Not a lot of green states, even in the red states
April 27, 2017 11:39 AM   Subscribe

Agriculture is not the "number-one driver" of rural American economies, despite the claim made by Ray Starling, special assistant to the president on agriculture, trade, and food assistance, when discussing the big-ag focus of the White House's first initiative to tackle rural policy. The Daily Yonder's response includes an interesting map based on BEA and USDA data showing the dominant economic sector of all non-metro counties in the United States. Agriculture is green, and there's not a lot of it outside of the Great Plains.

Per the BEA's Rural America at a Glance report (PDF) , populations have been steadily decreasing in farming counties, while "recreation counties have seen the most robust population growth since 2000." As in urban areas, most jobs in rural areas are in the service industry; the public sector is also a major source of rural jobs.
posted by xylothek (26 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- Brandon Blatcher



 
If you're wondering what metro and nonmetro counties are, try the USDA's Economic Research Service Rural Classifications page.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:48 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Are the gaps from lack of data or lack of people?
posted by Artw at 11:49 AM on April 27, 2017


The gaps look like counties that are not classified as rural, for one reason or another. Most of them are clearly urban/suburban areas. Some of them might be state or federal parkland instead.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:52 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


Are the gaps from lack of data or lack of people?


King County isn't rural.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:53 AM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


People get a warped impression of how agricultural rural areas are because you drive through miles and miles of fields. But those miles and miles of fields are generally not producing that much or employing all that many.

When I was growing up, the economy of my small Indiana city was driven by mining, industrial plants, or distribution warehouses, most of which were down access roads off the main highways. Unfortunately, almost all of that shut down in the 80s and 90s, and now it's an economy of drunk college students.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:53 AM on April 27, 2017 [7 favorites]


On posting, it looks like the man of twists and turns' link has the full definitions for metro vs. nonmetro. So, if I'm reading the definition correctly, all the blank areas on the map are "metro" areas, which means they include at least one city with more than 50,000 residents or at least one city of 2,500-50,000 that participates in metro labour markets (i.e., suburbs and exurbs).
posted by tobascodagama at 11:57 AM on April 27, 2017


"recreation counties have seen the most robust population growth since 2000."

This needs to be amplified as another reason not to defund park services and sell off public lands.
posted by Iridic at 12:08 PM on April 27, 2017 [9 favorites]


Apparently there will be even fewer if NAFTA goes away.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:10 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]


People get a warped impression of how agricultural rural areas are because you drive through miles and miles of fields. But those miles and miles of fields are generally not producing that much or employing all that many.

My husband, who grew up pretty rural, clued me into this - apparently it's no longer really profitable at today's food prices to run these kind of "small" family farms anymore - the big farm industrial near-cities have pretty much a lock on prices that are profitable for them and unprofitable for anyone else. So you have a lot of fields going fallow, or producing only food for personal consumption or small scale sale.
posted by corb at 12:57 PM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


small Indiana city ...economy of drunk college students.

Muncie?
posted by leotrotsky at 1:02 PM on April 27, 2017


On the other hand, even if ag is not the main industry, it's still one the of few things that can't be moved somewhere else. Therefore, without ag there would be no reason to be in some areas at all.
posted by 445supermag at 1:06 PM on April 27, 2017


My husband, who grew up pretty rural, clued me into this - apparently it's no longer really profitable at today's food prices to run these kind of "small" family farms anymore

Which is why the government should get out of agriculture subsidies. It's not going to Mom & Pop, it's just a transfer payment to large agriculture corporations. It's one of those few areas where I actually *gasp* agree with the Heritage Foundation.

In the 1930s, about 25% of the country's population resided on the nation's 6,000,000 small farms. By 1997, 157,000 large farms accounted for 72% of farm sales, with only 2% of the US population residing on small farms.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:07 PM on April 27, 2017 [16 favorites]


Ag is one of those interesting fields. It's utterly necessary for our survival, but the number of people employed has dropped steadily along with its share of the economy. Not that agriculture isn't hugely profitable if you're a farm megacorp, it is, but it's still only around 1% of the current GDP. And, perhaps not coincidentally, agriculture employs only around 1% to .5% (depending on how you count it) of the population.

Yet agriculture has clout in the government vastly out of proportion to its actual economic impact. The US has spent trillions building water projects trying to irrigate the deserts of the American West, mostly under the authority of the Reclamation Act, which was supposedly to benefit small family farmers. In fact all the water goes to the huge megafarms.

Thanks to the way big agriculture has been able to play Congress, the average Western megafarm pays around $7.50 to $10 per acre foot (325,851 gallons) for water that costs upwards of $30 to $60 per acre foot to get to them, your taxes subsidize the water they use.

Meanwhile city water is often upwards of $150 per acre foot, and can often be up to $300 or more per acre foot, mainly because that extra the cities pay subsidizes agricultural use.

We're left with a legacy of dams that have ruined almost every river in the American West, and we really can't change that. But we desperately need to reform water policy and sale to farms.

The book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner gives a colorful history of how we got here, and it's timely despite being written in 1986.

We're about to face a massive water crisis, the plains states mostly have agriculture only because of massive groundwater pumping, and the groundwater is about to run out [1] in around 15 to 20 years. And when it does, they'll be shrieking for massive water projects to bail them out.

Seriously, read Cadillac Desert, it's both entertaining and horrifying. And we're going to be up against the forces he describes in that book fairly soon, so we need to be prepared to resist.

