Farmers Didn't Like Big Cities: Corruption in the Capitals

John Sides at The Monkey Cage posts on a study which shows the level of governmental corruption is higher when the state capital is more isolated. One factor is there's more news media coverage when the big media are closer to the capital, therefore less corruption.

Thinking about our capitals, most of them are not in the principal cities of the states.  I presume it's because there was a tug of war between the rural districts and the urban areas.  The farmers didn't want to add to the power of New York City or Philadelphia or Boston by making it the capital, so the compromise, given the power of the rural areas, was to make a smaller city the capital.  Today we just think that Albany, Harrisburg, and Springfield are naturally the capitals, without realizing the path by which they got there.

Maple Syrup and Commercial Production

We had a big maple shading our yard, which once I tapped and made a little bit of maple syrup from the sap.  Only once, because I didn't and don't have the patience needed to boil down the sap.  But my memories of that long-ago episode meant  I found this post at Casaubon's Book on the plight of New York syrup makers interesting.  The unusually warm weather meant production is way down. And most interesting was the idea of a vacuum system, which commercial producers now use to extract sap.  $10,000 for such a system won't sound like much to commercial grain producers in the Midwest, but it's a step up for people who didn't use to need such capital.

The Virtues of Community

Going against the flow can be lonely.  A complaint from a locavore:

I live five miles outside a town of 850 people that could be more vibrant, more open to my ideas and goals as a farmer. I know that the customers who buy our eggs and lamb appreciate the work I do to make the food they eat, but I don't see them every day. (In fact, because I sell at an online farmers market, I rarely see any of my customers at all.) There are one or two other farmers in the area who grow things like we do, but we see them about every other month. Folks in my town are nice people, but they generally see nothing wrong with chemical farming or genetically modified seeds, as far as I can tell. Rarely does anyone think that farming without these technologies might be worth something extra. We stand by our values and practice sustainable agriculture, but pay the price of being seen as outsiders.

There can be a tendency to idealize the past. I grew up in an area of small farms and people who commuted to the city for work, but it wouldn't be  terribly warm and welcoming to newcomers.  I don't think the different ideas are as important as the actions and attitudes of the newcomers.  An extrovert who joins in community activities can be accepted regardless of any weird ideas he may have; someone who holds back won't be warmly integrated.

The Case of the Missing Drill Sergeant

I've the feeling articles on why Americans can't be found to do [hard manual labor, whether harvesting crops in Alabama or wherever] are perennials.  But I noted Italians can't be found to do the hard labor of making cheese, according to this Marginal Revolution post.  So why?

It's not genetic: we know Italians did hard manual labor when they were immigrating to this country in the 1890's. We know WASPs did hard work back in the 1630's and 40's and we know our ancestors did hard work at other times.  So why can't Alabama farmers find Americans to pick tomatoes instead of relying on immigrants?

I offer the solution; it's called the "missing drill sergeant". In my experience there were two things, and two things only, which could make me do hard physical labor: one was growing up with it; the other was a drill sergeant.

By growing up with it, I mean this: by growing to be a man on a dairy farm I incorporated ideas of what was hard and what had to be done, what would make me respected among my peers when I hired out.  I also literally incorporated the muscles I needed to do hard work and the calluses I needed to avoid the pain.

The other way I learned to do nasty things was through my Army drill sergeants.  I was constrained by the situation and forced to do things I'd rather not.

I'd say the same applies to our workforce: we don't have slavedrivers and drill sergeants in the modern economy.  Those Americans who grew up to do the work have, if possible, made their escape, just as I escaped from the dairy farm.  So we rely on people from elsewhere, whose frame of reference from growing up in a less developed country makes picking tomatoes or working on Italian dairy farms seem at least tolerable, considering the financial rewards.

[Updated with a couple links.]

The Suicide Belt Sounds Like Minutemen to Me

From Freakonomics on suicide(suicide is twice as common as homicide):

The American suicide belt is comprised of about ten western states, this sort of wide longitudinal swath running from Idaho and Montana down to Arizona and New Mexico. … So, yes the inner mountain west is a place that is disproportionately populated by middle-aged and aging white men, single, unattached, often unemployed with access to guns.

Remember the Minutemen from the 1990's?  It seemed as if a high proportion felt they were mistreated by FmHA/FSA.

How'd That Work Out for the Rural Areas: FDR in 1933

Matt Yglesias quotes from FDR's inaugural, in the context of whether Obama is a good leader, but I'm interested in this one sentence:

Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.

That belief has a long history, and it carries on today, when some in the food movement argue for revivifying rural areas. The New Deal tried, they even had a Resettlement Administration, bits and pieces of which ended up in the Farmers Home Administration and now FSA, but it didn't work as they thought it should.  I think the bottom line is: most rural areas (measured in area) in which farming is the main occupation will continue to lose population for the foreseeable future. I note today there's a Mid-Atlantic exposition/conference on precision agriculture coming up; it's the first one.  If they can do precision agriculture in this area, that further cuts the need for labor and increases the need for capital, all of which means a further expansion of the size of farms and a further cut in farm population.

