I stopped by recently to talk with a farmer friend I once photographed working on his farm.
We got to talking about the loss of the old ways of life in rural communities, the death of the family farm, the corporate take-over of agriculture, the shuttering of Main Street, the devastating impact of the trade pacts and megastores on rural life, the hollowing out of small towns and old cities.
The farmer, a thoughtful and generous man, is a supporter of President Trump. We know each other well, and I asked him to try to explain to me how President Trump became the champion and savior of rural America, when, like me, he had never set foot on a farm for almost all of his life.
I wasn’t looking to trash the President, I said, I was just curious to know how this happened.
“Oh, it’s easy,” he said. “Nobody else ever spoke about us or to us for years, they all sat back and watched our whole way of life disappear, it was their policy, and they clapped and laughed. They decided we were too small to live in the new economy. So soon, there won’t be any of us left.”
If you live in rural America, as I do, you don’t have to wonder why the 2016 election happened, as my city friends do all the time. It’s pretty obvious.
Rural America is a smoldering wreck, the mostly ignored and forgotten Dresden of modern America. Our cities are full of rural people, the exodus from rural America is one of the great migrations in history.
In rural America, the downtowns have been wiped out by Amazon and Wal-Mart and factories rushing to Mexico, their children slaughtered by drugs and overdoses, the jobs gone, the hospitals and doctors shutting down, their children leaving, the farms dying, etc. etc.
As the coasts fill up and many cities grow more prosperous and more vibrant, the heartland, long the spirit of the country, is bleeding out. No one is doing a thing about it.
Almost every small town in America is a third-world small town now, no jobs, no hope, no future. Rural America America has emptied, fled to the coasts on the cities where there are no callings, only mostly bad jobs working for people who care about nothing but money.
Farmers are starving and killing themselves while 22-year-old college-educated geeks are making millions of dollars a year, making apps that flush our toilet bowls and turn on our lights for us. Why wouldn’t farmers be angry, why wouldn’t demagogues sprout?
The truth is, there is an elite in America, and it is elitist. Our media and economists and politicians wrote off the catastrophe of rural America as an improvement, a necessary sacrifice to the new economy. They were, to a one, stunned by 2016.
In Ernest Gaines’s novel, A Gathering Of Old Men, set on a sugarcane plantation in rural Louisiana, a black farm worker named Johnny Paul is talking about the community of black field hands that he knew as a growing boy.
“Thirty, forty of us going out in the field with cane knives, hoes, plows – name it. Sunup to sundown, hard, miserable work, but we managed to get it done. We stuck together, shared what little we had, and loved and respected each other.
But look at things today. Where the people? Where the roses? Where the four-o-clocks? The palm of Christians? Where did the people use to sing and pray in the church? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Under them trees back there, that’s where they used to stay, the weeds got it now, just waiting for the tractor to come plow it up.”
Instead of caring for our land and our rural people, as we would do if we understand our dependence on them, “we have not, as a nation, given them so much as a serious thought for more than half a century,” writes the farmer and agricultural activist Wendell Berry in The Way Of Ignorance.
He wrote that in 2005.
Berry said he reads his full share of commentary of politics and economics by accredited experts, and “I can assure you that you will rarely find in any of them even a passing reference to agriculture or forestry. Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge.”
This is why no pundit or cable news gasbag or famed newspaper staff saw 2016 coming. If you live where I live, you couldn’t miss it if your eyes and ears were open. Trump signs sprouted like dandelions up here.
For decades, the political message to farmers was “get big or get out.” But they didn’t get out, they just waited to get crushed, hanging onto a way of life they could not let go of, and that no one in power cared about.
I am a city boy, I’ve spent most of my life in cities and will always love them, but now, where I live is part of the heart and soul of our country. It isn’t Silicon Valley.
Rural America is sick and bleeding, and I believe we will never be right again if we don’t recognize the importance of what we lost, and do what we have to do to make so much of America whole again.
If we don’t do it, we can already see the consequences. Somebody else will step in to fill the void, and we might not like them at all.
And make no mistake, the way back is complicated. To talk about saving rural America writes Berry, is to accept again and more determinedly than ever, the health of the ecosystem, the farm and the value of the human community as the ultimate standard of agricultural performance.
That’s a tall order in a country whose agricultural system has been shattered by economics and politicians and in a country led by people who refuse to halt or accept the rape of our planet by human greed and human waste.
Jon: I hope you post this on Facebook; I’m forwarding it to everyone I know.
Thanks, everything I write on the blog is posted to Facebook..
This makes me so sad. The US Department of Agriculture is being deliberately torn apart, land policies (and all other policies) are prioritizing and rewarding corporations, and rural America DOES feel the pain.
