But like many other rural areas around the country, their town of Fremont does not have a bustling economy. Both a Kmart and another department store, Shopko, closed in Waupaca county this year, costing dozens of workers their jobs. Mary Rieckmann who will turn 80 in January, got a job delivering newspapers; the family also launched a GoFundMe account.
But after Mary crashed her car on a foggy night, her husband and sons convinced her to abandon her paper route. Heavy rain and unseasonable snow this year have also hurt many Midwestern farmers. Portions of Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota experienced record flooding this year, with the upper Mississippi River receiving percent more rain and snow than normal. Unusual rain and snow prevented farmers from planting on 19 million acres this year, the most since the USDA began measuring in Last year, by contrast, weather prevented planting on just 2 million acres.
One farmer called Rosmann to say he was considering suicide — floods destroyed the corn he had already harvested and stored in a grain elevator, but neither crop insurance nor flood insurance would cover it, since he had already harvested the crop. John Hanson, who runs an assistance hotline in Nebraska, says that this year he has gotten calls at midnight from desperate farmers, including one sitting in his kitchen with a loaded shotgun and the lights out.
Rural America has been shrinking for decades, and the Great Recession accelerated that contraction as rural manufacturing jobs disappeared and people moved to cities and suburbs seeking work. That is indeed where the jobs are. Between and , metropolitan areas that included central cities of at least 50, people accounted for 99 percent of all job and population growth, according to data crunched by David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University.
In the Midwest, 81 percent of rural counties saw population declines between and , and in the Northeast, 85 percent of rural counties shrank over that time period.
Kalbach, the Iowa corn and soybean farmer, says on the square mile of land where she lives, five farm different families used to grow corn, beans, hay, cattle, and pigs. Over the past 15 years, the other four families have given up and moved away. As farmers sold to bigger operations, the local businesses that were dependent on small farmers went belly-up, too. The place where the Kalbachs buy chemicals is now 75 miles away.
There is no longer a local place where she can get farm equipment repaired. So have the institutions that make a community. Around 4, schools in rural districts closed between and , the most recent year for which there is data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics; suburban districts, by contrast, added roughly 4, schools over that same time period.
Cochran is worried about the future of her rural Pennsylvania community as more farmers give up. Two neighbor farm auctions are scheduled soon. The dairy refrigeration supply business where she buys equipment is on the verge of collapse. Young people, seeing economic despair all around them, get out as quickly as they can. Americans are increasingly concentrating in a few metropolitan areas — by , 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states.
Most family farmers seem to agree on what led to their plight: government policy. The smart labels are meant to assuage fears consumers may have about where their food comes from.
They also target consumers who predominantly shop at local farmers' markets and want to make sure the food they pick up at the store doesn't carry a significant carbon footprint. A study by Bloomberg found that while US agricultural land takes up million acres - a fifth of the land in the 48 contiguous states - only For comparison, the same study found that urban areas made up only 3.
According to PBS NewsHour , rural areas have had some of the highest suicide rates of any geographic area in the United States, and suicide rates among farmers and agricultural workers actually outnumbered homicide rates between and While stigma around treatment and a lack of mental health professionals in the area doesn't exactly help, many have been able to find support on Twitter.
Mike Pearson, a farmer who uses the community, told PBS that the AgTwitter community lacks the "toxic negativity" of political Twitter and has been a source of both information and support. Sara Lepley. While there are more than 2 million farms across the US, farmers and ranchers make up just 1. Warren While farmland may stretch far and wide, farmers and ranchers themselves make up just 1.
Is it safe? Agricultural production in the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a smaller number of large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U. The following material provides an overview of these trends, as well as trends in farm sector and farm household incomes.
After peaking at 6. Rapidly falling farm numbers during the earlier period reflected growing productivity in agriculture and increased nonfarm employment opportunities.
Since then, the number of U. In the most recent survey, there were 2. With million acres of land in farms in , the average farm size was acres, only slightly greater than the acres recorded in the early s.
Technological developments in agriculture have been influential in driving changes in the farm sector. Innovations in animal and crop genetics, chemicals, equipment, and farm organization have enabled continuing output growth without adding much to inputs. As a result, even as the amount of land and labor used in farming declined, total farm output nearly tripled between and Gross cash farm income GCFI is annual income before expenses and includes cash receipts, farm-related income, and Government farm program payments.
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