Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

What About Desolation of Rural America?

It has become fashionable for big city publications to opine about how to fix rural America. Indeed, many of the pundit/columnists are retired from USDAs in past administrations and their solutions to devastation in the rural community are usually recycled from their own faulty policies. Occasionally, an op-ed writer falls on his sword and suggests corrections for what he did wrong.

The solutions remind me of pronouncements from the blind men examining an elephant. The guy at the trunk says the elephant’s a snake and the guy at the leg says it’s a tree. I don’t remember what the guy at the ear says but when the elephant sprays they all agree it’s a rain cloud come to Earth.

Rural America is a lot more complicated than an elephant, but nobody gets anywhere without understanding real life. Writers lump all rural folks together, big farms with small ones. North with south with east and west. They blame born-again churches and Fox News for rural anger. Here’s what the pundits need to understand:

1. Rural America is diverse. One ecosystem provides for raising wheat. Another provides for timber. In between, the plains and prairies muddle through with corn and beans, and a smattering of livestock, while USDA’s system of subsidies rewards those that holler the loudest. All of big-city wealth is shipped out from rural lands. We send food, timber and, increasingly, green energy from our communities to town.

2. All of today’s food, timber and even energy systems depend on subsidies. The biggest payments go to the farms with the best bookkeepers and relationship to the USDA office. Corn-and-bean commodity guys make enough to spend winters in Florida; their subsidized GMO products fatten subsidized hogs in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Other farmers squeak by.

3. “Get big or get out” hasn’t worked for rural folks. Earl Butz’s 1972 edict banished small farmers to urban places where they lived in their pickup trucks. Towns were abandoned and their antique fixtures sold for parts. My town friends tell me I don’t have any neighbors. I do, but they’re few and far between while in the old days there was a family on every 60 acres.

4. The lands our neighbors left became consolidated into mega-farms. Houses and barns were burned and plowed over. Fences disappeared as pastures became plowed land. This system hasn’t worked out well for the soil or the water and the degraded resources are now expensive to maintain, no longer assets.

5. As farms become bigger, equipment becomes massive. At a certain point, a farmer figures out he can do better by giving up his equipment and hiring custom crews to take care of the land. Custom crews start in Texas and work their way north to Canada. To prepare for them, the big guys kill their crops to dry it out for the harvest machines. That killing herbicide (glyphosate or 2-4D) can’t be washed off—it goes right into the food system.

6. Rural kids are gone. When farmsteads are abandoned, it means families have moved to town. Rural school systems are broken. Gathering places like general stores and community centers are gone. Things that define community, like public safety, medical help, roads and jobs are quickly endangered and disappear despite the courageous work of folks that want to save them.

And, here’s the piece the pundits REALLY miss:

7. The old-timey fire-and-brimstone churches are still here. When the school system in my neighborhood went to four days a week in 2021, churches stepped in with off-day programs. They provide meals, daycare, meeting places for clubs. Stores, schools, doctors may be endangered but rural churches, while struggling, are the last community vestiges hanging on even though churches, too, are in trouble.

Why do the crazy churches have so much power? It’s because every institution except the churches have abandoned rural America. Our folks are lonely, seeking company and, on Sundays, they go to church and think about the end times.

Now for the fix: A few courageous youngsters have returned to their rural homes or even come here from families that have been urban for generations. A few courageous immigrants have moved to our places with hope of building their own farms. These folks have no clue how hard it’s going to be but they’re building greenhouses, selling at farmers’ markets, creating entertainment and wedding venues, following the business plans of successes that worked in rich communities on the coasts.

We can keep those folks in our communities by extending a hand of friendship and by patronizing their fledgling businesses. USDA has started to step in with a few programs to help beginning farmers. If we want to re-build rural America, and please remember that it’s where America’s wealth begins, we need to support our local farms.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024

Populist.com