[1] for values of 'run out' mostly meaning it'll cost too much to be profitable, not "it is all gone", though some places are literally pumping the aquifers dry.
posted by sotonohito at 1:21 PM on April 27, 2017 [10 favorites]


Aquifers are one of a long, long list of reasons I can never be a Libertarian.
posted by fraxil at 1:26 PM on April 27, 2017 [12 favorites]


It is phenomenally weird to me that New Jersey is classified as entirely metropolitan, but I'll allow it. It seems more odd that the "metropolitan" areas of California and Arizona extend so far inland. It looks like there are areas classified as "metropolitan" that contain large wildlife refuges. Maybe I am a Coastal Elite and maybe I'm totally wrong, but that map smells funny.

I tried looking at the USDA ERS guidelines linked, but I don't have the background to make sense of it.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 2:21 PM on April 27, 2017


The Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation in Arizona is also classified as metropolitan.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 2:24 PM on April 27, 2017


Occasionally I read an economic argument that seems to be saying that ag policy doesn't really matter much because it's a small dollar fraction of the economy, but that confuses me; we have to eat, so a great deal of the cheapness of food is making other economic activity possible.

Similarly, dreadful as I find much of our ag policy, the transition out of it could go really really badly.
posted by clew at 2:34 PM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]


Are the gaps from lack of data or lack of people?

I'm guessing data except for the counties that are urban centers. One of the gaps in North Dakota is Sioux County, part of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and it isn't exactly a densely populated area. Most of the counties in North Dakota aren't heavily populated but countieswith lower population densities than Sioux County that are nonetheless represented on the map. (Slope county, .6 people/sq mi. Stop by Georgia's & The Owl if you're ever in Slope County, ND.)
posted by nathan_teske at 2:58 PM on April 27, 2017


Muncie?

Bloomington. (Went back after 10 years. Good news, lots of downtown development. Bad news, "new urbanism" seems to involve student apartments stacked above bars.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:48 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't know if the county-level dataset is really granular enough to make any meaningful conclusions.

According to the classification, my county, where just over 60% of the land is publicly owned, and where just under 50% is owned by the Department of Agriculture itself, does not qualify as "rural", presumably because we have a big town in the middle.

Granted, if you did the math for my county, you probably would not end up with agriculture being a dominant economic sector because it really doesn't take that many bodies to grow trees.

But there are an awful lot of people in the (very) rural areas around here who aren't being counted in this analysis.
posted by madajb at 4:42 PM on April 27, 2017


It's just silly to talk about agricultural policy in narrow GDP contribution terms. The workforce and investment commitments necessary so people don't starve will always come first. Food being cheaper and easier to produce (and thus a lower share of the GDP narrowly construed) than it was a century ago frees up literally (actually literally!) tens of millions of people to produce economic value by other means.
posted by MattD at 8:03 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's just silly to talk about agricultural policy in narrow GDP contribution terms.

Assuming we're talking about ag policy and not rural policy, which is the key distinction of the FPP. For just about everything else: health care access, poverty, housing, drug abuse, HIV, and education, whether that rural community has some form of non-agricultural economy is a big deal.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:20 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'd add to your excellent list, xylothek, keeping track of whether we're only getting cheap food and/or big ag profits by polluting or destroying natural resources where the rural poor live. And what we plan to do when they run out (because ffs, we don't seem to look after them on a justice basis).
posted by clew at 10:31 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm interested that my county (Yakima county, WA) is -blank- on this map. I'd have definitely listed this area as rural and predominantly driven by agriculture. I'm not real clear on their methodology, though.
posted by Archelaus at 10:06 PM on April 28, 2017


I think the bar for rural is lacking a city of 50,000 and not an exurb.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:08 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


MattD While I agree in part, I also disagree. We have, in theory, cheap food but in practice that just means the true cost is shifted to a different line in our budget.

You can make an argument for farm, or water, subsidies as a sort of indirect welfare. The middle class (mostly) pays higher taxes so that food prices stay low which benefits the lower class. But somewhere, someone, pays for that.

I tend to think mostly about water policy and water pricing because that's what has the most direct impact on me. You can make an argument for the nation subsidizing the construction and continued operation of the water projects that transformed large chunks of California from desert to farmland. Other than the lack of water, those farming parts of California are great for farming. There's plenty of sun, the climate is warm enough you can often get two crops a year. Much the same can be said for Arizona. If you want fresh produce produced year round in the USA, California and Arizona are pretty much your only options.

But a lot of that water is spent on crops where it doesn't make sense. California grows a lot of cotton, alfalfa, and wheat. None of those are worth the true cost of the water they use. In fact, using subsidized water, California mega-farms often grow cotton when the South, where it makes sense to grow cotton, is facing a massive overproduction and farmers there are being paid not to grow any.

We've got that typically American system of an industry with public payment and public risk, but private profits. We get all the bad parts of nationalized agriculture, but none of the good parts. We've got utterly miserable resource management, there should be **NO** land irrigated at public expense in the high plateau states (Wyoming, the Dakotas, really anywhere above 3000 feet in the West) because it's a criminal waste of water for miserable return (a bit of wheat that could be grown more cheaply elsewhere). But we squander millions of acre feet irrigating a tiny portion of the high desert basically because if we didn't the politicians from those states would shut down the whole irrigation scheme that makes truly useful irrigation in California and Arizona possible.

We need to either make farmers pay what the water is really worth, in which case the market will sort things out with its usual cruelty and the farmers of the high desert will be bankrupted quickly while in California and Arizona they'll abandon low value crops like alfalfa and cotton and wheat and switch to the crops they should be growing there. Or we need to make the subsidies make more sense.

Because we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep a bunch of really lousy land irrigated, and we shouldn't be.
posted by sotonohito at 2:31 PM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


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