In the Great American Desert
From The Economist print edition
The Senate debated a $171 billion farm bill this week. But are some rural parts of the country past help? Consider the view from the Great Plains
IN CAYUGA, North Dakota, Mark Saunders recently gave a party for a friend who used to be a farmer. Most of those who came were also ex-farmers, still living nearby only because they have found jobs at a local factory. The lands around Cayuga were once dotted with working farms. These kept the town going; but now Cayuga's main street is derelict, and the church holds services less than once a month. Ed Langeliers, the pastor, fears that, if the small towns go, no one will teach children moral values and the merits of hard work. He also worries that, as small farmers leave the land, larger corporate entities will take over.
His fears are echoed across a region that is reckoned to be dying. In 1930, there were roughly 575,000 farms on the Great Plains, an area that runs roughly from northern Texas to southern Canada, and from eastern Montana eastwards to Illinois (see map). The number dropped steadily over the years until in 1997, according to Myron Gutmann, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, there were only 231,000. But the number of farms bigger than 1,000 acres has increased from 45,000 in 1930 to more than 77,000 in 1997. Between 1930 and 1990, the rural population dropped from more than 4m to around 2.6m. The rural Great Plains have seen more people leaving than coming since the 1940s and, in some counties, even earlier. But the pace of depopulation has accelerated, and there is no agreement on what should be done.
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The plains are forbidding and mostly semi-arid lands, covered with short or tall grass and lacking both water and trees. The earliest European explorers did not touch them. Francisco Coronado, exploring in the 1540s, surveyed only a fraction of the plains before he retreated to the Rio Grande. Three centuries later, the area was still marked on maps as the Great American Desert. Yet in the 1860s pioneers decided in earnest to turn this near-desert into productive farmland. The government spurred them on, offering 160 acres to any family willing to farm there.
Heavy rains brought bounty in the 1870s, but by the 1890s dust storms and blizzards billowed over the plains. Many farmers left, and then returned. By 1930, 5.5m people lived on the Great Plains. Gradually, as farming was mechanised, their numbers fell. In 1930 it took one farmer up to 20 hours to produce 100 bushels (2.7 tonnes) of wheat, using the most advanced technology. By 1975 he could do the same work in a quarter of the time. Today it can be done even faster. With each technological breakthrough, fewer people have to live on the plains.
Lack of water is another factor. This is, after all, a desert. Much of the Great Plains, without ground water, relies heavily on the Ogallala aquifer, a vast underwater reservoir. The Ogallala is dropping quickly; between 1990 and 2000, the net depletion was about 3.62m acre-feet a year. In the 1980s, the federal government in effect ended its policy of underwriting huge dam and irrigation projects for the region's farms and towns.
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 Profit margins are good, but the community has gone |
Many of those who still live there have survived by buying up land from those who have left. Dale Reimers of Jamestown, North Dakota, remembers when farmers lined up to drop off their grain at the local elevator. The Reimers now own the elevator, the most recent addition to what has become a 20,000-acre farm, some 20 times the average size in North Dakota. They are doing well, but Mr Reimer still bemoans the loss of small towns. He would rather farm a quarter of his present land, and have more neighbours round him. Instead, he expects to see fewer and fewer. Profit margins are good, but the community has gone.
Over the past decade, 47 of North Dakota's 53 counties and 53 of Nebraska's 93 have seen their populations drop. "The demise of the small town", says Wes Jackson, president of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, "and the loss of the cultural capacity is replaced by an industrial mind that is at once simple and simplifying." Mr Jackson contends that with more farmers on the land, and with more small towns, more care should be taken that farming does not degrade the environment. In other words, Mr Jackson says, America needs a high "eyes-to-acre" ratio.
Mr Jackson's is just one of many arguments offered by those committed to staunching the loss of population on the plains. Although it may make economic sense to abandon a desert, many feel that America is losing a vital part of its character along the way. As farm towns continue to decline, there is a drive to transform America's agricultural policy into a scheme, more like Europe's, that would try to support rural life in general.
In 1996 the Republican-led Congress passed the Freedom to Farm Act. Among other things, the measure let farmers receive subsidies while planting whatever they wanted, rather than what the government told them to. In return, Congress mandated that the government would, over time, stop supporting America's farms. Commodity prices were good then, and federal payments were low enough to make the plan seem feasible.
But commodity prices plummeted, and five years later federal farm aid soared to $32 billion (bringing the total disbursements over the past 40 years to around $350 billion). Net farm income shows no signs of increasing without federal intervention. Government spending per head in the Great Plains is higher than anywhere else in the country (see map).
