Little farms on the prairie bow to a Wal-Mart era
'Promised land' struggles to diversify - and survive
NICODEMUS, KAN. –
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.
"What we have in our rural communities today ... is essentially a kind of colonial economy," says Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames. "What we expect from these communities is to produce these raw materials as cheaply as possible and then transport those raw materials out so value is added somewhere else."
Critics call this "corporate agriculture" (although it's really commodity agriculture out here, since families still mostly run the grain and cattle operations). And before you pooh-pooh it, consider how well it works for most of the country. Farmers raise bulk food with labor-saving technology that lets them spread their costs over larger and larger tracts of land. Big corporations buy that cheap food and process it into branded items that supermarket chains sell. The end result: US consumers spend only about 8 percent of their budgets on food - lower than the rate in any other nation.
The challenge lies here in the heartland frontier. Critics argue that commodity agriculture isn't environmentally sustainable. Economically, it has proved devastating to rural towns: Bigger and bigger farms mean fewer and fewer farm families to support small-town merchants and rural schools. To reverse the decline, experts warn, the region needs something beyond megafarms.
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"The big question is: How does this region go beyond a commodity economy?" says Mark Drabenstott of the Center for the Study of Rural America, a unit of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Other parts of rural America have diversified into manufacturing and services. Farm wives work in town. Farmers themselves are taking second jobs: Nearly half of all farm operators now say their major occupation is something other than farming.
But out here on the frontier Plains, where a commute to the city might take two hours - one way - second jobs are harder to come by. Less than a quarter of producers on the northern Plains have significant employment except for the farm.
That's why, more and more, the remaining farm-dependent counties are in the frontier Plains. In the 1950s, two-thirds of the nation's nonmetropolitan counties were farm-dependent (at least 20 percent of business earnings came from agriculture). Today, only a seventh of nonmetro counties remain farm-dependent, and nearly a third of those lie here on the Plains frontier.
For the frontier's towns to prosper again, the region will have to figure out what to do with its vast expanse of farmland. Boutique farming represents one possibility. If farmers can tie directly into niche markets the way Alexander and his partners have, then they can keep more of the wealth in rural America. Maybe it's brown eggs for the organic market. Or poultry raised the old-fashioned way rather than in huge confinement facilities.
"There's a growing market of purchasers who increasingly want to buy food because of some differentiated quality," says Mr. Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center. It still represents less than 1 percent of farm production, he estimates. But even 5 percent of the huge food industry would pump millions of dollars into rural economies.
Already, some cooperative ventures are showing promise. Organic Valley Family of Farms in rural Wisconsin has grown to become a $125 million co-op of more than 500 organic farmers spread over 17 states. In North Dakota, Dakota Growers Pasta Company processes and sells the durum wheat its member stockholders raise. Since it sells a higher-value pasta, rather than bulk wheat, the cooperative gives its farmer-members a larger share of the consumer retail dollar.
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TOM BROWN - STAFF
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