MonteQuest wrote:Outcast_Searcher wrote:MonteQuest wrote:There are no services in most of rural America anymore. All the small towns are ghost towns.
Why put statements like that (with no citations) into the middle of an interesting conversation, where you are making some valid points?
Unless you are willing to define services, and demonstrate how NONE of them are provided in most of rural America, the first point clearly doesn't hold.
Fair enough. In the Midwest where I live, smack in the middle of the corn belt, all the small towns of say 150 to 1000 people, and there are many of them, no longer have schools, grocery stores, hardware stores, gas stations, banks, restaurants, doctors, dentists, etc. Within 7 miles of me, there used to be 5 towns that had all these things when I was 16. Now, you have to drive 25 miles to buy even gas or any food. Not one business remains on main street, except maybe crop services or a post office. There used to be 4 farmer families per section (square mile 640 acres) now there is hardly one per section; some none at all. Farmers now farm large acreages of 800 to 1,200 acres instead of 160 acres. The population is gone and all the services that supported them.
Now, this may be much different in other small towns areas of America for sure, but this is where much of the food is grown, and we were discussing where people could return to farming the land. Sorry for not elaborating further at first.
Fair enough (back to you). My experience is with towns a little larger (say more like 3000 to 5000 population), so what I see may be slightly different. My grandfather lived in Spruce Michigan 35 years ago, with population about 150, and I can certainly imagine many services in such a town (or one several times that size) going away due to cost cutting -- both government and private.
So if we're going to screw much of the small farmer community, that would give the monoculture "efficient" corporate farming industry little competition. Somehow, I don't see that as a good thing for anyone but agribusiness.