I think you make a lot of assumptions of what I believe here.
Large family owned farms constitute about half of total farm area. It’s not really clear to me what qualifies as “family owned” here: I imagine most still have a number of workers.
I’m also not sure if farms are the primary driver of rural economies. They certainly occupy most of the area. Rural areas appear to take the form of vast swaths of nothing but farms surrounding tiny suburb-density towns. I think there’s a good chance that without the subsidy and with more direct infrastructure burden, the tiny towns (which seem to be most of the rural population) would significantly shrink in population.
That said, I admit (electric? micro?) cars or motorcycles seem like a perfectly reasonable transport system for the remaining rural population. Farmers might need higher clearance for field roads. PRT would likely work for small towns and inter-town transport, but not for farms, and wouldn’t have been possible until recently. If highways are much cheaper with smaller vehicles and without trucks, I imagine rail would be a good alternative for farmers to ship produce.
The main point I was making is that rural areas have significantly more road, utility cost, and transport cost per capita. Owning a car is expensive, and unnecessary in many cities.
You’re not wrong that NYC is a bit insane (and I don’t think “a hundredth” is out of the question in many cities), but the added value seems to generally outweigh the increased waste of most cities even today. Pollution can be mitigated with incentives, and I’d be surprised if rural areas don’t pollute more per capita.
Jerry-rigging everything is a compromise you don’t need to make in many cities! I’d argue that that sort of thing is just a market inefficiency, and actually more wasteful. If you wouldn’t jerry-rig in a city, it’s probably because paying someone is actually a better deal overall, ignoring regulations.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I’ll do my best to do the same.
Rural Economy
Farmers raise corn and soybeans. Beans mainly go to feed livestock. Corn is split between livestock and making ethanol. Ethanol is sold to fuel cars. So, our main exports are soybeans, meat, and ethanol.
A lot of people have jobs supporting the local population or for local companies. The rest either drive 45 minutes to the nearest city or work at the door factory that’s in a nearby town.
We all call it the city, but I guess it’s not that big by your standards. Sioux City has 82,000 people. It feels huge to us.
Cars
People in small towns are generally more poor than people in cities (I think, I have no experience with cities), and what people drive is generally what they can afford. I think you’d have a tough time convincing all of the mothers that their minivans can all be replaced with motorcycles and sleek electric vehicles. (also, you need significant clearance for gravel roads)
As for replacing semi trucks with trains, I’m sorry, but that could never work. I’ll explain why, don’t worry. Here’s how corn and beans are moved, at least at my parents’ farm.
First, when the crops are harvested, they’re placed in the bed of a semi truck to be hauled to wherever there’s storage. For my farm, that’s my grandparents’ place where there’s a pair of elevators for the drying process (complicated) and a few dozen grain bins which range in size from 16 to 80 thousand bushels.
Then, when the market is at its highest, the grain is sold to a coop (a kind of company that buys up grain from farmers and sells it all to someone who can’t afford to deal with small-time farmers) or ethanol plant or whatever. Someone will drive that grain to its destination in a semi truck.
A train system that accommodates these two steps would have to connect thousands of farms to hundreds of farm houses to dozens of processing plants. It would have to conform to hundreds of different farming styles. Basically, the concept is inconceivable. The system already in place allows anyone to haul grain anywhere anytime they like, relatively cheaply. Trains only really get efficient when you’re travelling a very long distance, and for most areas, that just isn’t the case.
Pollution
Nobody notices pollution or smog in small towns.
I’ve visited NYC once, and it was awful. It’s never like that in rural areas.
So, you’ll have a really tough time convincing anyone to use green vehicles. There’s really no incentive. In fact, a rather successful local business takes modern vehicles and removes all of the emission control bits. It makes the car or truck more fuel efficient and more powerful/responsive.
Subsidies
People keep talking about subsidies. I don’t think they understand exactly how things work. There are three ways my parents might get money from taxpayers.
We get money for maintaining the terraces on the farms. This is part of a big program to prevent runoff, and it’s necessary to keep farms productive.
Sometimes, a farm is converted to natural prairie to support wildlife and butterflies and such. This is called CRP, and you can get a little money for it, but not much.
When the markets are bad and there’s no way to make money, we’ll get money. Otherwise, you’d suddenly see half of the farmers go out of business and then you’d have no food. This happened especially when the Trump trade deal with China didn’t go through, so a lot of the soybean export just stopped happening.
