Little farms on the prairie bow to a Wal-Mart era

More than a century ago, some 350 freed slaves left the Kentucky hardscrabble for a new beginning on the Kansas prairie. Promoters billed Nicodemus as "the Promised Land," and while some would-be pioneers turned back as soon as they saw it, most stayed and created the largest exclusively black settlement west of the Mississippi River.

The town prospered for a while, in anticipation of a railroad. But the train never came, and drought, depression, and a postwar exodus reduced its population until its little white schoolhouse had to close in the late 1950s. Today, even the school bus doesn't stop here anymore. And all those 19th-century dreams of agricultural independence have come to rest on the shoulders of one man, Gil Alexander - the last full-time farmer in Nicodemus.

"I'd like to see someone stick with it," he says. But to "any young person who wanted to get into this, I would say, 'Run!' "

While the rise and fall of Nicodemus remains bound up with African-American history (it's now a national historic site), its story resonates everywhere in rural America. Hard times and low prices have repeatedly forced producers off their land and pushed others to farm ever-larger acreages.

This consolidation has created the most efficient industrialized agriculture in the world. But it also represents a leading factor behind the collapse of so many rural towns on the Plains. And the trend will continue, experts warn, unless the region can reverse its drive toward megafarms or find some other way to diversify its threadbare economy.

These currents pose the greatest challenge to the Plains frontier (counties with fewer than six people per square mile). This is where a good crop still makes local retailers smile, where an accident to one farmer routinely pulls neighbors from miles around to plant his corn or combine his wheat, and where experiments are under way to preserve this way of life by reengineering agriculture toward smallness.

To some, these solutions can revive a semblance of the old Jeffersonian ideal, where rural communities - indeed, the nation - supposedly thrive because family farmers own their land and control their destinies.

In reality, however, farmers' future rests largely in the hands of others. "As people's preferences change ... that drives agricultural production," says Mitchell Morehart of the US Agriculture Department's economic research service.

In other words, consumers will determine whether frontier farmers keep producing bulk commodities, or start growing specialized "boutique" food.

Chances are you've never heard of one boutique product: Promised Land Flour. It's made from wheat that Mr. Alexander and part-time farmers here grow, grind, and sell directly to consumers. Their "mill" is so small - "You can almost get this thing in a car," one observer says - that Alexander won't show it. But the flour sells well, particularly during Nicodemus's annual emancipation festival, which draws hundreds of the town's descendants from as far away as Alaska and Washington, D.C.

"If we wanted to, we could probably run [the mill] full time and sell all the flour we'd put out," Alexander says. He estimates the wheat he converts to flour brings $15 a bushel as opposed to the wheat he sells in bulk, which goes to large wheat processors and might earn him $3.40 a bushel. Unfortunately, the first approach takes far more time, effort, and skill to do successfully.

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