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glowing-fish posted:Right, but then what are the specific challenges faced by rural people? Ah -- I think I'm beginning to see what you're thrusting at. See this is sort of what I was trying to get through to you in your thread about Wilderness by describing the concept of Imaginaries. You aren't going to unpack the subtext by establishing rigorous and objective economic criteria for what is and isn't rural and then vigorously enforcing what is now an abstract and foreign definition for a vernacular phrase. You questions aren't about economics so much as they are anthropology or sociology. We all understand there are differences in how poverty effects people in urban vs. rural areas. Transportation and access to services like healthcare are much more expensive and difficult problems to solve in census designated rural counties in Mississippi than New York city. I think these issues and others revolving around migrant agricultural labor and Indian reservations are some of the most important and pressing issues of social justice today, and often ignored, and I have been happy to have a place to discuss them itt. However, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Presidential election, there was another conversation that was dominating this thread. A narrative was developing about "economic anxiety," particularly in the Midwestern mill towns that swung towards to Trump. There was plenty of data available too, about how the difference in life outcomes between white men and their minority counterparts is decreasing. Nevertheless, as me and Tiny Brontosaurus have established, despite this relative decline in various metrics for rural areas, they aren't very different in terms of poverty from urban areas, with which one faces the most poverty sensitive to differences in classification methodology. You ask what is the subtext? Obviously these subtext is different for the resident of Jefferson, and to understand their personal identification you'll have to delve into the literature of identity formation (for example, Durkeheim on collective consciousness for a primer), but for a moment I'm going to talk about why it suddenly became a pressing issue itt and in the media generally. Now I can't speak for everyone. However what I hear is a political argument being made. A position is being staked out, but a position that almost nobody wants to have to make explicitly. Many Democrats looked at the political disaster in November and concluded they absolutely had get the white vote back, and they were lost because the Democratic platform is too geared towards policies that are beneficial for minorities and immigrants. You can't just say this though as a Democrat, I mean try telling your Mexican-American constituents 'yeah sorry and all but turns out white people really like it when they hear me call you rapists and posture tough on deportations.' You can't do that. So instead of saying "Democrats need to be more appealing to white people," you just say "Democrats need to do more to address rural issues," and everyone will understand when you say rural, what you actually mean is white. Meanwhile everyone continues to ignore that by far the most enduring rural poverty afflicts minorities.
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Jul 7, 2017 03:26
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FAUXTON posted:Probably more along the lines of small scale farming as opposed to a gigacorporate humongo-farm where you're either an overpaid suit or underpaid labor. This might have been posted here before, but: Most US farms aren't farms. No one knows for certain, but the definition of farm is such that a property that is capable of producing more than 1000 dollars of agricultural produce a year is a farm. Even if it doesn't produce that much, it just needs to be capable of doing so. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/big-farms-are-getting-bigger-and-most-small-farms-arent-really-farms-at-all/ So if you have a large residential property with, say, 10 apple trees and some raspberry bushes...that could be a "farm", since it could produce over 1000 dollars of agricultural products, if someone bothered to harvest them. So yeah, most farmers in the US are hobby farmers.
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Jul 7, 2017 03:31
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FAUXTON posted:Probably more along the lines of small scale farming as opposed to a gigacorporate humongo-farm where you're either an overpaid suit or underpaid labor. Yeah like small family owned farms not part of "big ag"
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Jul 7, 2017 05:17
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glowing-fish posted:This might have been posted here before, but:
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Jul 7, 2017 05:56
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Infinite Karma posted:That seems uselessly vague. I live in a condo, but I could put a handful of avocado trees in my 300 s.f. backyard and grow $1000 of avocados a year... why is every property with outdoor space not considered a farm? Because you would have to actually plant avocado trees. I know some one who claimed the blackberry brambles on their 10 acres as a farm. She never tried to sell them.
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Jul 7, 2017 06:10
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The exurbs are really home to this sort of "farm". It's generally middle class and above folks with huge properties that sell some berries and eggs and fruit here and there so they can claim what ever tax breaks or zoning allowances for being a "farm"
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Jul 7, 2017 06:16
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Baronjutter posted:The exurbs are really home to this sort of "farm". It's generally middle class and above folks with huge properties that sell some berries and eggs and fruit here and there so they can claim what ever tax breaks or zoning allowances for being a "farm" And whatever horseshit loophole that allows them to drive around in a pile of garish poo poo they call a farm truck.