The taxes my parents pay (about half of what they make) is MUCH higher than what they’re payed. Farm expenses are tax deductible, but everything else isn’t. If my dad makes 500,000 dollars, spends 80% on that on the next year’s seed, fertilizer, equipment repairs, and all other expenses, whatever is left over is cut in half. The system is basically made to make sure farmers can’t get ahead. Please, stop pretending that farmers are just accepting cash from the government, because most of the time, they work harder than anyone with significant risk.
That got way longer than I meant it to. I hope you get a picture of what life is like in the country. If you’d like to provide city perspective, I have no idea what people actually do for work there (big buildings full of offices? All I know is what’s in movies.)
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn’t decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
Thanks again for the perspective! These are good things to note and provide a lot of context. I still wonder what qualifies as “family owned” and whether it’s really just farming that brings 60 million to rural life.
The median household income in rural America looks to be only a bit lower than urban. Otoh, the rural poverty rate was 16.4 percent in 2017, compared with 12.9 percent for urban areas.
Jason Crawford mentions farms worked with trains and horses before trucks. The scenario I mentioned with trains would still use (intermodal?) trucks for the last mile and just replace rural highways. I could believe farming transport demands are too strange for this, but I could also see standardization insignificantly increasing costs. And do people in town often travel to the farms or mostly just to other towns or cities?
Pollution isn’t just a local issue, and I agree rural areas have no obvious pollution—but a carbon tax (for global warming) would make fuel more expensive, increasing the already significant costs of rural gas transportation.
I imagine the biggest subsidy of rural areas is the highways, which are 3⁄4 of the paved lane-miles in the US. The maintenance of these highways appear to amount to ~$3600 per capita annually, with a subsidy of ~$1200. I’d believe that utilities aren’t subsidized more than their urban counterparts.
If as this implies there really isn’t much subsidy, I stand corrected! Thank you, cars. And of course, any other technology (electric, PRT) would still function like the automobile. And AC / climate control is necessary in many states.
Now I wonder how rural areas look in other countries wrt population share, infrastructure, economy, and farm finances.
This is clarifying of rural life. Thank you!
I think you make a lot of assumptions of what I believe here.
Large family owned farms constitute about half of total farm area. It’s not really clear to me what qualifies as “family owned” here: I imagine most still have a number of workers.
I’m also not sure if farms are the primary driver of rural economies. They certainly occupy most of the area. Rural areas appear to take the form of vast swaths of nothing but farms surrounding tiny suburb-density towns. I think there’s a good chance that without the subsidy and with more direct infrastructure burden, the tiny towns (which seem to be most of the rural population) would significantly shrink in population.
That said, I admit (electric? micro?) cars or motorcycles seem like a perfectly reasonable transport system for the remaining rural population. Farmers might need higher clearance for field roads. PRT would likely work for small towns and inter-town transport, but not for farms, and wouldn’t have been possible until recently. If highways are much cheaper with smaller vehicles and without trucks, I imagine rail would be a good alternative for farmers to ship produce.
The main point I was making is that rural areas have significantly more road, utility cost, and transport cost per capita. Owning a car is expensive, and unnecessary in many cities.
You’re not wrong that NYC is a bit insane (and I don’t think “a hundredth” is out of the question in many cities), but the added value seems to generally outweigh the increased waste of most cities even today. Pollution can be mitigated with incentives, and I’d be surprised if rural areas don’t pollute more per capita.
Jerry-rigging everything is a compromise you don’t need to make in many cities! I’d argue that that sort of thing is just a market inefficiency, and actually more wasteful. If you wouldn’t jerry-rig in a city, it’s probably because paying someone is actually a better deal overall, ignoring regulations.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I’ll do my best to do the same.
Rural Economy
Farmers raise corn and soybeans. Beans mainly go to feed livestock. Corn is split between livestock and making ethanol. Ethanol is sold to fuel cars. So, our main exports are soybeans, meat, and ethanol.
A lot of people have jobs supporting the local population or for local companies. The rest either drive 45 minutes to the nearest city or work at the door factory that’s in a nearby town.
We all call it the city, but I guess it’s not that big by your standards. Sioux City has 82,000 people. It feels huge to us.