But there has been a decades long campaign by the right to blame and diminish “government” while government programs that help people are rarely acknowledged, much less celebrated.
Your neighbors aren’t wrong in feeling ignored and left behind, although they are much less marginalized than people of color, with accents, or are non-Christian. And they put their faith in a man whose focus is money for him and his friends. A man who wants them to resent food stamps going to residents of inner cities, and wants them to name poor people walking hundreds of miles to find a better life as an invasion.
While we still have a democracy perhaps we can learn to focus on solutions to hard questions (land policy, energy policy, infrasructure, etc) rather than identifying someone to blame (no need to insert examples here, the list is long and obvious).
Thanks, Jeanne, I so appreciate what you have added here. It is all part of the story that we don’t seem to be talking much about as a nation.
Excellent and timely
I will share this for my 2 farmer friends both struggling to keep the family farms going
A lot of people i know do dome form of self reliance with hunting or raising meat. And growing veggies, processing, then sharing. More than hard work as a problem i see apathy in individuals. Bad choices so easily seen from one step away that people young cannot see why changing to more relevant choices could be more productive. A lot of hard and sad times we create ourselves. Its a mixmaster of hard, fun, worthless, productive, exciting, soul sapping ……effort. every day. While i am not self sufficient i do share back with good people that share with me. And it makes all the difference! I am rural. Probably poor by some peoples standards. Much richer than many around me.
Rich in what i love. Thats the important aspect to be in charge of I think.
Jon, I think this blog was one of your finest contributions offering a deep perspective into our lives. I hope to continue benefiting from your blogs.
Spot on Jon, an excellent and thoughtful essay. Mr. Berry is an American Hero in the very best sense of that often overused and misused approbation. Thank you.
Hi Jon – This is the first time I have commented on your blog and I hope you don’t take offense. I also live in rural America, by choice, after having grown up in a city. The rural America you mourn is not sick and bleeding it is dead. This may sound harsh but the technology that allows you to blog on the internet, podcast and take lovely photos is the same technology that allows three men to farm a thousand acres. Have you seen a 24 row corn planter? It is a GPS driven automated machine that tests the soil pressure for each seed and plants it perfectly. The fully automated ( don’t require a human to drive ) combines and planters are available just hugely expensive. Their price will come down. Unfortunately the farmers you talk with have been hacked, by FOX news and Facebook. Trump may talk about them but he is lying -he won’t save their way of life, it is already dead, the twenty-two year old punks who created code that can learn has seen to that. I too have farmer friends. I like and respect them. They are good people but they are out gunned. Automation isn’t just for auto plants, it is for warehouses and combines, heavy earth movers and eighteen wheelers. I understand their rage and yours. Americans have been taught that technology is good but you and I live in an area where technology will eliminate an entire working population – farmers.
P.S. I’m a retired GIS analyst and programmer
Louise, I’m not clear on why I should take offense at anything you wrote, my only disagreement is that farming is not the only measure of rural life…there are other ways to bring these communities back..family farms are lost, I think, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be life in rural America..you are welcome to agree or disagree here, Louise, the only offense is being nasty, which you are certainly not.
I spent every other weekend growing up on my grandparent’s farm in Central Illinois. They raised angus, milk cows, pigs, and chickens and lived a quiet life working the land. I remember those times with great affection, especially the hours spent in the cellar of the old farmhouse with my sweet grandmother cleaning eggs and packing them in crates. After they passed away, the farm was sold – there are no longer animals being raised on the old Warfield place. The house and big barns have been torn down, replaced by a new house. But these wonderful times live on in my memories, never to be forgotten.
I have a question for anyone weighing in on this conversation that I would so love to have answered. I, too, understood why rural people were enthusiastic about Trump and I was waiting to see if he would actually deliver anything to these good people who have respectfully supported him. We are almost to the end of this man’s four year term and I can’t say I see that he has done a damn thing to help them. There are obviously many other issues about Trump that could be discussed but right here I would love to hear someone tell me what he had done to make good on his promises for rural America.
I think that is mostly true, Wendy, he has done some things for farmers especially, but I think history will show that they have been betrayed once more. farmer friend said he knows who and what Trump is, he is just their last hope…at least he pretends..
The economy, it’s always the economy. Since NAFTA and China with it’s most favored nation status, I saw many mom and pop American businesses fall by the way side. It wasn’t just farmers that suffered. It was men and women who’s best abilities involved blue collar work. They lost their homes, found they couldn’t feed their families. When the recession came they bled first. Now there are jobs again and manufacturing jobs are coming back from overseas. We can get good quality American made products again instead of only substandard products from China. Workers have so much work they can afford to change jobs and employers are offering extra benefits to draw good workers.