Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

This article illustrates what to me is the wrong approach. These small towns 
are fighting for their lives, but they're playing by the system's rules in a 
rigged game.
------------------------------

Amid Dying Towns of Rural Plains, One Makes a Stand
December 1, 2003
 By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times

SUPERIOR, Neb. - When death comes to a small town, the
school is usually the last thing to go. A place can lose
its bank, its tavern, its grocery store, its shoe shop. But
when the school closes, you might as well put a fork in it.


So it was in Hardy, one of many last-gasp towns in Nuckolls
County, Neb., along the Kansas state line. A rock memorial,
overgrown by grass and weeds, rests like a tombstone under
sagging football goal posts. The stone marks where the
Hardy school used to be, where the wind carried voices of
children - the joyous static of tomorrow.

This year, Nuckolls County, population 4,843, lost another
two schools, to budget cuts and declining enrollment,
perhaps dooming another pair of towns to Hardy's fate in a
region that has seen nearly two-thirds of its population
disappear since 1920.

But here in Superior, whose slogan is "An oasis of the
Great Plains, in the middle of everywhere," and which
claims to be the exact same distance from Los Angeles and
New York, they have made a last stand.

>From the Dakotas to the Texas Panhandle, the rural Great
Plains has been losing people for 70 years, a slow
demographic collapse. Without even the level of farmers and
merchants that used to give these areas their pulse, many
counties are also losing their very reason to exist,
falling behind the rest of the nation in nearly every
category as they desperately try to reinvent themselves.

And now a broad swath of the nation's midsection seems to
have lost something else, as well: its optimism. Polls show
a quiet crisis in confidence, the one thing that had seemed
a part of rural American DNA. More than ever, people feel
powerless to control their lives and pessimistic about the
future, according to the annual University of Nebraska poll
of rural attitudes.

"Will this be the last generation to inhabit the rural
Great Plains?" asked Jon Bailey of the Center for Rural
Affairs, a nonprofit research group in Walthill, Neb. Few
people in Nebraska, which has 7 of the nation's 12 poorest
counties, scoff at the question.

Some of the same signs of despair and breakdown that wore
out aging American industrial cities in the 1960's have
come to the rural plains. Among teenagers, there is now a
higher level of illicit drug use in rural areas than in
cities or suburbs, recent surveys indicate. The middle
class is dwindling, leaving pockets of hard poverty amid
large agribusinesses supported by taxpayers.

Government attention has only consolidated the trends,
people in the small towns of the plains say, by subsidizing
mega-farms that rarely create local jobs or contribute to
merchants in the region. Arguments about the miracle of the
American breadbasket - harnessing market efficiency and
technology to produce cheap food in stunning abundance -
may resound globally, but they ring hollow locally. The
rueful view here is that subsidies, however sensible in the
macroeconomic sense, are gutting the plains ever more.

With its population down to the 2,000 level that is often
considered the threshold for a functioning regional center,
Superior, the anchor of Nuckolls County, has vowed it will
not catch the death chill of nearby Hardy. But the town's
struggle to stay alive shows how even with the best of
civic intentions, it is difficult to fight forces that have
humbled much of rural America.

People here taxed themselves to create an economic
development fund. They put in a fiber-optic network for
telecommunications. They shored up their high school. They
zoned 30 acres at the edge of town for industrial use,
graded it and put in utilities. At the center of the
proposed industrial park sits the empty shell of a brand
new building, built with the help of $145,000 in state
money, on spec. Just outside of town is a paved and
well-lighted runway, although only a lone crop duster,
flipped in a storm, rests upside-down on the tarmac.

They touted their small-town virtues to urban-weary
prospects.

"Deer season is year-round if you drive a car," was one
joke.

They spruced up some elegant old homes, a downtown historic
district, and created an annual Victorian festival around a
Superior native who married a British lord long ago and
became nobility: Lady Vestey.

They put together a PowerPoint presentation, boasting of a
union-free labor force in a town where a solid
three-bedroom, two-bath home sells for less than $50,000.

"Industry could come in here and produce their products
pretty cheap," said Joe Jensen, who runs the public utility
and is on the economic development committee. "And with all
the things going on with genetic manipulation of
agriculture, we think we're pretty well positioned."

And so they wait - for jobs, for business, for a future.


They wait - for families with children, for people to
volunteer at Little League, for a new restaurant.

They wait - for benefits that were supposed to come with
Internet commerce and a shrunken globe to drift out to the
middle of everywhere.

But there are plenty of people in this town and throughout
the rural plains who say all the spec buildings and cheap
labor incentives are futile, misleading gestures. Hundreds
of counties have followed Superior's path, and their
industrial parks and new buildings sit empty.

In nearly 70 percent of the counties on the plains, there
are fewer people now than there were in 1950. Population
continued to plunge in the 1990's and has fallen even
faster since the 2000 census.

