The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Icarus on the Farm

All farmers keep a constant eye on the horizon, watching for the cloud that might bring rain to nourish the crops or hail to destroy them. As the new year dawned, the most ominous financial cloud in a generation appeared on the horizon of the rural Midwest. Even farmers too young to remember the last big storm would be wise to get their financial crib doors shut before the next one hits.

It seems cruel to sound this warning just now. At the moment, farming is the one prosperous part of the American economy. Farmers are getting prices which, if not records, are very high. Corn is rising again, to about $6.50 a bushel. Soybeans are also up, to about $12 a bushel. The price of farm land has never been higher. The average price of an Iowa acre shot up no less than 32 percent last year, to $6,700: Illinois and Indiana aren't far behind. Sales of $10,000 per acre or more are common.

The real estate market may be dead everywhere else, but not down on the farm. In a recession-weary nation, it's great to be a Midwestern farmer. 

So what's the problem? What's the cloud that threatens to rain on the rural picnic?

Drifting in the Driftless Area

I spent the last week in Galena, a gem of an old Victorian town, nestled in the hills and forests of the so-called Driftless Area, in northeast Illinois near the Mississippi River Valley. I came away thinking how this area could be more than the beautiful but generally depressed region it is now.

Galena itself seems to be doing fine. It is a tourism and second-home mecca, packed with good restaurants and refugees from Chicago. But the Driftless Area itself is divided between four states and some 25 to 35 counties, depending on where you draw the boundaries. None of these jurisdictions -- not the states nor the counties -- has been able to work with the others to leverage the region's scenic potential and combat the economic distress that, like the scenery, they all share.

Thinking About the Future

It's easy to get that neglected feeling, sitting here in the Midwest, surveying the industrial collapse in our own back yard and wondering if anybody out there really cares. The pre-dawn dustup in Zuccotti Park gets more national air time and ink than the destruction of Midwestern towns and cities, even though the same pathology -- an economy out of control -- underlies both. As Willy Loman's wife said in The Death of a Salesman, "attention must be paid."

That may be changing. In the past few days, at least two nationwide broadcasts have looked at the plight of old industrial cities in the Midwest. Both recognized the economic problems but emphasized positive measures to remedy them.

The Midwest Is Going Regional

Everyone who's studied the Midwestern economy agrees that strictly local solutions don't work, and it's time to work regionally. Everyone also agrees that Midwesterners are just too ornery by nature to accept the cooperation that regionalism requires. 

It's beginning to look as though everyone is only half right. Regional arrangements are sprouting like corn in June. It's too early yet to say what they'll yield, or how deep their roots go. But for now, regionalism looks like an idea whose time has come.

We've written about some of these projects in other posts, but it's an encouraging exercise to review this progress. At the least, it shows that Midwesterners, after years in denial over the state of their economy, have awakened to the realities of coping in a global economy.  

The Mailman Doesn't Deliver Any More

The Midwest embraces a galaxy of small towns, broadcast across the countryside like seed, each a little civilization unto itself. All exist for some economic reason -- as a farm town, a market town, a mining town, a little factory town. Most were founded about 150 years ago and grew up around institutions -- the school, stores, the bank, churches, the post office -- that were both symbols of that civilization and places where the townspeople met to do business, to socialize, or just to talk and swap news.

Most of these towns have been shrinking for fifty or a hundred years, as the economy changed and their young people went away and didn't come back. As the towns slowly evaporated, so did the institutions. The school closed, consolidated into another school in a bigger town next door. As stores closed, so did the bank. As parishioners left, churches shuttered.

Until finally, there was almost nothing left but the post office, still tidy, still official, still flying the American flag, still proclaiming that the town had its own zip code and, hence, an identity. It was real, and it was special. The government said so. 

But now, the U.S. Postal Service, beset by rising costs and competition from the likes of UPS and email, has announced it is considering closing some 3,600 of its 32,000 post offices around the country, about one-fourth of them in the Midwest. There will be a 60-day comment period, and then the final closings will be announced. Some may be spared, a spokesman said, but the final number of closings "will be a lot closer to 3,600 than to zero."  A state-by-state list of post offices under consideration is available here.

The Global Economy Flies Away

We live in an interconnected world, dependent on links -- roads, telephones, fiber optic, airlines -- to keep us in touch with the global economy. If one of those links breaks, we are that much less connected to the world, that much further distant from the economy that determines our daily reality.

This is what may happen to 19 small cities in the Midwest, where Delta Airlines says it plans to change or shrink its service or end it altogether. In some of these cities, Delta is the only airline that flies in or out. If it leaves and if no other airline takes it place, these cities will become remote islands in the global sea, as cut off from the mainland as if someone dug up their highways or severed their phone lines.

A Region on the Mississippi

The future of the Midwest may be taking shape in some unlikely places, out of the view of most pundits, by people who are tired of letting someone else determine how they will live and have decided to do it themselves.

One of these places is called The 7 Rivers Region, where parts of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa come together. It's an extraordinary beautiful area, clustered around the towering bluffs and watery sweep of the Mississippi River valley, south of the Twin Cities and north of Dubuque. The region's core is the two towns of LaCrosse, Wisconsin and Winona, Minnesota -- both pleasant and prosperous little cities but not exactly the top of the agenda when economic planners meet these days.

Those planners should take another look. The 7 Rivers people are pioneering the concept of regionalism -- the idea that, in a global economy, individual cities and states are too small to compete, so can thrive only by leveraging their assets in broader regions. They haven't exactly seceded from their states, but they're linking arms across the Mississippi to promote their region, without waiting for Madison, St. Paul or Des Moines to do it for them.

The Foodie Attack on Food

The New York Times has done it again. Or rather, its Sunday Magazine has done it again. For the second year in a row, it has published its annual Food Issue without a word about most of the people who grow America's food or most of the people who eat it.

The issue was devoted to "food as community," which is fine for the people one sees in Gourmet Magazine, gathered outdoors around a rustic table, beneath a grape arbor, ingesting the artisanal grub they have spent the previous three days cooking. It has nothing to do with "food as food," which is the concern of the vast majority of America's farmers and eaters.

Bad Eggs and the Future of Farming

Wright County, in north central Iowa, is on the map these days for reasons it would rather forget. It's the home of the DeCoster family and their Wright County Egg, the lead company in a massive recall of 550 million eggs linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak.

There's not much good to be said about the DeCoster operation, which has been in trouble with environmental officials and the law in Iowa and other states and was once branded a "habitual" violator by the state of Iowa.

But both Wright County and the DeCosters are bellwethers of global agriculture and its impact on the Midwest. There's more to this story than just one big rogue outfit.

Reports from Wright County itself indicate that the DeCosters aren't all bad, that they get high marks from locals for their substantial philanthropy to the local library or their support for local festivals. When I first read this, I thought that Wright County must be one of those impoverished Iowa rural counties which is so grateful for any business or jobs that it's willing to harbor and excuse a serial polluter to get them.

There's more to it than that. Actually, Wright County is one of the wealthiest counties in Iowa. Its per capita income of $44,372 (2008 figures) is the third highest in the state. Its unemployment rate is usually around 4 percent and is only 7 percent now, well below the national average. Two of its hospitals are expanding. So are its schools.

On the other hand, it's one of the majority of Iowa counties that is shrinking -- 12,700 people, down from 19,000 in 1960. The long-term decline would be even worse if it wasn't for an influx of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, that make up nearly 10 percent of its population.

I talked with Denny Bowman, who runs the economic development department in Wright County. From what he said and the other stories since the egg scandal broke, it's clear that Wright County is an epicenter of global agriculture, which is to say big farming.

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.