
Rural Kansas is dying - neaden
https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodity-agriculture/
======
chrissnell
I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in
the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my
back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm
working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most
affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber
internet, great third-wave coffee shops, a great local library, decent
restaurants, and a couple of solid cocktail bars. Kansas State University is
here, so that brings us a nice performing arts center that gets nationally
touring acts and Big 12 football and basketball teams that you can't help but
love. My only "commute" is driving my kids to school and driving myself to the
coffee shop. We have a great little airport with free parking and I can leave
my home and be stepping onto the jet bridge in twenty minutes and SFO is an
easy hop through DFW.

It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the
Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.

~~~
Madmallard
how do you feel about tornados

~~~
antognini
Probably the same way he feels about earthquakes.

~~~
dawnerd
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I think a better one would would be
hurricanes.

~~~
spc476
With hurricanes you get warning days in advance (I live in Florida). With
tornadoes, you might get a few minutes warning, and with earthquakes, not so
much (as far as I understand it).

~~~
dawnerd
I was more thinking of seasonality of them.

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DanAndersen
The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a
Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish
a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing
more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real
attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we
want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering
in tech hubs.

~~~
jpao79
How do we know that remote telecommuting work isn't working? If you could
telecommute to work and could live virtually anywhere, Kansas would not likely
be at the top of the list due to a somewhat harsh winter climate. I'd imagine
people would locate somewhere remote but with a temperate climate (i.e.
Central California coast, Florida, Colorado, Western Washington, or even Costa
Rica, etc.).

~~~
mwcampbell
Surely I'm not the only one who would prefer to live and work near where I
grew up, regardless of the weather.

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mcone
The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real
reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in
some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option
for much longer. See
[http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....](http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722.html)

~~~
vwcx
“It comes down to the luck of where your ancestors settled,” Wilson says. “Or
where you bought ground.”

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-
midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/?beta=true)

------
ComputerGuru
TThe only mention of corn in the entire article:

 _While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to
irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the
crowd._

Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn’t even touch
upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn’t mention corn subsidies that keep corn
prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how boosted
production has dropped wheat prices.

~~~
jonknee
Well it's not like you have awesome urban living around corn fields either.
Huge fields and few people kind of get in the way of vibrant towns.

~~~
sverige
Small town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium-
sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000
people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90
minutes away.

Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were
much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and
made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size
is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than
not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the
country as a whole.

~~~
jonknee
> This is a loss for the country as a whole.

Is it? It seems like that’s the direct result of increased productivity. Even
if it’s a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of
cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain.

tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in
United States terms. It seems a win for the country.

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sp332
Living somewhere rural isn't hell. It means you might get bored some of the
time - and that's not the end of the world! It also means you get to do what
you want, instead of depending on other people to entertain you every minute
until you die. Having some empty time between events happening is fine. Living
more independently can even be great sometimes. You don't want to live in
Kansas, that's fine, I'm just worried that a lot of people in the comments
here are acting like there's no reason anyone could want to live there.

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jonknee
This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number
of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming
and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to
them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with
fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural
agricultural communities.

We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast
areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.

~~~
mobilefriendly
With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.

~~~
jonknee
You need more than internet access (which is probably not all that great in
much of rural Kansas!) for people to want to live somewhere. I mean you can
get that anywhere, why pick perfectly flat wheat fields? The small towns were
a byproduct of needing a lot of people to grow wheat, they weren't
destinations that people chose.

~~~
walrus01
If I were going to pick a boring, flat land wheat farm type of place with
ultra low cost of living to telecommute from, I would not pick Kansas. You can
buy a pretty decent house in Ritzville, WA for $100k, it is on I-90, and it's
not a ridiculous driving distance to Spokane or Seattle. And numerous
mountainous hiking/camping/skiing/4x4ing locations within a 2 hour radius.

Also in the wheat farming sort of region, some random small town 45 minutes
from the moscow-pullman metro area in SE WA. Pullman is a nice welcoming
college town. Can buy houses for $100-120k.

~~~
Latteland
And there's a tesla supercharger there, so you are covered for everything.

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theseus7
The increasing concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer,
larger farmers is the result of declining property taxes on land:

[http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality...](http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality_&_Falling_Prop_Tax_Rates.CV.pdf)

Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land
is worth very little relative to urban land.

A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on
capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the
concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while
shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are
highest.

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Sophistifunk
It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more
opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them.

Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so
they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international
economic migrants do.

~~~
theseus7
The more general principle is that investors put their money where it
generates the highest return.

Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and
capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily
dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land
values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an
accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move.

This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on
labor with taxes on land values.

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AdamM12
Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main
street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move
there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some
partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a
small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.

