I’ll argue the opposite of Keikat… these towns are in decline. The problem is - modern agriculture has changed. Traditional family farms are on the decline. With mechanization, farms are bigger and more automated, and the current belief that the goal of a “good education” is college, many young people leave and never come back. It’s a factor that has been accelerating for almost a century. Some places may have trouble getting employees - not because they are doing well, but because between a fracking boom cycle in the upper Midwest and loss of younger population, there is nobody.
Some farmers are good money managers, smart, and are doing well. Some aren’t. But the jobs we associate with “rich” or “upper middle class” tend to congregate in the larger cities, and of course the high-tech boom has made this worse. The population may be stable in small towns for now, but the average age seems to be increasiing.
I always wondered about that; in college, I was a RA in the university’s freshman honors dorm for 3 years, and there were a remarkable number of small-towners represented.
I only remember a small handful who intended to go back to their hometowns to make their lives, and the majority of those were involved with agriculture, or some other small-town type career- teaching, etc… One woman did end up getting a medical degree and becoming a small town doctor.
The vast, vast majority did end up going through school, graduating, and ending up in a big city somewhere.
My Dad would worry about the brain drain of Mobridge. The best & brighest &the go-getters leave and after a few generations he believed it made a difference.
The people who stayed and are making a decent albiet modest living tend to be working for the schools or hospitals. There aren’t just a lot of other opportunities which doesn’t bode well. A town can’t go on forever living off outside tax dollars coming in.
My brother taught school while establishing his ranch and now with taking over Dad’s operation he was able to quit the day job but his wife still works for the local schools as a speech pathologist. He’s 41 and I can’t think of anyone involved in production ag that is younger than him which is another worrying sign.
I was going to post much the same thing. The chamber of commerce and larger employers in my county very much talk about the brain drain - the smartest and most ambitious young people leaving for metropolitan areas. Who can blame them; I’ve told both of my kids they should look at growing metro areas when they graduate college, and leave this stagnant region in their rear-view mirror.
Agriculture is thriving, and there are some very good jobs for smart, ambitious young people, including those with university ag degrees. But the number of ag jobs is much smaller than it used to be. The industry still accounts for a lot of economic activity, including tremendously expensive machinery, but the number of jobs and total payroll keeps shrinking.
As you indicate, many of the decent jobs in rural counties are in the health care industry, public schools, or government, which tend to be the largest employers (if a major manufacturer doesn’t dominate the market) other than Walmart.
I used to have a big ag processor as a client (I work in advertising), and I did a lot of research interviews with farmers about 10 years ago. These were grain farmers (mostly corn/soybeans, but some wheat farmers, as well), though I suspect that the general trends would have been similar for other sorts of farming.
The gist was this: if you want to be a farmer (i.e., owning a farming operation, as opposed to working on a farm, or working at a ag company), about the only way you can do it now is to inherit an operation from your parents. The start-up costs are just too high (machinery, land – even if you’re just renting it, seed, and fuel), and very few lenders would be willing to loan the amount of money that’d be required to start a new farming operation, especially given that every farmer faces the possibility of being financially wiped out by a single bad growing season.
A number of farmers told me stories about young men and women from their communities who loved farming, and dreamed of becoming farmers. But, because they weren’t actually from families who already owned farms, those young people, without exception, wound up having to pursue other careers, which often wound up taking them out of the community.
The cycle is different here. Children of long-time families tend to scamper away, get their career started, marry… and come back here for a decade or two to raise their family. Then they might move away again as empty-nesters.
We’re in the smaller class of residents who came from outside to raise a family here, and I could see our (last two) kids coming back here in ten-twelve years to join the cicada cycle.
My next-door neighbor put in his 20 in a Southern state police force and is semi-retired here at about 45. Raising kids.
This strikes me as quite accurate. But I would argue that your definition of “being a farmer” is too narrowly defined as only the guy or family who owns the farm. Being a farmer has to include employees who work for the big agricultural giants, as well as smaller, regional operations (though still very large compared to old family farms). I live in dairy farming country, and the number of “farms” has shrunk incredibly, even as the dairy production has increased. There are fewer family farms, and the two or three big operations keep gobbling up land and farms. When I was young, a decent size dairy farm had 100 or maybe 200 cows. These couple of local families each now have 20,000 or so cows spread all over the county.
They are running truly large businesses, with machinery, transportation and employee issues that were unheard of decades ago. I’m not saying it’s “good” from a cultural standpoint, but they employ managers, technicians and other employees in addition to the “grunt” type of farm laborers we probably think about.
