Why rural areas need the cities

[hal2kilo]

So they can have something to point their fingers at, and blame for their misfortunes?

 

[Jhhnn]

Most people are passive and Trump, while creating the the big lie about the election results which created the environment for the insurrection, did not actively encourage armed revolution enough to truly inspire his cult base to show up in the first place. It was a rag tag group of the most hardcore, which he then encouraged to assault the capitol. He also did make changes in the Department of Defense personnel enough to slow down a response to an assault. He was hoping for a bigger turnout. They were simply disorganized. That's all. Most of the GQP sympathizes with the insurrectionists, they just didn't have enough guidance to show up with them on that day. To convince a bunch of people that it's possible to overthrow the American government would take more organization and more organized leadership. And they got within minutes of halting the peaceful transfer of power anyway.

If Trump actively campaigned for an armed revolution, it would have been a bloodbath.

Don't be so naive.

Gawd. Trump did everything he possibly could to froth up the faithful. It just didn't work. That's because the wannabee revolutionaries are all hat & no cattle. Talking shit is a conservative fashion statement.

 

[MrSquished]

Gawd. Trump did everything he possibly could to froth up the faithful. It just didn't work. That's because the wannabee revolutionaries are all hat & no cattle. Talking shit is a conservative fashion statement.

No he did not do much of the direct calls to violence - until that day, but enough people were not there. People need that leadership to truly believe they have it in them to do this crazy thing. If Trump had an organized group of rabble rousers getting his cult riled up and believing Jan 6th was going to be a real call to action, it would have been a whole other spectacle.

 

[vi edit]

I don't have anything really "new" to add to the discussion other than my perspective. I grew up on a farm At the tender age of 5 I could look out my window down on the pasture to the majestic scene of cows humping. I've de-tassled corn over summers as a young teenager. "Rowed" soybeans walking down them with a shovel and digging out weeds. Bailed and stacked hay. Did 4 years of FFA and attended national FFA conventions and various farm related contests.

I now live dead in the middle of one of the more densely packed areas in the country. I bike almost everywhere here. Grow plants in stock tanks along the 5' easement on my property. Enjoy hitting the river with my family on paddleboards/kayaks. Ect.

To cut through some hyperbole, no cities cannot exist without rural areas. They simply do not have the ground required to provide that much agricultural products to sustain food supplies. That includes space for dairy cows to produce milk/milk products. Chicken farms. Giant fields of wheat and soy that go into producing other products that are staples of other things we consume. Forests for lumber. And so on. Saying cities can exist without those being supplied is just flat out wrong.

That said, there's going to be a reckoning coming. We're already well on that path. Hell I'm part of it. The distributed and rural nature of small town America is going to continue to dwindle. The economy of scale of commercial farming/forestry/ect is rapidly reducing human resource requirements. Small farms are rapidly drying up. There simply are not many good jobs in rural areas. Employers are struggling to retain talent in rural areas. There continues to be a significant exodus from small rural towns to larger urban centers. Urban development will continue to be the heartbeat and economic centers for most states. The access to goods and services, jobs, airports, schools, ect is just objectively superior than rural communities can provide.

As we start to handle existential threats like climate change and decade long droughts, more consolidation is going to be the direction we have to go. We are going to have to start making sacrifices in what we consume. Things like almonds take a ridiculous amount of water to grow. We're going to have to take a long hard look at our consumption of high resource demanding products and figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze there. Fruits and vegetables will probably need to move to a more seasonal nature and where appropriate to the climate. We will have to change how we look at our supply chains and the endless buffet of choices we have now.

Same thing for travel/commuting. Eventually populations are going to have to accept the reality and start compressing into tighter urban cores. Individual houses will not be sustainable. We'll need to get more creative in building materials and planning. The way things were 50 years ago isn't going to work 50 years from now.

Now where does all that tie in to this thread? People like me have to be the envoys for this. People that have walked both sides of the isle. A city dweller that hasn't left their metro area has no idea how rural life is. Same for a rural person that barely leaves their bubble. They just see whatever Fox news tells them is burning down in Portland. As a country we are going to have to figure this out, and pretty quick because we are on a real bad trajectory of division. Cities are going to continue to draw young away from rural areas and keep them. Agriculture as we know it is going to continue to refine it's commercial efficiency and further reduce the need for human labor. That just further minimizes the need to actually live in rural areas.

