How?
Karen and I once did a workshop in a county in Iowa that I am sure giff57 knows all about. The question was: how do we stop our small towns from dying? We talked a lot about physical issues - infrastructure and design - but everyone was aware that those are necessary, but insufficient conditions for a revival of the local economy. We even talked about zoning. But as it wound down, I finally said, "folks, how can you tell a soybean from here, from a soybean from Brazil? There was silence. I was too polite to do it, though in retrospect I should have, but I could also have said, "folks what have we eaten at this workshop that was produced and processed locally?" Answer: nothing. We are standing on top of five feet of astonishly great topsoil and we didn't eat a single local product in two days.
97+ percent of that county is cultivated for crops that are exported without one penny of value added. Karen and I did an informal windshield survey: less than one-third of the farms we drove by had its own vegetable garden. The reality is, and it is painful, that folks in those counties that are losing population long ago surrendered their fate to outside corporations. I watched it happen when I was a kid in rural KS. The only way back is to start using their assets for themselves. And to attract the entrepreneurss who left to come back these little rural counties are goign to have to make huge investments in parks, trails, pools, rec centers, schools, etc. The one asset they have is affordable housing, but that won't work without the infrastructure to go with it. Given the costs, most of these places won't come back without substantial outside help - which means an active rural development policy.
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Originally posted by Lee Nellis