This describes my situation. My wife and I moved “home” when our kids were reachingschool age so we could raise them near their grandparents, aunts and uncles. Now that the kids are in college, my wife and I are thinking about going somewhere else. I don’t expect either kid to stay here, but who knows.
Is this really so new, though? Rural areas tend to have high birthrates, and the best and brightest have tended to leave for economic opportunities elsewhere for generations. Today, that opportunity is less likely to be an actual city and more likely to include a suburb or exurb somewhere.
Well, I always think of the small Midwestern town that had the same population for decades. Sociologists eventually found out why: when a girl got pregnant, a guy left town.
I’m another native originally from South Dakota, this time Milbank in the NE part of the state. Its population of 3500 serves the local agriculture industry, has granite quarries (although China really hurt them with cheap stone), and a number of small industries. There are a few franchise restaurants (Hardees, Subway, Taco Bell), but no McDonald’s, no Walmart, no Applebees or equivalent. My high school graduating class (40 years ago) was 110, while this year’s class is 70.
They do a lot of self-promotion: “You’ll Like Milbank” slogans, here’s our new hospital, our new recreation center, our summer festival, so there’s lots of things for young families. The local weekly newspaper is thriving. They’re currently running a series of articles on “those who stayed/came back to live here” as success stories.
One problem is the aging of the town. The fastest growing age group is senior citizens, which does provide the need for nursing care at least.
They’re fighting corporate farming, with about half of the community for them, see the future of agriculture, and others lamenting the demise of the owner-operator farmer. It’s become a lifestyle discussion as much as anything.
I’d classify the town as sustaining, not necessarily thriving (as it was in the 1950’s and 1960’s), but no danger of becoming a ghost town. The locals would probably disagree and call it vibrant and enjoy living there.
What is it about the magic word "growth"that makes it the be-all-end-all of a town? If every small town experienced Growth, it wouldn’t be a small town, would it?
I once worked in Kansas City. 20 mles out of town was Blue Springs, where I lived, along with about 25,000 more people who did not want to live in a big city. But 25,000 made it a big city, and I moved further out, to Oak Grove, where people went to flee from Blue Springs.
There was a municipal election in Oak Grove, in which each candidae was given a paragraph to state their goals and promises in theh paper. All 12 of them said Growth. Yet, every single voter had moved to Oak Grove hoping it would not grow, but would remain a quiet little town smaller than Blue Springs.
Nobody wanted Growth in Oak Grove, except the dozen business owners who were the candidates in the municipal election. By now people are probably fleeing from the Growth in Oak Grove, out to Bates City.
So, have you considered that maybe Mobridge is decent and stable precisely because it is not burdened by dreaded Growth? People like you, who want growth and bright lights and traffic, have already gone on to make someplace else grow, and left Mobridge to those who are perfectly happy without growth.
“Many second homes / summer folks” doesn’t necessarily equal “tourist” or “resort”. The town where I live has an official population about 3K people which is more along the lines of “2k in the winter, 4k in the summer”. Many of the summer-and-weekend birds are children of the town who live in the near regional capital during the school year and move back to the home they inherited in the village during Easter and the summer (it’s high enough in the mountains that A/C is not needed, and a much better place to let the kids play in the street). I’m a rarity in that I’m not local, but there are enough part-time homes that mine doesn’t look strange (I usually spend my time wherever else per job requirements).
There is only one hotel (not in the village but in a tiny one that’s part of the same township) and two buildings which get rented as managed apartments (“aparthotels”), often to people from Elsewhere who work in the village; they have both long-term and short-term rates.
A friend/neighbor is exploring the feasibility of offering a bed&breakfast/farm experience on her family farm. People would pay for the opportunity to live and work on a farm. She is currently working on the cost increase to her insurance, which may make the plan cost prohibitive.
I don’t think that’s what bump meant by “tourist/resort town”. Sure, the summer/weekend population is bigger than the year round population , but it doesn’t seem to be so many more people that the town’s economy depends on the tourist population. I once went to a resort town out of season and more than half the businesses were either closed or only open on weekends (including fast food places) - which makes sense when the year-round population is under 1000 and the summer population is closer to 50,000. That town’s economy was totally dependent on tourists. A town is going to be dependent on tourism long before the in-season population reaches 50x the year-round population, but I don’t think an additional 2000 people is going to cause it, even if it’s a doubling of the population.