Which is really the debate here. We need rural areas, but we don't necessarily need large numbers of people to live in rural areas. It's just an ever growing strain on existing infrastructure and support. The "last mile" costs to those communities for water, utility and deliveries lucratively high vs urban centers. There are counties here in Oregon with 1500 people. It's not possible for a county that size to actually sustain it's own weight without drawing from others. Their growth has been flat while others have seen negative growth over 20 years and those will continue.

We need to engage in good faith, and mature conversations about where this country is, where it's going, and how that looks in 50 years. But right now most born and raised rural Americans won't budge. A lot of people born in the city look down on them as backwoods idiots in a dying community and say good luck with that. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We are going to have to completely re-write how we align our agriculture infrastructure, and how we go about future urban development and addressing our dissonance to rural communities.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I don't have anything really "new" to add to the discussion other than my perspective. I grew up on a farm At the tender age of 5 I could look out my window down on the pasture to the majestic scene of cows humping. I've de-tassled corn over summers as a young teenager. "Rowed" soybeans walking down them with a shovel and digging out weeds. Bailed and stacked hay. Did 4 years of FFA and attended national FFA conventions and various farm related contests.

I now live dead in the middle of one of the more densely packed areas in the country. I bike almost everywhere here. Grow plants in stock tanks along the 5' easement on my property. Enjoy hitting the river with my family on paddleboards/kayaks. Ect.

To cut through some hyperbole, no cities cannot exist without rural areas. They simply do not have the ground required to provide that much agricultural products to sustain food supplies. That includes space for dairy cows to produce milk/milk products. Chicken farms. Giant fields of wheat and soy that go into producing other products that are staples of other things we consume. Forests for lumber. And so on. Saying cities can exist without those being supplied is just flat out wrong.

That said, there's going to be a reckoning coming. We're already well on that path. Hell I'm part of it. The distributed and rural nature of small town America is going to continue to dwindle. The economy of scale of commercial farming/forestry/ect is rapidly reducing human resource requirements. Small farms are rapidly drying up. There simply are not many good jobs in rural areas. Employers are struggling to retain talent in rural areas. There continues to be a significant exodus from small rural towns to larger urban centers. Urban development will continue to be the heartbeat and economic centers for most states. The access to goods and services, jobs, airports, schools, ect is just objectively superior than rural communities can provide.

As we start to handle existential threats like climate change and decade long droughts, more consolidation is going to be the direction we have to go. We are going to have to start making sacrifices in what we consume. Things like almonds take a ridiculous amount of water to grow. We're going to have to take a long hard look at our consumption of high resource demanding products and figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze there. Fruits and vegetables will probably need to move to a more seasonal nature and where appropriate to the climate. We will have to change how we look at our supply chains and the endless buffet of choices we have now.

Same thing for travel/commuting. Eventually populations are going to have to accept the reality and start compressing into tighter urban cores. Individual houses will not be sustainable. We'll need to get more creative in building materials and planning. The way things were 50 years ago isn't going to work 50 years from now.

Now where does all that tie in to this thread? People like me have to be the envoys for this. People that have walked both sides of the isle. A city dweller that hasn't left their metro area has no idea how rural life is. Same for a rural person that barely leaves their bubble. They just see whatever Fox news tells them is burning down in Portland. As a country we are going to have to figure this out, and pretty quick because we are on a real bad trajectory of division. Cities are going to continue to draw young away from rural areas and keep them. Agriculture as we know it is going to continue to refine it's commercial efficiency and further reduce the need for human labor. That just further minimizes the need to actually live in rural areas.

Which is really the debate here. We need rural areas, but we don't necessarily need large numbers of people to live in rural areas. It's just an ever growing strain on existing infrastructure and support. The "last mile" costs to those communities for water, utility and deliveries lucratively high vs urban centers. There are counties here in Oregon with 1500 people. It's not possible for a county that size to actually sustain it's own weight without drawing from others. Their growth has been flat while others have seen negative growth over 20 years and those will continue.