Cars
People in small towns are generally more poor than people in cities (I think, I have no experience with cities), and what people drive is generally what they can afford. I think you’d have a tough time convincing all of the mothers that their minivans can all be replaced with motorcycles and sleek electric vehicles. (also, you need significant clearance for gravel roads)
As for replacing semi trucks with trains, I’m sorry, but that could never work. I’ll explain why, don’t worry. Here’s how corn and beans are moved, at least at my parents’ farm.
First, when the crops are harvested, they’re placed in the bed of a semi truck to be hauled to wherever there’s storage. For my farm, that’s my grandparents’ place where there’s a pair of elevators for the drying process (complicated) and a few dozen grain bins which range in size from 16 to 80 thousand bushels.
Then, when the market is at its highest, the grain is sold to a coop (a kind of company that buys up grain from farmers and sells it all to someone who can’t afford to deal with small-time farmers) or ethanol plant or whatever. Someone will drive that grain to its destination in a semi truck.
A train system that accommodates these two steps would have to connect thousands of farms to hundreds of farm houses to dozens of processing plants. It would have to conform to hundreds of different farming styles. Basically, the concept is inconceivable. The system already in place allows anyone to haul grain anywhere anytime they like, relatively cheaply. Trains only really get efficient when you’re travelling a very long distance, and for most areas, that just isn’t the case.
Pollution
Nobody notices pollution or smog in small towns.
I’ve visited NYC once, and it was awful. It’s never like that in rural areas.
So, you’ll have a really tough time convincing anyone to use green vehicles. There’s really no incentive. In fact, a rather successful local business takes modern vehicles and removes all of the emission control bits. It makes the car or truck more fuel efficient and more powerful/responsive.
Subsidies
People keep talking about subsidies. I don’t think they understand exactly how things work. There are three ways my parents might get money from taxpayers.
We get money for maintaining the terraces on the farms. This is part of a big program to prevent runoff, and it’s necessary to keep farms productive.
Sometimes, a farm is converted to natural prairie to support wildlife and butterflies and such. This is called CRP, and you can get a little money for it, but not much.
When the markets are bad and there’s no way to make money, we’ll get money. Otherwise, you’d suddenly see half of the farmers go out of business and then you’d have no food. This happened especially when the Trump trade deal with China didn’t go through, so a lot of the soybean export just stopped happening.
The taxes my parents pay (about half of what they make) is MUCH higher than what they’re payed. Farm expenses are tax deductible, but everything else isn’t. If my dad makes 500,000 dollars, spends 80% on that on the next year’s seed, fertilizer, equipment repairs, and all other expenses, whatever is left over is cut in half. The system is basically made to make sure farmers can’t get ahead. Please, stop pretending that farmers are just accepting cash from the government, because most of the time, they work harder than anyone with significant risk.
That got way longer than I meant it to. I hope you get a picture of what life is like in the country. If you’d like to provide city perspective, I have no idea what people actually do for work there (big buildings full of offices? All I know is what’s in movies.)
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn’t decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
(I just want to say, your comments have been very interesting and detailed in an area I don’t know a lot about, thank you very much for writing them!)
Thanks again for the perspective! These are good things to note and provide a lot of context. I still wonder what qualifies as “family owned” and whether it’s really just farming that brings 60 million to rural life.
The median household income in rural America looks to be only a bit lower than urban. Otoh, the rural poverty rate was 16.4 percent in 2017, compared with 12.9 percent for urban areas.
Jason Crawford mentions farms worked with trains and horses before trucks. The scenario I mentioned with trains would still use (intermodal?) trucks for the last mile and just replace rural highways. I could believe farming transport demands are too strange for this, but I could also see standardization insignificantly increasing costs. And do people in town often travel to the farms or mostly just to other towns or cities?
Pollution isn’t just a local issue, and I agree rural areas have no obvious pollution—but a carbon tax (for global warming) would make fuel more expensive, increasing the already significant costs of rural gas transportation.
I imagine the biggest subsidy of rural areas is the highways, which are 3⁄4 of the paved lane-miles in the US. The maintenance of these highways appear to amount to ~$3600 per capita annually, with a subsidy of ~$1200. I’d believe that utilities aren’t subsidized more than their urban counterparts.
If as this implies there really isn’t much subsidy, I stand corrected! Thank you, cars. And of course, any other technology (electric, PRT) would still function like the automobile. And AC / climate control is necessary in many states.
Now I wonder how rural areas look in other countries wrt population share, infrastructure, economy, and farm finances.