For counties close to cities or near Interstate highways,
the prospects are good, and population and jobs are
generally growing. But most everywhere else - about
one-sixth of the landmass of the United States -
populations are at modern lows and the wage gaps with
cities are at record highs.

"You don't have young people taking over the farms, and you
don't have businesses staying," Mr. Bailey of the Center
for Rural Affairs said. "Even the parents are telling the
kids to get out. There is very little to keep many of these
towns going."

The state and federal governments continue to put money
into Superior and other diminishing towns, trying to stem a
demographic force that can seem like a pull of gravity. The
hospital, the town's largest single employer, is using
federal loans to finance a $6 million expansion. Poor
health, in the graying flatland counties, is one growth
industry.

The governor has praised Superior as a model for all of
dying rural Nebraska. But if they can't make it here,
people say, they can't make it anywhere on the prairie.

A Thriving Economy Vanishes

Not long ago, people in this
spirited town on the Republican River made things the rest
of the world wanted to buy. There was a cheese factory
churning out mozzarella from the milk of Nebraska cows for
Pizza Hut toppings; a big cement plant at the edge of town;
and dozens of small stores offering the forgotten retail
art of personal service.

These operations provided good jobs and a middle class for
Nuckolls County.

They are all gone. The factories are empty: too remote and
not profitable enough, the owners said. The stores are
dead: unable to compete after customers moved out and
discount chains - like Wal-Mart, 60 miles away, off the
Interstate in Hastings - moved in.

Over the last generation, Superior has lost two car
dealers, four clothing stores, a shoe store, a drugstore, a
locally managed savings and loan, a J. C. Penney store.

In Superior's autumn, another landmark is struggling to
stay alive: the weekly newspaper, The Superior Express.

"Thirty years ago, when we'd go around and take pictures
for the fall football issue, there were 10 high schools in
the area," said Bill Blauvelt, 57, the owner and publisher.
"Now there are only three. For us, this may turn out to be
the worst year ever for loss of revenue."

Mr. Blauvelt, whose great-grandfather came to Nuckolls
County in 1870, said he was the end of the family line. He
has no children and doubts he could find a buyer for the
paper. When asked about the future, he shrugged.

"I don't have plans," Mr. Blauvelt said. "This is the
problem for many rural businesses - there is no plan for
the next generation. And that's the problem with Superior
now, we've lost the movers and shakers, the support
structure of a middle class that makes things happen."

Like most of the rural Great Plains, Nuckolls County is
old, white and relatively poor. One of four households
makes less than $15,000 a year, according to census
figures. One of four people is older than 65. Most of the
jobs are tied to farming, though the hospital is the
biggest employer, with 148 workers. The county is 99
percent white.

In many ways, Nuckolls County is not unlike any other
rectangle of open space in the American midsection. Over
the last half-century, when the United States added 130
million people and the population grew by 86 percent, rural
counties in 11 Great Plains states - those counties without
a city of at least 2,500 people - lost more than a third of
their people. The farm-based counties, and those away from
interstate highways, lost the most.

In the 99 counties with the highest percentage of residents
older than 85, all but two are in the Great Plains.

Two forces common to rural America have transformed
Superior.

One is the collapse of the family farm and the subsequent
rise of agribusiness. A hundred years ago, more than 30
percent of American workers earned their income from a
farm. Now it is a little more than 1 percent. The big farms
are getting richer, fattened by federal subsidies, and the
small farms are disappearing.

The United States grows more food now than it did 50 years
ago, on about 25 percent less acreage, and with a fraction
of the workers it once used.

The other force is the Wal-Mart effect. The day a Wal-Mart
comes into a midsize town, Mr. Blauvelt said, the town
newspaper loses about 40 percent of its advertising
revenue. But at least the paper has a fighting chance to
stay in business. For local stores, it is no contest.

A recent University of Nebraska study found that in 52
rural counties in the state, the locally based share of the
retail pie fell by 50 percent over the last 20 years.

The stores that do survive sell basics: gas, quick-pickup
groceries, coffee. Or they find a niche, selling local
crafts, say, or wine.

"With the current trends showing no sign of reversing, we
will eventually be left with a lot of places without
schools, stores or even government," said Dr. John C.
Allen, director of the Center for Applied Rural Innovation
at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "We will
depopulate much of the Great Plains - and it won't stop
there."

Over all, the population of the Great Plains has increased
since 1950: mainly in the metro areas, as the farm counties
empty out. The rural counties are the ones that seem
terminally ill.

But in every death there is rebirth. Some people are
trickling into Superior and other prairie towns. They tend
to be returning natives, nostalgic for home, looking for a
life that is hard to find in the big cities.

"Our greatest asset is the psychological loyalty of people
who left here," said Dr. Don Crilly, a retired vascular
surgeon who returned to Superior 10 years ago from the San
Francisco Bay area. He and his wife, Sylvia, moved into the
biggest house in town, a plantation-style mansion that had
been owned by Dr. Crilly's father.

