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Ten Reasons Why Urban North Dakota Ought to be Concerned About Rural North Dakota

by Curt Stofferahn

On July 2nd, the New York Times published an article about rural North Dakota on its front page. The avowed purpose of the article was to point out the unevenness of the boom in the American economy. Based on research that I gave the writer, he accurately depicted a booming economy that is uneven in its effects both within the region and between regions. The writer went beyond a mere retelling of the research to include his account of visits with residents in rural communities of northeastern North Dakota.

He depicted a rather dismal state of affairs in this corner of the state which are symptomatic of this unevenness -- population loss, out-migration, loss of family farms, difficulty in earning a living from farming, an aging population, declining rural communities, in-migration of poor Hispanic farm laborers, loss of social organizations, and a lack of hope for the future. But writer stopped there without providing any explanation for the situation nor any hope for the future. He gave the impression that its demise was the inevitable result of economic forces and technological change. At its best, it was an elegiac, sympathetic account.

The reactions to the article have been varied among rural residents who read the article. A few were just pleased that North Dakota made the front page of the New York's Times. Some saw the article as an elegy while others saw it an a obituary. Some were offended that the writer did not go far enough in discussing why this situation has occurred. A few took issue with the economic and technological determinism implicit in the article. Others stated that the writer did not take into account the role of federal policy, or lack thereof, in creating this situation. Still others wished he had looked beyond the despair and hopelessness to discuss ways in which rural North Dakotans are resisting this alleged "inexorable" decline.

Among those initiatives they included efforts to reconstruct the food system through farmer-owned, value added, agricultural processing cooperatives and the development of sustainable, regional food systems; efforts to diversify into high value crops, to organize farmers' production to bargain collectively with agribusinesses, to promote electronic commerce in rural communities, to promote agricultural and rural tourism, to lobby Congress for a change in federal farm policy; and to frame the discussion about what is happening to rural areas in terms of economic and social justice.

Having read the article in the Times, one of my colleagues at the University asked "Why should anyone living in any urban North Dakota city be concerned about what happens in rural North Dakota?" His question was so stunning because those of us who live in rural areas or who are involved in rural organizations think that the answer is so self-evident that there is no point in even asking the question. Evidentially, the answer is not so self-evident, and the constrast between the apparent prosperity in urban North Dakota and the agricultural depression in rural areas gives the impression to some urban residents that the urban areas can succeed economically without rural North Dakota.

Perhaps a definition of rural is in order here, and a number of defintions are used. Often times, rural is defined as areas with less than 2500 population. By that definition, 27 percent of the state's population lives in towns with less than 2500 in population or in open country. One could hardly argue, however, that all communities larger than 2500 are necessarily urban. Towns such as Valley City, Grafton, Wahpeton, Dickinson, and Williston have a more rural than urban character. Another definition uses non-metropolitan as a substitute for rural. By that definition, 57 percent of the state's population lives outside the metropolitan counties of Cass, Grand Forks, Ward, and Burleigh-Morton. Again, this definition is also problematic as within these "metro" counties, we have large pockets of "rural". Finally, another definition of rural refers to the primary economic base. In North Dakota, the greater majority of the non-metropolitan counties (28) have been designated as farming dependent meaning that farming conributes a weighted annual average of 20 percent or more of total labor and proprietor income over a three year period. Addtionally, in terms of economic importance to the state's economy, agriculture contributes 37 percent of the new wealth generated in the state, more than any other single sector. Finally, in terms of land area, the less sparsely settled areas of the state constitute a major portion of the state. However one measures "rural", it still comprises a major component of the state.

Because definitions and relative numbers of rural population and might not be enough to convince urban residents that rural people and places are important to the state, I tried to articulate ten reasons why North Dakota's urban residents ought to be concerned about rural people and places in this state.

First of all, urban residents ought to be concerned about what happens in rural North Dakota because the residents are their relatives, friends and fellow citizens. Most urban residents in the northern Great Plains are at most two generations removed from their rural roots, and therefore they have some connection to rural areas, however remote that connection may be. Whenever any of our fellow citizens, regardless of where they live, experiences some misfortune through no reason of their own, our compassion for their situation should be enough to motivate some expression of concern. Grand Forks residents experienced some of that compassion during the flood of 1997 when they were displaced from their homes. Many were temporarily relocated to surrounding rural communities, and the generosity of our rural citizens was overwhelming. The chronic economic and social disaster in rural areas, while less dramatic as a flood, is equally compelling in the displacement of people from their homes, livelihood, and heritage and ought to generate the same kind of compassion that the flood did for Grand Forks residents.

Secondly, people still live in rural areas, and with declining populations and a declining population base, it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide the necessary services that make rural life tolerable. As a right of citizenship, no resident, regardless of residence, should be deprived of the basics of human existence that we have come to regard as rights. These include transportation, communication, education, health care, and social services. By virtue of their smaller size, rural communities can be laboratories for experimentation in providing services. Typically, programs have been devised on an urban model such that they are not always applicable to rural areas. Through combining public and private resources, the innovative solutions that we devise might may permit us to continue to provide these services.

