October 2007 Newsletter

With your help we have worked tirelessly for over two years to secure farm bill victories for all of rural America – capping unlimited farm payments to the nation’s largest farms, providing family farm and ranch livestock producers access to a competitive marketplace, and investment in conservation and rural development based on proven strategies to revitalize rural communities.

We need your help, now, as we enter the final turn of the farm bill battle. We have ambitious goals for the coming year, $150,000 raised from individuals just like you. And we must raise every dollar we can in the next few months to finish the work we are doing.

The development of local foods systems across the country should be applauded. Diverse economic opportunities for family farmers and ranchers that supply local food systems are worth pursuing. Providing high quality food with some character to our urban cousins also has merit. “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” campaigns and other local food initiatives also create economic opportunities for local merchants and restaurants.

However, I should be able to buy actual food from actual farmers from somewhere near where I live. I went to the grocery store here in Lyons the other day. The folks there are nice, the prices are not too bad, and there is more selection than one might expect.

The farm bill is entering a critical phase, with heightened risk of falling prey to the five fundamental fallacies of farm and rural policy. To pass legislation that renews hope and opportunity in rural America, we must confront those fallacies.

Fallacy #1: The best farm bill provides the most money for farm programs, irrespective of other priorities.

Family farmers would be better off with modest, well targeted payments than with bigger payments and no limits. We need farm programs, but we also need to invest in the future of our communities through small business development, beginning farmer programs, and value added agriculture initiatives.

In August the U.S. Census Bureau released new data from the American Community Survey showing that poverty in rural areas, particularly child poverty, continues to be a major societal problem.

From the 2000 Census to 2006 (the year of the recently released Census Bureau data), the overall non-metropolitan poverty rate increased from 13.4 percent to 15.2 percent (a 13 percent increase). Meanwhile, metropolitan poverty rates also increased, but at a slower rate (and have declined since 2003).

In August, while Congress was on a month-long recess, we didn’t give members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committee much of a break. We mounted an effort to encourage their constituents to turn out to their elected officials’ public events.

When they returned to Washington, D.C. on September 1, we didn’t give them a break either. Mike Korth and Kevin Raun, farmers from Nebraska, joined us for meetings on the Hill to talk about the farm bill.

Who grows our nation’s food and how they grow it continues to gain new national prominence. Now more than ever, there is a national interest in building an agricultural system that benefits family farms and rural communities, and a system that is not controlled by large, corporate interests.

This effort to limit corporate control of our farming system has deep roots in the Midwest, where nine states have passed laws restricting corporate farming over the last 100 years. Oklahoma has the oldest corporate farming law in the nation. Originally embedded in the state constitution in 1907, the provision prohibited all corporate ownership in agricultural production.

States can still place tough restrictions on corporate farming as long as they don’t discriminate against farmers from other states.

That was the Center’s message to Nebraska legislators at a recent hearing on corporate farming. Federal courts have struck down corporate farm laws in Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Now the North Dakota law is under attack.

As reported in Alan Guebert’s Farm and Food File, the Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended earlier this year that the EPA recover nearly $25.2 million of the $25.4 million granted to America’s Clean Water Foundation in three federal grants between 1998 and 2003. The grants were awarded “to perform environmental risk assessments at agricultural facilities,” according to documents on the EPA Office of Inspector General’s website.

The Access Project, a Boston-based research affiliate of the Schneider Institute for Health Policy at Brandeis University recently released a report detailing the health insurance status of non-corporate farm and ranch operators in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Findings from these seven states include:

Nearly all farm and ranch households have health insurance and are insured at higher rates than the nation as a whole. Over 90 percent of respondents said all members of their household were continuously insured in the past year. That compares to 72 percent of adults nationally.

Last month I looked at four factors that make rural communities able to thrive despite circumstances against them. They are availability of good paying jobs, access to critical services, strong leadership, and a healthy natural environment. The model that I want to start with in this discussion of communities fighting to keep these four areas intact is Hartington, Nebraska.

First, Hartington has established itself as a regional hub for industry, professional, agricultural, and retail services. In terms of retail sales, the measure most often used is called the “pull factor.” This refers to the community’s ability to retain those dollars that are earned within the community.

Rural news bits from Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma, the Midwest, Illinois, North Carolina, and Kentucky

Wisconsin: They are calling it the brain-drain boomerang. New research shows that although Wisconsin still suffers an overall loss of college-educated residents, the drain is mostly among graduates in their 20s. The state has net gains among college grads in their 30s and 40s. As graduates began to start families, quality of life and strong community begins to outweigh factors that originally drew young adults away from the state. Rural communities stand to benefit from this boomerang effect.

The Center for Rural Affairs’ Rural Enterprise Assistance Project (REAP) lending program had an exceptional year in Fiscal Year 2007. REAP, the largest statewide rural small business development program in the nation, placed 52 loans totaling $685,675 over the past 12 months.

This lending is also helping to leverage other funds. REAP helped to leverage over $1.3 million this past year. Historically, the small business development program has “leveraged” loans totaling $8,366,155.

The Center for Rural Affairs was recently awarded $99,000 to expand our entrepreneurial conference, MarketPlace: Opening Doors to Success. The grant will allow the Center to pilot the conference in Colorado and to include curriculum for Latino entrepreneurs and Latino-owned business development in both Nebraska and Colorado.

Get your rural-news-and-views fix in between newsletters online at the Center’s Blog for Rural America. Here is a short excerpt from a recent post:

Asking Price: $50,000,000
We’ve written several times about the money cotton and rice growers receive from the feds. And given those dollar figures, we’ve been thinking it would sure be nice to get our hands on a good-sized cotton and rice farm, sit on the porch, drink some iced tea, and cash checks. Finally, we’ve discovered a suitable chunk of land, and if we could just get a little help with the down payment we should be good to go.

Participants to Meet with Presidential Candidates

The Rural Youth Summit to be held this month will connect young people from rural communities around the country to exchange ideas on the challenges and opportunities of living in rural areas. The “Rural Youth Summit: Revitalizing Rural America” will be held on October 26-27 in Ames, Iowa.