The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

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. 

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. 

Friday Night Blight

To rebuild the Midwestern economy, the first thing we must do is outlaw football.

Oh, come on. I can't be serious. It'll never happen.

Well, yes, I am serious. Nothing would free the Midwest to get to work on the problems of the 21st century like getting rid of football -- especially high school football.

Or more accurately, what football symbolizes. Here's what I mean:

It seems ludicrous, but the Midwest is sliced and diced into thousands of rivalrous units -- towns, counties, school districts, states. All these little entities have two big things in common. First, they're caught squarely in the path of the global economy and, second, they're too small to cope by themselves. Cooperation and collaboration is the only rational key to a better future.

But would they even dream of cooperating with each other? Fat chance. Each insists on its own independence. Each begrudges anything good that happens to its neighbor. Each promotes its own superiority, its own uniqueness.

They are, of course, not independent at all. Nor are they unique. All, in fact, all bailing from the same sinking boat.

A Rural Remedy

Driving the rural Midwest can be a distressing, depressing experience. The countryside is as beautiful as ever -- not just the rolling hills and forests that look like a Grant Wood painting come to life, but even the flatter vistas across fields of corn and beans, so lush in summer and still majestic in winter, as evocative as the ocean, primed to spring into life almost any day now. The white farmhouses, red barns and blue silos seems to paint the spectrum of America.

But look closer. Too many of the farmhouses are derelict, their families gone, their land consolidated into the farm next door. Too many farm towns are derelict, too, their main streets reduced to a bar or two, their schools closed, their groceries replaced by a Casey's out on the highway, their residents often people who are there only because they are cheap places to live. Even more substantial towns are dog-eared affairs. Their population has been shrinking for decades. The high school graduates smart kids who leave and don't come back. On the edge of town stands a half-empty industrial park, the symbol of an earlier grab for prosperity that didn't quite work out.

Many of these towns look like they've surrendered to an economy, now global, that has no place for them. Some truly have surrendered and may have no future. But others realize that the world has changed and they must change with it.

To these defiant places, Mark Drabenstott has something to say. Drabenstott may be the leading thinker on rural issues in the Midwest. For years he was director of the Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. More recently, he has been working with the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He's studied and consulted around the globe and looked hard at his own Midwest.

The result is a major report called "Past Silos and Smokestacks: Transforming the Rural Economy in the Midwest," which The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has just issued. It's the Council's latest Heartland Paper, a series intended to analyze the Midwest's biggest challenges and draw a roadmap to solutions.

Who Cares?

I spoke last week to some of Chicago's brightest young people -- business folk, academics, an architect, a government type or two -- picked for a program for the city's future leaders. My subject was the Midwest and its response to globalization: in other words, if Chicago is the capital of the Midwest, how goes its inland nation? Too much of the Midwest, I told them, is coping badly with globalization. In fact, some of its big cities (Detroit, Cleveland) and old factory towns (Rockford, Muncie, Lima, Flint) might not make it. If they don't reinvent themselves, I said, they may be doomed to keep sliding into impoverished backwaters. A lot of old farm towns are already there and also might not come back.

Nobody seemed happy about this news. But some of these young people had a question: so what? Why should we care? Throughout history, towns and cities have come and gone. If Muncie goes, why should anyone in Chicago care? If Detroit keeps crumbling, should we do anything about it? More to the point, should we be expected to do anything about it? In a world of limited economic resources, why should we even consider spending some of those resources on places that have lost their economic purpose and show no sign of finding a new one? The Midwest's future, they said, depends on the strength of its winners -- Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, Madison, Ann Arbor -- not on succoring its losers.

So if yesterday's cities vanish, why should tomorrow's leaders care?

A good question that deserves an answer, and I'm not sure I've got one. But at the least, we can talk about it a bit, and see if anyone can give a good reason.

Tales of Two Counties

The Midwesterner blog welcomes comments, the more the better, and after a quick check for libel or four-letter words, posts them quickly. But occasionally, we get a comment that’s worthy of posting all by itself – longer and informed and so thought-provoking that it’s a shame to just tack it onto the end of an earlier posting. One such, from Paul Ginger, ostensibly deals with an earlier post that dealt with the woes of Webster City, a small Iowa county seat that has just lost an Electrolux factory that was its major industry for a century. As I wrote, Webster City is floundering. In his comment, Ginger, who signs himself Gingerman, had some suggestions for Webster City, based on what’s been going on in another county, Wood, in another state, Wisconsin. But these suggestions go beyond the specific problems of Webster City and speak to several postings, on how Midwestern towns and cities can recover from the economic tornados that have leveled so many of them. Hence, I’m happy to turn over this space to Paul.

His comment also illustrates what we hope to do with this blog and, indeed, with our entire Global Midwest Initiative. This is to break down the barriers – political and cultural and informational – that make the Midwest such a Balkanized place, and to be a forum where Midwesterners can swap problems and war stories and, with luck, solutions. Gingerman, with this comment, has just joined that conversation.