Third, rural people are the customers, clients, patrons, patients and employees of urban-based businesses, professions, services, and manufacturers. The four major metropolitan counties already have a dominant presence in total retail sales in the state in numbers beyond their combined metropolitan population. The hospitals and medical clinics in the metro areas have catchment areas extending well into their hinterlands. Many adjacent non-metropolian counties are within the labor market and commuting area of the metropolitan counties, and their residents have been a major part of the labor force in these metro areas. In fact, recent labor market studies have documented that metropolitan areas have largely exhausted the existing labor market in the adjacent non-metro areas and that further growth in the labor supply will come from within those who are under-employed or from new migrants from outside the region. Thus, rural people are essential to the continued prosperity of urban areas. The recent North Dakota Rural Life Poll demonstrated that farm families are significantly curtailing or postponing their purchases of farm machinery, automobiles, furniture, household appliances, entertainment, and health care. These impacts have been felt by mainstreet merchants in small and large towns as well as farm machinery manufacturers such as Case-IH. The impacts in urban areas would have been much greater had it not been for the unprecedented diasaster payments appropriated by Congress to make up partially for the failure of the 96 farm bill.

Fourth, out-migration and population loss in rural communities results in under-utilization of existing infrastructure and higher per capita costs of maintaining it. At the same time, increased in-migration to urban areas from rural areas results in the development of new infrastructure and higher property taxes. This under-utilization of sunk assets is a great loss of invested wealth, and building new infrastructure in urban areas to meet the requirements of new urban, formerly rural, residents results in a waste of wealth.

Fifth, much of our culture is embedded in our common rural heritage. So many of our idiomatic expressions have rural roots such that we probably don't even recognize it. Can anyone imagine life in North Dakota without rodeos, county fairs and 4-H Achievement Days, ethnic celebrations, Fourth of July celebrations, Memorial Day observances, and all school reunions? While urban areas do have some of these events, the real community celebrations of these events occur in rural areas. We would be diminished culturally if these kinds of events disappeared, and we would have lost a great deal of our heritage. Europeans recognize the contribution of rural areas to their culture and heritage and are willing to provide transfer payments to keep people on the land and in rural communities. We have not reached that point yet, perhaps because our history is relatively recent and perhaps because we take too much of it for granted. We don't want to turn rural areas into some kind of set piece or museum, however. Their contribution to our culture and heritage only exists to the extent that people actually live there. Attempts to promote agricultural and rural tourism can capitalize on these assets.

Sixth, rural areas provide a great deal of recreational opportunities to urban residents. Hunting in particular is a recreational activity that takes place in rural areas, and the extent to which access to that activity continues is dependent on people living on the land. In addition to providing habitat and feed for game animals, resident farm and ranch operators have been providing hunting access to urban hunters. That access would be greatly reduced if resident farmers and ranchers are replaced with non-resident landowners and operators. Quite a few urban hunters maintain relationships with resident farmers and ranchers just so they have continued access to hunting. It is quite difficult to secure access to absentee owned land when the landowner lives a distance or the renter is not a resident on the land. The mountain states have seen weathy investors buying up scenic or recreation areas just so that they have exclusive access to these areas. These new western land barons have made public access to their lands impossible and have restricted access to public lands adjacent to their lands.

Seventh, a family farm and ranch system provides a resiliency and stability to the food system. Industrial, agricultural systems involved in monoculture crop production or a confined livestock production are locked into particular production practices and marketing channels. When disease, insect infestation, drought, or flood threatens that commodity, or energy costs threaten the marketing system, the entire food system is placed at risk. In addition, a family farm and ranch system provides for more innovation and responsiveness to changing consumer tastes and preferences. When a high percentage of a particular food commodity is controlled by one or a few firms, consumers discover that their prices are fixed through monopoly or oligopoly power rather than a competitive market and that bureaucratic concerns for profit maximization rather than consumer tastes and food safety take precedence.

Eighth, given the right incentives, a family farm and ranch system can be a better steward of the natural resource base than would an industrial agricultural system. Resident owner-operator, family farmers and ranchers, because they are intimately connected to the resource base, are more likely to provide the proper stewardship of that base than non-resident owners or managers of industrial agriculture operations. Stewardship is a widely held value among family farmers, but current agricultural policies and depression-era prices force farmers to engage in production practices they often find are contrary to their beliefs.

Ninth, a family farm and ranch system supports a more vibrant rural economy and rural communities. Research conducted by Goldschmidt in California in the 1940s and confirmed countless times by numerous rural sociologists in the last twenty-five years has conclusively demonstrated that rural communities surrounded by a moderately-sized family farms, as compared to rural communities surrounded by industrial agriculture operations, support more businesses and more social organizations, and they have larger populations, better schools and public services, higher levels of political and civic involvement, more equality in distribution of income and wealth, and less class division. There is worry among some rural observers that the continued growth of industrial agriculture and the out-migration from rural areas will result in the conversion of small towns into rural ghettos populated by those with little human capital and poorly paid farm workers living in substandard housing.

Tenth, some researchers have argued that dispersed ownership of the land by resident owner-operators is a bulwark of democracy. This tenet of Jeffersonian democracy has also been supported in urban areas by researchers who noted that higher levels of home and business ownership promote greater civic and political involvement. Given the declining rates of civic and political engagement in our country, we ought to be encouraging practices which contribute to higher, rather than lower, levels of political and civic engagement. Rural communities in the Great Plains have been characterized by high levels of community participation which helps to build social capital. Researchers have found social capital to as important as other forms of capital in promoting community development, but the chronic rural crisis and the current agricultural depression are depleting rural areas of the social, human and economic capital needed for development.

I would hope that the state's urban residents would be concerned about rural people and places, but we need more than their concern. Urban North Dakota is dependent on rural North Dakota and vice-versa. North Dakota should be seen as a region with reciprocal linkages among its cities and its hinterlands. No urban areas is so self-sufficient that it cannot exist without its hinterlands.