The town welcomed them, they said. They were charmed by the
easy pace, the friendships, the lack of cynicism.

Mr. Jensen, the utilities manager, also returned for social
reasons. He was lonely during all the years he lived in
suburban Phoenix, he said.

"I'd come home in Arizona, close the garage door behind me,
get some slab of meat out of the refrigerator and go put it
on the grill in a backyard enclosed by a cement wall," Mr.
Jensen said. "That was my life."

But these are exceptions. The trends go the other way.
Nuckolls County is projected to lose 5 percent of its
population just in the next four years, state officials
said. And, perhaps more surprising, most people in
small-town Nebraska are not happy with where they live, the
University of Nebraska poll of 3,087 people in 87 counties
indicates.

Only 11 percent said they were satisfied with where they
lived.

"This is a huge shift from earlier polls," said Dr. Allen,
who has conducted the poll for a number of years. "In some
of these rural counties, we've lost 40 percent of the
18-to-49-year-olds. This is where your entrepreneurs come
from. Those are your optimists, your future."

For Young People, Few Prospects

The parking lot of the
Subway sandwich shop, the only chain eatery in town, teems
with high school students trolling for action.

Their biggest complaint is that Superior is boring. Amanda
Thompson, a freshman, belongs to the 4-H Club and Future
Farmers of America. Like her grandfather, a veterinarian,
she loves animals. But she doubts she will stick around.

" I kind of want to stay here and take over my
grandfather's business, but Superior is so boring," Amanda
said. "There are no cute guys. Since it's such a small
town, people drink a lot."

Among this group of friends, only Quentin Colwell, a
senior, said he planned to stay in Superior. He has a job
on a pig farm that pays $8 an hour, and that's his future,
he said. "I'm stuck here," Quentin said.

The students said they thought there was a plot among the
adults in town to keep young people out and maintain
Superior as a retirement community. The adults say just the
opposite: They are desperate for new people, especially the
young.

"People live a lot longer here," Sylvia Crilly said. "Or,
as the old joke goes, it just seems that way."

The students' complaints mirror rural attitudes statewide.
In small towns, people are happy with their family lives,
their church, their friends. But nearly 90 percent of
people surveyed in rural Nebraska said they were
dissatisfied with their community restaurants, stores and
entertainment.

On the flip side, Superior has many things that the rest of
America has lost. A full dinner of chicken-fried steak and
fixings goes for $6.50. Home gardens produce beefsteak
tomatoes that are two pounds and 16 inches around. The new
library closes for supper, then reopens.

Lives Mired in Poverty

When Sylvia Crilly moved to
Superior, she said she was surprised by the open secret of
rural America.

"As an urban person who lived within blocks of the East
Oakland ghettos, I have been just shocked by some of the
poverty I have seen here," Ms. Crilly said. "Some of these
people are just drowning."

She noted that 26 percent of children younger than 5 lived
in poverty in her community. During the greatest economic
boom in modern American history, the late 1990's, the
income gap between city and rural workers opened wider than
ever. People in rural counties of the Great Plains make 48
percent of what their metro-area counterparts make. That
compares with 58 percent in 1990, according to one study.

Nebraska has the three poorest counties in the nation, with
per capita income barely $6,000 in the worst one, Loup
County, according to the federal Commerce Department. And
the report shows even more Nebraska counties moving toward
the bottom.

For these communities to survive, they will have to loosen
their dependence on farming, many economists say.

If not farms, then what? Factories? The state has been
helping with grants for small-town industrial parks. But
companies sniff and go elsewhere, to counties with mountain
views or even better tax incentives.

"You can go to any county in Nebraska and you'll see the
same thing - these empty industrial parks," said Mr. Bailey
of the rural affairs center. "The idea is if you build it,
they will come. But they don't come. And the state does
people a real disservice by making people think they will."


A question for the majority of Americans who live in cities
is why the emptying of the heartland makes a difference.
Dr. Allen said the nation's character suffered when it
became a one-sided country of urbanites.

"You take the center out, and you really lose something,"
he said.

Economists say that history - mined for tourists - and
small companies making unique products are the future for
rural America. Superior's boosters see both its isolation
and history as potential assets. A winery will soon open in
town, producing a taste of the middle of the country, from
grapes not grown on either coast. As for history, the
little town of Red Cloud, just to the west, has prospered
from its claim as the home to Willa Cather. Hardy, the
dying town just to the east of Superior, has nothing
similar to fall back on.

"We've taken ownership of our community seriously, and
we're not going to see it die," said Sherry Kniep, the
economic development director of Superior.

But if this is death, it is slow, and not without surprises
along the way. Mr. Jensen fell in love after returning home
to Superior.

"The girl I had the big crush on in high school wouldn't
give me the time of day," he said. "Then I met up with her
again at our 30th reunion and - guess what? We got
married."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/01/national/01RURA.html?ex=1071290503&ei=
1&en=34a00418b0638cb1