We need to engage in good faith, and mature conversations about where this country is, where it's going, and how that looks in 50 years. But right now most born and raised rural Americans won't budge. A lot of people born in the city look down on them as backwoods idiots in a dying community and say good luck with that. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We are going to have to completely re-write how we align our agriculture infrastructure, and how we go about future urban development and addressing our dissonance to rural communities.

You're hardly the only one with that experience. There's some truths but you're way out of touch with 2010+ rural America.

That reckoning already happened. Farmers are already the true American Welfare Queens. They literally cannot exist without government subsidies, as they don't make enough to sustain a farm and harvest it without ruining it (via overfarming, nutrient depletion, or surviving drought and/or flood or a mix of those factors, which is why we bail them out and pay them not to farm their land to dust).

Don't need land when you can build underground facilities or skyscrapers to grow so the argument that we need rural land for that is going to be nonsense before you know it. That stuff isn't here yet, but it will come. There's already some operating, and it'll just be a matter of scaling. Those are already much more efficient than typical farms. Climate change is going to accelerate the need for those as traditional farmland gets ravaged.

We tried that. They didn't just refuse to partake or listen, they've decided they'd rather burn everything down than to even accept anything but their way.

They look down on them as backwood idiots because that's who they're saying they are and that they're goddamn proud of it. I grew up there, I know those people. They have become full on cultists. They're the ones declaring that they don't need anyone's help (when they've been getting help the entire time, rural areas have really never in the history of America been independent, be it the Pilgrims, Southern plantations, Texas, the various aspects of the 1800s be it cattle drives, the "old west", gold rush, manifest destiny, etc; never ever has rural America survived on its own, that's a complete bullshit fabrication of historical fact).

That's gonna happen regardless of whatever they think/say/do. Rural America is dying the same as coal. Its up to them to accept it and deal. The rest of America is going to move on with or without them. We already tried to help them transition. They said "fuck you".

They had some limited opportunity to thrive, by embracing immigrants and using them to bolster their numbers. Instead they've fought them and demonized them, while the dwindling "true 'Merican" population became more extremist. These are not the quaint little towns of Doc Hollywood, these are enclaves of religious nutjobs that have spun an us vs them mentality, while they poison their minds on lies.

I disagree with certain aspects of what you say. I don't think America has to give up individualism, but you're right we'll need to embrace a much more consumption aware and efficiency minded lifestyle, and also work to deal with climate change (its too late to do anything to stop it). I can even see technology decompressing the population and enabling move back to rural areas. You massively underrate how much people in cities do ag projects, or would be capable of it.

Truth is, I actually think we're deluding ourselves that its rural vs urban that is the issue. I know plenty of liberal hippies that are rural and plenty of right wing nut job city people. The real schism in America is something else and I think we're wasting time on this, just like we're wasting our time on Millennials vs Boomers, etc. It really is as simple as accepting reality or not. The real question facing America is if we can figure out a way to keep progressing around those that refuse to accept reality, or if they'll ruin it.

 

[vi edit]

I don't think people appreciate the space required for produce.
One example.

Average person eats 20 pounds worth of tomato/processed tomatoes a year. An average plant produces around 20 pounds of tomatoes.
That's one plant person.
For easy figuring you can get around 3000 plants into an acre.

For my metro area of Portland of 650,000 people, that's over 215 acres. Just for tomatoes. Nothing else.

 

[ivwshane]

I don't think people appreciate the space required for produce.
One example.

Average person eats 20 pounds worth of tomato/processed tomatoes a year. An average plant produces around 20 pounds of tomatoes.
That's one plant person.
For easy figuring you can get around 3000 plants into an acre.

For my metro area of Portland of 650,000 people, that's over 215 acres. Just for tomatoes. Nothing else.

I think your math is a little messed up as your calculation is based on yearly consumption meaning you’d need about 18 acres a month which is still a lot.

 

[Jhhnn]

I don't think people appreciate the space required for produce.
One example.

Average person eats 20 pounds worth of tomato/processed tomatoes a year. An average plant produces around 20 pounds of tomatoes.
That's one plant person.
For easy figuring you can get around 3000 plants into an acre.

For my metro area of Portland of 650,000 people, that's over 215 acres. Just for tomatoes. Nothing else.