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Yet if such spending is meant to support rural areas as well as farmers, then the government has failed. In Minnesota's 7th congressional district alone, farmers received some $4 billion in direct government payments between 1985 and 2000. Some small farmers agree that federal payments have helped them stay on the land. But, even as subsidies have increased, farm employment in the 7th district declined by 30% between 1976 and 1998.
According to Ford Runge, a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota, "the public does not seem to be getting what they think they are getting." Roughly 20% of farmers, he estimates, are receiving some 80% of the federal subsidies. This 20% also happen to own the largest farms. They are using the federal subsidies mainly to remain viable, but also to bid land away from other farmers. The cap for federal subsidies is very high; so the larger farms get, the more subsidies they receive. As large farms bid up land prices, capital costs for smaller operations rise, and young people find it harder to buy land. In this way, say Mr Runge and others, the federal government, far from propping up small farming towns, is hastening their decline.
In the 1930s, when farm programmes began, they were seen as a vital part of America's "food security". The country is now, if anything, over-fed, but farmers still depend on taxpayers for about half their income. This week the Senate inched towards passing a farm bill that would cost $171 billion over the next ten years. This has to be reconciled with an earlier House bill that would cost $168 billion over the next ten years, before George Bush can sign it. The White House is grumpy about both, and foreigners view them as calamitous. The House bill focuses on higher fixed annual payments, the Senate's on higher support prices. But both will pump yet more government cash into the plains, with the lion's share going to big farmers.
Is there another approach? Ann Veneman, the agriculture secretary, has argued that subsidies should be spread more evenly to help smaller farmers, and should include more payments for conservation. Tom Harkin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate agriculture committee, has co-authored a measure called the Conservation Security Act, which could mark a shift towards propping up smaller operations. The bill, now embedded in the Senate legislation, would pay farmers up to $50,000 for managing their lands in ways that protect the environment. Chuck Hassebrook, director of the Centre for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, wants the government to set aside $500m in payments to promote ecological or co-operative farming, which might bring more farm jobs.
All these ideas go down badly with owners of larger spreads. To them, preserving small farms means turning the clock back to a vanished age. Bruce Babcock, director of the Centre for Agriculture and Rural Development at Iowa State University, sees no point in trying to expand a workforce that has naturally contracted. In his view, the decline of small farms on the plains is a sign of success. Farm towns need to stop relying on the government and find a new raison d'être.
Apart from agriculture, the chief resource of plains towns is their people, with their pioneer virtues (so Americans feel) of persistence and ingenuity. Backers of the countryside see a great deal of entrepreneurial talent lying unused, and some are trying to harness it.
John Allen, director of the Centre for Applied Rural Innovation at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, travels to small towns to help people find alternative ways to make money. When he met members of the Nebraska Youth Development Network, they told him they wanted to build the world's largest wooden roller-coaster in the Sandhills, which cover two of America's poorest counties. The roller-coaster, they thought, would lure other young people from miles around who would stay and start businesses. Alternatively, they proposed a road race that would draw millionaires from Europe and Asia. Mr Allen turned down the roller-coaster, but the road race will go ahead this year.
Just south of the Sandhills, in McCook, Nebraska, townsfolk are trying to find new ways to keep their town from shrinking. The town's population, nearly 8,000, has declined over the past decade. Many of the smaller towns around are disappearing. Five years ago, people in McCook started the Buffalo Commons Storytelling and Music Festival. That name is notorious on the plains. In 1987 Frank and Deborah Popper, two demographers at Rutgers University in New Jersey, looked at the history of settlement on the plains and concluded that the region was ill-suited to ordinary farming. It should be left, they said, as a "buffalo commons" -- a vast restored prairie where buffalo would again roam in great numbers.
At first, plains folk saw the Poppers as east-coast doomsters. Their opposition has softened over time as inexorable forces drive them from the land. Some small farmers have unwittingly followed the Poppers' advice by selling their land to Sioux Indians, who in turn are using the land for buffalo herds.
But looming behind all these efforts is a larger notion: that the settling of the Great Plains is a human experiment which has seen its day. Jack Zaleski, the editorial page director of the Fargo Forum newspaper, has watched small towns fade over the past decade while Fargo has grown by some 20%. According to him, the changes in agriculture are so profound that the little towns will never return.
This would have come as no surprise to Major Stephen Long, who travelled through the southern plains in 1819. He reported that the land was "almost wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable for a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence." American inventiveness -- including the six-shooter and barbed wire -- and trailer-loads of taxpayer dollars proved him wrong for a while. But it may take a new ingenuity to keep this part of America's heart from fading away.