Conflicting Definitions, Resolving of

Sec. Vilsack isn't content with trying to come up with standard definitions of reporting dates, crops, and acreages among crop insurance, FSA, etc.  He also wants to standardize definitions of "rural".  He knows we have (at least) 11 now, and that's too many.

Good luck to him  I suspect he'll find several of them are written into law, and most of the rest likely trace back to law.  All of them, I guess, are well embedded into the procedures of the agencies which have to employ them.  So, feeling cynical today, I suggest he devote his time and energy to something more productive.  Perhaps a perpetual motion machine?

African-American Farmers

Via the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, there's a scholarly study here which is available without restriction until July 16.  Worth reading.

The National Grange--a Remembrance

Extension.org's RSS feed the last couple days has been focused on cooperatives, including this piece on early cooperatives.  The first national one was the Grange,or The National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry.  Turns out it was triggered top down: the first organizational meeting was in USDA offices  in DC.

The Grange was still biggish where I grew up, biggish because the community was so small as to be almost non-existent. In my early years there were the Methodist church and the Grange hall (a barn which had been converted and improved over the years). Some people were active in the church, at least when they weren't turned off by the minister the bishop had assigned.  Some people were active in the Grange, and not the church.  Some, like my mother, were active in both, and got very aggravated when there were conflicts between the two.  In my early years the Grange hall had the facilities for dances and community suppers. But when the church members dug out and finished a basement under the church for meeting rooms, the monopoly on eating facilities was broken. Dancing, of course, was still verboten for Methodists.

When it was created, and during my mother's early years, the Grange could be the center of social life, at least nondenominational social life. Its organization had roles for men and women, more egalitarian than many of the churches of the time. Economically it could join with other organizations to form buying and marketing co-operatives, like the Northeast's Grange League Federation (Dairymen's League and Farm Bureau Federation) in which my father was active.  Politically it was one of the big three ag groups, behind the Farm Bureau (which my home county claims to have started), and jousting with the National Farmer's Union.

Lifetime habits and organizational inertia kept the Grange going into the mid-20th century, but then it faded as the car, radio, and TV offered more entertainment possibilities. It's still around, as a visit to the website shows, but not any more in my locality of birth.

The Fading Rural Economy

John Phipps describes the closings of local services.  Unfortunately, economics says big farms are more efficient than small, meaning the farming population declines, which puts all the services on which farmers depend under pressure.  Add on the competition from bigger outfits, the easier transportation from cars and good roads, and there's a big current to row against.

Why You Can't Keep Them Down on the Farm

Roving Bandit quotes a professor on 7 reasons you can't keep people down on the farm (phrased as "reasons urban growth is a reasonable and natural phenomenon". (economies of scale, centrality,diversity cover some of the seven). The same rules mean bigger cities grow bigger.

Meanwhile Megan McArdle had a recent visit to China and an interesting post on rural life, including observations on how the government is trying to slow the rush of people to cities:

Yet even this level of income is achieved by substantial government intervention.  In part to slow the pace of urbanization to a manageable level, in part because they're worried about food security, and in part presumably just because they don't want the farmers to starve, the government offers some pretty hefty subsidies to rural communities.  The crop prices are supported above market levels; the houses, appliances, and someday cars, are acquired with substantial discounts through government programs.  According to our hosts, without those subsidies, it's not clear that there would be anyone left on Chinese farms.  Chinese agriculture is amazingly productive, as I mentioned, but it's also amazingly labor intensive, and tends to be done on a small scale; they can't compete with the massive farms of North and South America.

Limits on the Size of Farms?

Agweb has an interesting discussion of the size of farms. The argument is that one person can manage up to 10 employees, which is about enough to handle 10,000 acres.  (I'm assuming we're talking grain or cotton crops here as I imagine produce or livestock would have a different scale.)  Any more and you're talking a real organization, where the top person is managing managers. 

I guess one could grant the title "family farm" to such farms--after all back in the 1870 census my great grandfather had a hired hand living in household and he only had 300+ acres.  But that's stretching it--I'm too lazy today to see what ERS says about farms where most of the labor is hired.

Rural Areas the New Blacks?

Back in the day, in Vietnam, black Americans were disproportionately 11B's (the MOS for rifleman) and suffered casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.  Today it seems men and women from rural areas, especially upper Midwest and Great Plains, are suffering casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.

"The study does not look into reasons why soldiers from rural areas have experienced a higher death rate in the Iraq War"

My memory is the 1960's military, at least the Army, was draft-based.  People with the poorest scores on the test tended to end up as 11B's.  Blacks were drafted relatively equally with whites but had the poorer education and poorer scores, so ended up in the most dangerous positions.

When Nixon took us off the draft, blacks would enlist for the opportunity.I remember reading somewhere blacks now are more heavily concentrated in the Army's "tail"--the administrative support services.  As a result, although the current wars are dangerous for truck drivers, the casualty rate for blacks is probably less than their proportion, certainly less than for rural areas.  (Given the loss of black farms over 40 years, I assume without checking that the black population is disproportionately urban and suburban.)