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Jul 7, 2017 07:04
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Yeah.. you definitely don't see that in Saskatchewan, it's mostly grain out here which requires quite a bit of land to be profitable. No fruit farms out here.
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Jul 7, 2017 07:18
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Infinite Karma posted:That seems uselessly vague. I live in a condo, but I could put a handful of avocado trees in my 300 s.f. backyard and grow $1000 of avocados a year... why is every property with outdoor space not considered a farm? From the article: quote:Part of the problem with the broad definition we use now is that it’s difficult to tell the difference between real farms and ones that exist only on paper. So why not make a stricter definition and investigate whether the farms in question are actually realistically capable of producing $1000 of food, or move the threshold higher? quote:In 2009, $200 million for land-grant-university-based agricultural research and $1.3 billion for conservation programs were divvied up to the states based in part on each state’s number of farms. A change in the definition of “farm” could leave states like Texas with less of that pie. So there are economic reasons, as well as cultural reasons, for suburban areas to cosplay as farm areas.
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Jul 7, 2017 15:02
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:Because you would have to actually plant avocado trees. glowing-fish posted:From the article:
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Jul 7, 2017 19:01
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Infinite Karma posted:Presumably you don't call 1-800-IMA-FARM to register as a farm for the Agricultural Census... they gather the data themselves, or poll people to get their statistics. If that's their methodology, why are there not literally tens of millions of small farms? Besides culture war dick-waving, is there any difference between claiming you're a non-producing micro-farm and not? Someone who knows a lot more about the USDA and stuff would probably have to answer, but I imagine there is a lot of reasons why a private person or a government would want to keep the number of farms high. There might be differences between tax rates between farms and straight residences, differences in grants or programs for individuals. Or, as the article stated, governments get a lot of money that way.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:50
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glowing-fish posted:Someone who knows a lot more about the USDA and stuff would probably have to answer, but I imagine there is a lot of reasons why a private person or a government would want to keep the number of farms high. There might be differences between tax rates between farms and straight residences, differences in grants or programs for individuals. Or, as the article stated, governments get a lot of money that way. Land you claim for an agricultural homestead costs less in taxes than land that is idle or used for fields.
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Jul 7, 2017 19:59
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glowing-fish posted:This might have been posted here before, but: So isn't this basically everyone who keeps horses as pets?
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Jul 7, 2017 20:06
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Xae posted:Land you claim for an agricultural homestead costs less in taxes than land that is idle or used for fields. When I said I knew a person that claimed to be a farm, they were claiming it on their taxes. I would assume any one who want statistics just asks the IRS for the number farms people claim.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:09
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Maybe it's just the area I was raised in by 95% of the farms that are around here are legitimate operations that people are making a living off of. People aren't using these farms a tax breaks.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:11
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Vargatron posted:Maybe it's just the area I was raised in by 95% of the farms that are around here are legitimate operations that people are making a living off of. People aren't using these farms a tax breaks. What area do you live in? Because, the census actually keeps careful records on this. Here is a pdf showing the number of farms on every county in Missouri (I picked Missouri because it would seem to be in the middle geographically and agriculturally...a good mixture of large grain farms, and also smaller orchard/vegetable farms), describing the number of farms, and also the income generation for each of those farms. https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_County_Level/Missouri/st29_2_001_001.pdf In most of those counties, a quarter to a third of the farms report under 2500 dollars a year income. Maybe 10 or 20 percent report over $50,000 in income. It would be interesting to see if there are areas where the majority of the farms were primary income farms, but I don't know where that would be. There is also a category for "principal operator-days worked off farm", with two answers, "any" and "200 days or more". In the first cases, most of them have some other job besides working off the farm, and 33% of the farms have the principal operator working off farm 200 days or more. glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 20:30
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glowing-fish posted:What area do you live in? Kansas maybe?
