all three members prosper;
when they relate not as members
but as competing interests,
all three are exploited.
By consulting Nature as the source
and measure of that membership,
The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture
that will save soil from being lost or poisoned
while promoting a community life at once
prosperous and enduring.

This may sound impossibly idealistic, but these folks are firmly rooted in physical and political reality, as well as sustained scientific research. Definitely worth a close look if you are interested in rural issues, agriculture and the environment.

[DUreader]

19. Thanks, saving it for later perusal

[wuushew]

18. I have no sympathy for red states

the fewer electoral votes the better. On balance the gains made to prevent American imperialism trump nostalga for farm life.

[SoCalDem]

20. ...and yet they still have TWO senators, just like CA & NY

That's the shame.. Their congressional representation will fluctuate with the losses, but the fact that a state that has fewer people than most large cities has the same representation on critical issues that affect ALL of us, really irritates me..

Four or Five sparsely populated states select the president, and that's not fair..

There is no way on earth that the revenues generated from those states, compared to the aid they receive from the federal govenrment, balances out..

I am all for helping poorer states, but the fact that they actually weild MORE power than they deserve, is disconcerting, to say the least..