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Retric
I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing.
People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen.

PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is
well above the US national average.

~~~
jonknee
Average household net worth is meaningless. Charles Koch himself is worth
~$60,000,000,000 which comes out to a cool $55,562 per household in Kansas.
And that's just one guy!

~~~
stephengillie
Such a large outlier! When rural farmers move out of Kansas, they increase the
average household net worth in Kansas - when they move away, they stop
"dragging down" the average. We shouldn't maximize this metric.

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mjevans
As far as I'm aware, there's no procedure or help for the orderly shutdown of
a locality that is no longer necessary for the greater community of any level
of government. I'm not even aware of there being such procedures in place in
other countries, let alone the US where this has context.

~~~
stephengillie
Cities can disincorporate when they run out of funds, or be disincorporated by
the state when they are abandoned. In 2012, the State of Kansas officially
disincorporated the city of Treece.[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas)

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Animats
Progress! More food from fewer farmers! You want millions of peasants tilling
the land by hand?

~~~
stephengillie
Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to
feed 100% of the US population.

Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of
the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals,
such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer".

Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more
well-spent?

~~~
jarvelov
With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the
task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to
other activities.

Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that
people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on
people's vanity.

However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when
compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would
prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.

~~~
stephengillie
If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often
say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to
explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human
explains their feelings about the berries.

Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?

~~~
durkie
Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.

~~~
stephengillie
Have you ever had to put 45 cases of cans on a shelf in an hour? Sorry for the
"what about ism". There are some jobs that I wish automation would take, since
they are so thankless.

~~~
durkie
I feel like both of our points are valid :)

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nanomonkey
This reminds me of a story about Slovakian Protestant Farmer's and how they
died out because it became social acceptable for each family only had one
child. If the child died the family died. If the child lived they would marry
another farming family's only child and the farms would combine, growing
larger.

Suicide by Culture ([http://250bpm.com/blog:113](http://250bpm.com/blog:113))

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davidw
I enjoyed this book about modern-day 'frontier America':

[http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-
from-n...](http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-nowhere-
tales-from-americas.html)

It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.

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sudosteph
I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so
much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will
go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets?

When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-
growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them
become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or
industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers
to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer
by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat
becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than
ridiculously bitter IPAs.

~~~
niftich
The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural
commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers
whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher.
As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are
significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money,
you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with
less profit.

Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local
circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further
consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or
they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor
high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in
Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.

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coleifer
This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less
people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to
surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and
across many industries.

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HillaryBriss
In the main banner photo of that article, rural Kansas has better and more
street lighting than some parts of Los Angeles, for whatever that's worth.

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lurquer
Much of Kansas is comprised of the most uninteresting topography in the United
States. But for wheat and corn, nobody would live there.

The author claims she grew up in Kansas. I doubt her job requires her to be in
Los Angeles. So, why isn't she in Kansas?

As a Midwest resident, I'm annoyed by patronizing West and East Coasters who
claim fly-over country is dying. Many folks in the Midwest stay here precisely
because the thought of living amongst smug nitwits like the author is so
revolting.

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vinhboy
> "We feel the prejudice in the cities against supporting small towns"

No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic
food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.

------
Mononokay
.

~~~
poulsbohemian
This doesn't seem entirely accurate - Minnesota and Iowa, for example, are
crawling with well-respected private liberal arts colleges. The problem
historically hasn't been producing an educated population, it has been keeping
them there.

~~~
wyclif
It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the
economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.

~~~
jonknee
> Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.

It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating.
We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed.

Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it
at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was
in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.

~~~
wyclif
Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how
there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can
see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't
possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at
the moment).

~~~
enervate
Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever
they can get and then re-invest the money?

~~~
aerotwelve
If it's like corn in Iowa, yes, many just hold it and hope for the price to go
up. It seems unreasonable, but commodity prices are just that low; selling at
the wrong time can be worse for your bottom line than doing nothing.
Especially since many farmers go into debt to pay for the initial costs of
planting, fertilizing, ...

You tend to see a lot more corn in storage (occasionally this is just huge
piles of corn covered with a tarp!) right after harvest time, precisely
because that's when the prices are the lowest. There's a surprisingly big
market for huge containers that are designed to store crops for long periods
of time.

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bsder
The problem is quite direct: people do not wish to live there.

Getting 100 people to decide that town _X_ is going to be their telecommute
hub and doing it is simply not that hard to organize nowadays--if people
actually _wanted_ to do it.

The fact that nobody wants to do this says more than any amount of development
initiatives.

~~~
daxorid
Speak for yourself. Plenty of us want to do it, and _are doing it_.

Cities are rotten.

