The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

The Real Future of Farming

The New York Times has just published a story in its Sunday Magazine that managed, in a thousand words or so, both to tell something good about Midwestern kids and to display what's wrong with most writing about American farming.  

The story featured Alexandra Reau, a 14-year-old girl in Petersburg, Mich., who has developed a nice business growing all manner of vegetables and herbs in her family's yard and selling them directly to people in the neighborhood. Alexandra is part of the CSA (community-supported agriculture) movement that aims to get fresh produce to customers who pay a flat fee for regularly-delivered boxes of fruits and vegetables. Alexandra sounds like a bright, sweet and ambitious girl, making money for college while learning about plants and how they grow.

Andrea, say the Times, is a "quiet honor student with demurely made-up eyes." And then it asks, gratuitously, "Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?"

Well, everybody who knows anything about American farming, that's who. It should be possible to write about a nice kid growing tomatoes and zucchini in her backyard without succumbing to the urban bias to demonize the people who grow most of America's food. But the Times, as usual, succumbed. 

Some Summertime Thoughts

A couple of thoughts inspired by some summer reading and viewing:

Joel Kotkin, a California-based writer on urban affairs, has an article in a recent Newsweek called "The Great Great Plains." His point is that the Great Plains region, from the Dakotas down toTexas, are reviving, even  blossoming, economically. This is an area that once was losing population so fast that serious sociologists suggested turning it back to the buffalo. Now, says Kotkin, it's booming again.

Well, maybe. But don't count out the buffalo just yet.

Kotkin, an optimist to the core, is the author of a new book called "The Next Hundred Million," which foresees vast new waves of immigration into the United States and predicts almost unalloyed benefits from this influx. I'm as pro-immigration as Kotkin is, but anyone who's paying attention knows the political battles ahead over this issue, not to mention its challenges to our schools, housing, health care and other services.

Ditto with the Great Plains. A number of Great Plains cities are indisputably thriving. But the Great Plains states themselves aren't doing so hot. 

A Midwestern Energy Program

Anyone who has stood beside a Great Lake on a winter's day, with the cloudless sky overhead an icy blue and the wind pelting down from somewhere in Manitoba, knows the power of elemental nature. The water, the wind, the frosty sun -- this is energy, pure but untamed.

Recently, advocates of alternative forms of "green" energy have looked at this abundance of nature and seen something just as basic -- dollars, jobs, a new economy for the Midwest. If green energy is the energy of the future, and if the Midwest is so richly endowed with these elements, how can we miss?

The only problem is getting there from here. So far, we don't have the science to make this happen. We don't have the money to pay for the science. The Midwest is not exactly alone in seeing riches in the green economy, so the competition with other regions will be fierce. Private industry seems unlikely to make the huge investment necessary in an industry that may or may not pay off. Midwestern states should do it but these states, hard hit by the recession, are having trouble paying current bills and seem unlikely to make this investment in the future.

A valuable new paper, published by the Brookings Institution, tackles these issues by calling for federal investment to "launch a region-wide network of collaborative, high-intensity energy research and innovation centers."