Small-town America fights for its life

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/small-town-america-fights-for-its-life

by whatami • 7 years ago

43 41 7 years ago

tabtab2• 7 years ago

There is no article there. Is there a Magic Button I'm missing, other than "subscribe"?

It seems content is also fighting for its life.

Here's a similarly-name article that's open-able, at least to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/rural-america-eco...

cmdshiftf4• 7 years ago

Working fine for me on Firefox 70.0.1 w/ ublock, noscript, privacy badger and a bunch of other privacy extensions enabled.

tabtab2• 7 years ago

It's working now for me. I've seen that multiple times lately: an article is intermittently hidden. It may be marketing games whereby they make it open to attract links from commenting forums such as Reddit and this one, and then switch on "subscriber only" mode when traffic comes. If intentional, that's evil in my book.

dredmorbius3• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/vZPggv

... Oh, that doesn't really work here. Sorry.

shortlived• 7 years ago

Didn’t work for me...

zrail5• 7 years ago

No judgement on this particular opinion piece, but just for sake of clarity in case people are unaware, the Washington Examiner has a rather pronounced conservative and Republican bias.

dfsegoat3• 7 years ago

Neutral source: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner/

zrail5• 7 years ago

Thanks. I should have linked a source.

CharlesColeman2• 7 years ago

Neutral source: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner/

Neutral, perhaps, but also poorly qualified:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check:

The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[2] Van Zandt describes himself as someone with "more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[4]

ur-whale3• 7 years ago

You say it like it's a bad thing. Odd.

zrail5• 7 years ago

I only pointed it out because people might not be aware since it's a smaller publication. Nobody needs to be told about Mother Jones' or Fox News' bias.

CompanionCuuube• 7 years ago

It isn't. That's an important part of having a diverse and less myopic perspective.

dominotw• 7 years ago

for sake of clarity

never heard of this newsource before but what kind of clarity is this additional information supposed to provide ?

zrail5• 7 years ago

Every media source has bias and I think people should be aware of them, especially for smaller sources like Washington Examiner.

dredmorbius3• 7 years ago

Also subject to an impressive amount of Wikipedia revert-edits from a White House OoTP IP address recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/204.68.2...

The page was subsequently protected:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Washington_Examin...

IP info:

https://www.infobyip.com/ip-204.68.207.13.html

(Archive: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.infobyip.com/ip-204...)

3pt14159• 7 years ago

The bias part I generally don't mind. I consume things across the spectrum. It's the mixed factual reporting that grinds my gears.

pitt1980• 7 years ago

normally this comment would sort of annoy me,

but its not obvious what the point of this story actually is

------

looking on google

Imogene is about hour outside Omaha

is about 15 minutes away from the nearest Wal-Mart

Kids from Imogene appear to go to school https://www.greatschools.org/iowa/shenandoah/1244-Shenandoah... (which happens to be near the Wal Mart)

there does not appear to be an abandoned main street or factory in Imogene

from the article itself, unemployment is under 2%

what exactly is so terrible about life there?

--------

Imogene appears to be a small, somewhat out of the way place, and that appears to have always been the case

what exactly is so terrible about that fact?

revicon• 7 years ago

TLDR;

"You’ve got better genetics on the seeds,” Roger explained. “You’ve got fantastic technology on the equipment. And so you don’t need as many people.”

ur-whale3• 7 years ago

For the lazy, here's a streetview of the church. It is indeed quite nice:

https://goo.gl/maps/2cToS5cmVitVJLgY8

spodek• 7 years ago

Environmental destruction is the story here, but with one misunderstanding.

Rural America is eroding. If you talk to farmers such as Short and Roger, they lament it. But almost nobody thinks it can be prevented. More efficient farming...

The new farming isn't more efficient physically, chemically, or biologically. It consumes without replacing resources like topsoil, biodiversity, water, etc. It looks more efficient financially only by neglecting the future costs to restore those resources.

I wouldn't call willful, determined overuse "erosion," though. I would call it destruction.

We've created financial incentives to eat our seed corn as a culture and the article presents one place it's playing out. Destroy the environment and people will leave it.

bryanlarsen4• 7 years ago

The new farming isn't more efficient physically, chemically, or biologically. It consumes without replacing resources like topsoil, biodiversity, water, etc. It looks more efficient financially only by neglecting the future costs to restore those resources.