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Jul 7, 2017 20:33
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ColoradoCleric posted:Kansas maybe? https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_County_Level/Kansas/st20_2_001_001.pdf Statewide, Kansas has around 62,000 farms. 18,000, or a little less than a third, are under 2500 dollars a year. Around 22,000, or a little over a third, are more than 50,000 dollars a year. In 30,000 of those, the primary occupation of the principal operator was farming, and in 32,000, it was "Other". 38,000 of those operators worked off farm, and 26,000 of them worked off farm more than 200 days a year. Even in Kansas, a third of farms are clearly hobby farms. (Just looked up Iowa...50% of farms in Iowa are over 50K a year, which is higher than in most states, but still means that only half of the farms in Iowa are something that a person could live off of) glowing-fish fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 20:44
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ColoradoCleric posted:Kansas maybe? North Dakota has laws against corporate owned farms, so I imagine they have a lot of money making family farms.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:48
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Upstate South Carolina actually.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:51
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:North Dakota has laws against corporate owned farms, so I imagine they have a lot of money making family farms. North Dakota also has a stronger than average amount of farms providing an income, but even in North Dakota it is only 50% above the 50K mark. I mean, we can move it down a little, because if you live on a farm in North Dakota, the cost of living is going to be low, and if you own the farmhouse, you aren't paying rent. Move it down to 25000 a year as our benchmark as a primary-income farm, and we get...an extra 2000 out of 30,000 farms includes, for 60% instead of 50%.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:54
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Vargatron posted:Upstate South Carolina actually. On the whole, South Carolina seems to have a low percentage of farmers as active farmers: https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_2_County_Level/South_Carolina/st45_2_001_001.pdf More than 50% of its farms make less than 2500 a year, and less than 15% of them make more than 50,000 a year. Of course, this is as defined by the USDA. It could be that of things that people would by common sense define as a farm, the percentage that are economically viable is much higher. It could be that 95% of things that you think of as farms actually are productive farms, but that is because you are discounting your neighbor who keeps goats and sells carrots at a road side stand.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:59
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In the southeast it is common for people who own small plots to rent several acres to big commercial operations. I suspect that accounts for a lot of those making less than 2500 a year, their land really is in production but the owner hardly does anything more than collect the check. This is common in cotton production at least.
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Jul 7, 2017 21:54
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glowing-fish posted:Right, but then what are the specific challenges faced by rural people? It's not really that rural people have different problems, it's that people care more about the same problems when they happen to rural people. Why? Well, feel free to think about it and draw your own conclusions, but some possibilities include "rural areas have disproportionate political power per person" and "rural areas are popularly perceived to be more white, safe, and self-reliant than the cities", not to mention "a number of very powerful lobbies and interest groups have their roots in rural areas".
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Jul 7, 2017 23:56
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Main Paineframe posted:It's not really that rural people have different problems, it's that people care more about the same problems when they happen to rural people. Yep. Rural poverty is framed as unfairly imposed and special but it's the exact same mechanism that causes some cities to depopulate and have large social problems - sometimes a geographic area just isn't that economically viable anymore and we haven't implemented a social safety net to deal with the effects of that. When it happens in a city it's the cultural depravity of minorities who should pull up their pants and get a job - when it's in rural areas it's good honest hard working Americans being destroyed by the government.
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Jul 8, 2017 06:58
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Vargatron posted:Speaking of pro-choice, I remember driving through Kentucky last year and there was a gigantic billboard to the effect of "God Weeps for his 350,000 aborted babies this year". You can't swing a dead cat in the upper midwest without hitting a billboard about how many days from conception a baby has <insert characteristic of people> so don't abort.
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Jul 10, 2017 05:49
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When I lived in Minneapolis, the neighborhood bar I frequented (because I'm a cheap bastard that loves sports but hates cable) had full view of a billboard from the front windows. Usually they had some manner of awful pro-birth nonsense. "My heartbeat (sic) 11 days after conception!" The sentiment was irritating, but every one of them had some sort of mechanical error in the slogan and that was infuriating.
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Jul 10, 2017 06:04
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Yep, those are the ones. Same group managed to get the shittiest possible custom license plate design past the DOT too. 
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Jul 10, 2017 07:25
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Liquid Communism posted:Yep, those are the ones. Could one not order that and then scrape off the word "life"?
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Jul 10, 2017 07:50
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i am harry posted:Could one not order that and then scrape off the word "life"? You have to paint Xs over the kids' eyes too.
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Jul 10, 2017 07:56
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:You have to paint Xs over the kids' eyes too. Counterpoint: You have to live in Iowa.