I'm a bit amused by the quote. The illustrious Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, has a book arguing that the South, particularly the Appalachians, is home to natural-born fighters, based on their Scots-Irish heritage.  Maybe the area has lost its edge, in favor of the German-Scandinavian Lutherans of the upper Midwest/Plains.  

I'd think in reality the key question is economic opportunity.  In the past blacks and the upcountry whites Webb writes about have had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.  In the present the northern rural areas have little opportunity, so end up as fighters.  (In the remote past, Scots and Irish had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.) And immigrants end up as fighters.

There's a more troubling possibility however. Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. And, for those who watched The Wire, the prisoners include some of the most talented leaders.  I think that's a big change since the 1960's, so it's possible if academicians are using as their baseline the number of people 18 and over they're getting a different result than if they used the number of people not institutionalized and with no criminal record 18 and over.

Returning Roads to Gravel

Political Animal comments on an apparent trend of cash-strapped states returning asphalt roads back to gravel.  The theme is that this is an example of failure to spend money on necessary infrastructure, which all us good liberals support.

It's possible there's a knee-jerk reaction here.  Many in the administration and in environmental community generally have bemoaned the drop in population in rural areas, particularly when it reflects the growing size of farms, "industrial agriculture".  The fact is, as population thins out, there's less need for roads which can support high volumes of traffic, because there simply isn't the traffic. Roads may be used most by the farm operator who needs to move her equipment from one section to another; sections which used to support multiple families but which no longer have anyone living on them.

Clayton on Small Rural Towns

A couple paragraphs from Chris Clayton's blog:

I found the Vilsack-Lucas exchange interesting considering I spent the better part of Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning in Southeastern Arkansas. On Tuesday night, in Monticello, Ark., at a political candidate forum, one older man complained about the lack of jobs for people in small towns. All of the manufacturing jobs were gone. A spec building built by the town a decade earlier was never used. The man said, "We got fast-food jobs, though. We have a every kind of burger in this town you want it, but people can't live off those jobs."

(I thought that also dovetailed nicely into the obesity debate.)

On Wednesday, I traveled a little way farther southeast. The blight really was surprising. There were a couple of towns with almost completely boarded former business districts. Any kind store other than liquor or convenience was gone. There was just nothing there in terms of work or economic development. It was depressing and made me wonder just how in the world you return jobs back to these small towns.

My answer is: you can't return jobs and people to small towns. At least you can't consistently and on a national basis.  Small towns have been declining for over a century and there's nothing on the horizon which would change the process.

Chances of Becoming a Farmer Equal to Chances of Making NBA?

That's what John Phipps says, in a post on the advice he gives to young people who are interested in farming (that is, the big ag, industrial, individual owner-style farming).  John compares farming with medicine, quoting a recent NYTimes article on the shift from individual or at least doctor-owned practices, to salaried practitioners.

Rural Wages and Unemployment

A factoid buried in this Daily Yonder article, with a nice graphic showing wage levels in rural counties: some correlation between low wages and low unemployment.  For example, WV has high unemployment but the unionized (presumably) coal miners who are employed have high wages.

Idiocy of Rural Life

Does this sound like today's greens: "...[capitalism] has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."

I'm sure you'd stumble over the "idiocy of rural life".  But this is from Mr. Marx, in his "The Communist Manifesto", although he said "The bourgeoisie has...."  It seems "idiocy" is a mistranslation; "isolation" would be better.  See the explanation  here (it's towards the bottom of the page).

Understanding America, II

I'm most of the way through the book. Two points that occurred to me, which may be related:

• there's no mention so far of Baker vs Carr, which was the big Supreme Court decision enforcing "one man, one vote". (Actually, it seems to have said the Supreme Court would have a say in reapportionment of legislative districts, with subsequent decisions actually saying one man, one vote.) Chief Justice thought these cases the most important set of decisions of his term. The significance was that both in the House of Representatives and in the State legislatures rural areas had a disproportionate representation. If memory serves, in some States the ratio was as bad as 1 to 10 (i.e, a rural voter had the same representation as 10 urban voters).
  
• the end of "blue laws". Don't rely on wikipedia--it's not a good summary. These were laws restricting the times stores could open (like only Thursday night and never on Sunday). I'd also include the "fair trade" laws, which required merchants not to discount their merchandise.

These two changes, IMHO, were not only interrelated, because the rural people were more concerned with restricting the aggressive advance of commercialization and the undermining of local stores by competition from the big city, later to be Walmart and Target, but also accelerated lots of the other changes in the culture we've seen since my childhood.

I'm prompted to write this because Dirk Beauregard, at the end of his post on the Miracle Weekend in France, observes that new French laws will legitimize Sunday openings.

The Realities of Rural Life

Yes, Montana is rather extreme, but still. See Erin's latest vacation