B.S. Farmers aren't stupid, they still remember the lessons of the 1930s. They all plan to farm until they're physically unable to, and hope that the family farm will stay in the family for generations to come. Their biggest asset is that land, and they'll be relying on it for decades to come.

That's why they're adopting methods like zero-till and cover crops to prevent soil erosion, why they carefully manage their straw cover et cetera.

They also don't listen to city folk who think obviously silly things like "organic is better for the environment". The alternative to glyphosate is tillage, and farmers have first hand experience with how destructive tillage is to the soil, how it erodes the soil and the subsequent erosion destroys the waterways.

Pigo• 7 years ago

Every farmer I've met, seen interviewed, etc, seem like they are at the top of their game. I usually end up surprised at how they have their hands in every aspect of every operation in their business. They seem very knowledgeable, while still dealing with the notion they are some hick with hayseed hanging out of their mouth.

We have farmers learning programming in order to hack their John Deere tractors, working with lawyers to sue John Deere for the right to do so, and having the ability to rebuild the tractor itself.

danaris3• 7 years ago

They all plan to farm until they're physically unable to, and hope that the family farm will stay in the family for generations to come.

And small family farms are an ever-decreasing share of where our food actually comes from. Over 70% of the farm acreage was held by the top 10% of the largest farms in the US in 2011[1].

Most of our agriculture today is not good old Farmer John and his wife and eight kids going out to hoe the beans at dawn. It's massive operations with hundreds or thousands of acres, huge agricultural machines, and, yes, loads of chemicals treating the soil to make it produce even when we've stripped it bare of nutrients by forcing it to grow the same crops year after year. (It's also many thousands of migrant farm workers doing the actual physical labour, but that's a separate issue...)

There are good permaculture movements springing up that seek to return to more sustainable methods, but they're almost exclusively individuals or small-community groups.

As for glyphosate...OK, sure, it can help to reduce the mechanical damage to the ground caused by repeatedly tilling the soil. But count me in the Extremely Skeptical camp as to it being "totally harmless" to humans, particularly given how influential Monsanto's money is in shaping the research into the subject. (And that doesn't even touch on the effects on the environment from spraying it all over the place, year after year, and letting it run off into waterways...)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-d...

hn_throwaway_99• 7 years ago

Agree with the other responder to this comment, this is BS. But oddly there are lots of passages in the actual article that directly refute this thesis, e.g.:

Also, farms are reducing erosion. “We’ve gone from 100-bushel corn [per acre] to 250-bushel corn because we’re saving our soil,” Short said.

mettamage• 7 years ago

An acquaintance of mine has startups about some these issues:

https://landlifecompany.com/ (reforrestation with the aid of technology)

https://www.sensoterra.com/ (smart soil moisture measurements)

Spooky232• 7 years ago

The destruction of farms has nothing to do with soil erosion. It's all about government policy that has destroyed producer prices.

One example is the changes in terms how anti-trust policy has evolved over time. Today, cartels of produce buyers collude to keep prices low. There's also the lobbying and market pressures to transform away to manufactured food processes (fake meat, milk, etc).

The environmental devastation is yet to come, and it will come from the commodity crops that are depleting water tables.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

The destruction of farms has nothing to do with soil erosion. It's all about government policy that has destroyed producer prices. It's certainly an issue in this town, but it's a small part of the whole.

Mvandenbergh• 7 years ago

I see that other commenters have already addressed this but the issue here is a confusion of timelines. The farming you are referring to is a caricature of first generation Green Revolution farming. Farming techniques being adopted today are designed to preserve soil, and to minimise water use. Biodiversity is not as much of a focus, that is true.

bryanlarsen4• 7 years ago

Biodiversity is not as much of a focus, that is true.

Not yet, but it's coming, for a couple of reasons:

- biodiversity helps soil health and disease resistance

- bi-cropping potentially means the ability to harvest two different crops from the same field without significantly impacting the yield of the primary. Twice the gross per acre is a pretty big incentive for adoption.

Small-town America fights for its life

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