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Jul 10, 2017 18:12
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Guest2553 posted:Counterpoint: You have to live in Iowa. Choose life license plates are available in something like 28 states and most have the crayon kids. Altering it though could run you afoul of state license plate tampering laws.
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Jul 10, 2017 18:19
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In addition, you'd be giving money to those groups and why would you do that?
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Jul 10, 2017 18:40
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Main Paineframe posted:It's not really that rural people have different problems, it's that people care more about the same problems when they happen to rural people. Bingo. If I have a problem, I just go talk to the mayor. Seriously. Not in some weird made up fantasy scenario. I literally go to his office and say "Hey, Jon, what's up with ..." and we get it fixed or we don't. If he isn't around, I go call up one of the town councilmen. Like this, basically, but less Australian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_O3BA5e28 And, as noted in the OP, I'm no one special: I don't own a factory or a sports team or a huge amount of land or anything. But due to the smaller scale, my ability to exert political pressure is much more effective. If he doesn't listen to me, he's going to hear it at church on Sunday, he's going to hear it at the bar he drinks at, he's going to hear it from the chamber of commerce... I can't imagine that happening in a city. Now, imagine you're a US senator or a representative: would you rather try to keep 39,250,017 people in a diverse range of places and ideologies happy (California), which works out to about 738,581 people per house seat, or deal with 585,501 folks who are all pretty homogeneous (Wyoming), which works out to 585,501 per house seat. You just get more bang for your buck with the rural areas, currently. If the gerrymandering laws get changed, the House will look very different, but the Senate was designed to favor the less populated states.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:20
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Toph Bei Fong posted:You just get more bang for your buck with the rural areas, currently. If the gerrymandering laws get changed, the House will look very different, but the Senate was designed to favor the less populated states. It's interesting how the Senate has disproportionately more power than the House due to this. Two senators from RI have just the same amount of pull than the ones from CA despite the differences in population.
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Jul 11, 2017 16:26
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What Happened when Walmart Left isn't the best article, but it does illustrate how rural folks have complex relationships with places like walmart. Just for a moment you can see the people getting angry that profit was all the company cared about, but the author felt like poorly describing the forest was more important than a real analysis. There is an intersection between this kind of stuff and healthcare, however. If medicaid is cut like the senate proposal wants, "managed decline" will be a decision made for us.
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Jul 12, 2017 12:53
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 You can walk across the country from one ocean to another and never enter a blue county. You can also walk across the country and never speak to a single person.
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Jul 20, 2017 14:27
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Toph Bei Fong posted:
maps like these always make me lol at the ludicrous size of san bernandino county in california. it's the size of a small nation!!!
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Jul 20, 2017 17:50
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Chakan posted:"managed decline" We call this "Detroit"
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Jul 20, 2017 17:58
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Chakan posted:What Happened when Walmart Left isn't the best article, but it does illustrate how rural folks have complex relationships with places like walmart. The thing that struck me most about that article is how much it doesn't say, how much it purposely tiptoes around for the sake of maintaining the narrative. For all the stories it tells about a region devastated by the departure of Wal-Mart, the truth is that the store in question employed no more than 300 people in a county of 18,000 and was only open for a bit over 10 years, and that McDowell County has been in economic freefall for sixty years. The people interviewed hint at this (for example, Nicole Banks mentions that processed foods are popular again now that Wal-Mart is gone), but the writer seems to avoid acknowledging that there was a time before Wal-Mart in McDowell County. And quite a time it was. Hell, JFK mentioned it in one of his speeches about poverty, and it was one of the major targets of LBJ's War on Poverty. The article mentions that the county's population dropped from 100k in 1950 to just 18k today; what it doesn't mention is that most of those losses happened from 1950-1970 and 1980-2000, while the Wal-Mart only opened in 2005. Another thing that caught my eye is how little attention the article pays to Kimball, the place where the Wal-Mart actually was. They found their way out to interview a few people half an hour away in Hensley, a place so small that no one has even bothered to figure out how many people live there, but the only mention of Kimball is a passing reference to how much tax revenue they lost; aside from references to Welch and Hensley, most of the article talks about McDowell County as a whole. It's an interesting omission, considering that at its peak the Wal-Mart employed more people than the entire population of Kimball. Of course, Kimball is majority-black and significantly poorer than most of the rest of mostly-white McDowell County, so maybe it didn't quite fit the story?
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Jul 20, 2017 18:55
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