Real numbers are helpful. The notion we can replace the vast acreages under cultivation with urban gardening is ridiculous.

United States of America Agriculture, Information about Agriculture in United States of America

www.nationsencyclopedia.com

 

[Fenixgoon]

Real numbers are helpful. The notion we can replace the vast acreages under cultivation with urban gardening is ridiculous.

United States of America Agriculture, Information about Agriculture in United States of America

www.nationsencyclopedia.com

the way i'm reading this article...it indicates that we absolutely can (not that it would happen in reality). more efficient farming means less land required to feed the same number of people. of course, factor in population growth and exports..and then there's no reason to shrink farms. but technically we could.

 

[MrSquished]

It's not that we don't need food from rural areas, we just need to stop subsidizing them with government programs they don't appreciate and in fact try to keep from everyone else while they happily take take take. Blue states keep their money, urban areas keep their money.

 

[vi edit]

Ok, so more real talk. When we talk about money to farmers, we're *REALLY* talking about corporate welfare. A bulk of that goes to corporate farms. The reality of farming is that it it's a toss of a coin if you are going to be profitable that year. Too much rain, you're fucked. Not enough rain. You're fucked. Too much rain too late in the year, you're fucked. Too good of a crop year, you're kinda fucked because then it's worth less. Subsidies are mostly there to keep farming sustainable. You run into a couple bad years, most places fold. But we still need food.

I work in healthcare. Covid fucked hospitals sideways early on. Most sites scaled back elective surgeries and other non-emergent services that make the bulk of their money. A lot of hospitals ate shit in 2020. Cares act provided them 100 billion to float operational costs for the year. A bulk of that went to the biggest hospitals first, which are in urban centers. Same for airlines.

Call corporate welfare for what it is. Farming adds a twist of nature that a lot of other professions can either weather, or aren't an essential service to our exitance. That would be stuff like hospitality and travel. While it's nice...it's not an essential thing such as food, clean water, or shelter.

 

[MrSquished]

Ok, so more real talk. When we talk about money to farmers, we're *REALLY* talking about corporate welfare. A bulk of that goes to corporate farms. The reality of farming is that it it's a toss of a coin if you are going to be profitable that year. Too much rain, you're fucked. Not enough rain. You're fucked. Too much rain too late in the year, you're fucked. Too good of a crop year, you're kinda fucked because then it's worth less. Subsidies are mostly there to keep farming sustainable. You run into a couple bad years, most places fold. But we still need food.

I work in healthcare. Covid fucked hospitals sideways early on. Most sites scaled back elective surgeries and other non-emergent services that make the bulk of their money. A lot of hospitals ate shit in 2020. Cares act provided them 100 billion to float operational costs for the year. A bulk of that went to the biggest hospitals first, which are in urban centers. Same for airlines.

Call corporate welfare for what it is. Farming adds a twist of nature that a lot of other professions can either weather, or aren't an essential service to our exitance. That would be stuff like hospitality and travel. While it's nice...it's not an essential thing such as food, clean water, or shelter.

A lot of the subsidies to rural America have nothing to do with helping farmers. Of any kind. Most people out there have nothing to do with farming

 

[Matt390]

Ok, so more real talk. When we talk about money to farmers, we're *REALLY* talking about corporate welfare. A bulk of that goes to corporate farms. The reality of farming is that it it's a toss of a coin if you are going to be profitable that year. Too much rain, you're fucked. Not enough rain. You're fucked. Too much rain too late in the year, you're fucked. Too good of a crop year, you're kinda fucked because then it's worth less. Subsidies are mostly there to keep farming sustainable. You run into a couple bad years, most places fold. But we still need food.

I work in healthcare. Covid fucked hospitals sideways early on. Most sites scaled back elective surgeries and other non-emergent services that make the bulk of their money. A lot of hospitals ate shit in 2020. Cares act provided them 100 billion to float operational costs for the year. A bulk of that went to the biggest hospitals first, which are in urban centers. Same for airlines.

Call corporate welfare for what it is. Farming adds a twist of nature that a lot of other professions can either weather, or aren't an essential service to our exitance. That would be stuff like hospitality and travel. While it's nice...it's not an essential thing such as food, clean water, or shelter.

Thats what futures contracts are for.