Agriculture is (not) Rural
Commentary by Anthony Schutz
This commentary provides some initial thoughts on how agricultural interests and rural interests relate to one another. At the outset of the Rural Reconciliation Project, it is worth spending some time considering the scope, structure, relevance, and meaning of "rural." This post first addresses common conceptions of rural in an effort to evaluate how agriculture relates (and does not relate) to those concepts. After briefly cabining the meaning of agriculture, it discusses a number of tensions between rural and agricultural interests in different areas of agricultural policy. In these cases, agriculture pushes the envelope of rural identity. The post concludes with some thoughts on the causes and consequences of this tenuous relationship. In blog-post fashion, it provides a few links to relevant materials, but it largely proceeds without heavy substantiation or the nuance of longer forms with easier means of notation. Please share reactions or thoughts with me at anthony@unl.edu.
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I’ve worked on agricultural law and policy throughout my academic career. Agricultural law involves the study of the law and policy governing crop and animal production (often, but not always, for food). Its origin in legal academia dates to the 1970s, and it came of age in the 1980s amid a financial crisis. Given that history, it tends to focus on the law and policy affecting farmers. [I use the term "farmer" in a broad way to refer to agricultural producers in many lines of work--like ranchers or other livestock growers--with the caveat that identifying these people is a policy-laden enterprise, that has proved especially difficult in federal farm policy.]
When we embarked on the RRP, I was convinced that I was not simply reframing my attention to agricultural law and policy as rural policy. In fact, my initial reaction was that agriculture is not rural. While a provocative declaration, it is only partly true. My initial reaction, as I explain below, arose from years of observing agricultural policy that runs contrary to rural interests. But agriculture remains at least somewhat rural. Farms are (often) located in rural spaces, after all. And farmers are (often) rural people. Nonetheless, agricultural policy is not very concerned with rural people. To the extent it is concerned with farmers, it tends to elevate their interests over those of their rural kin. This disconnect between agriculture and rural is becoming increasingly clear.
“Rural”
There seem to be two relevant ways that we use the word “rural.” The first is as a geographic indicator of place that distinguishes some places from urban areas. Granted, there are gradients (e.g., suburban and exurban), but the point of the geographic use of the term is to delineate a place.
In delineating that place, the key driver appears to be population density. There are some sophisticated ways of looking at population, density and proximity to glean a nuanced view of rurality. But in the end, rural is often a marker of geographic space where relatively small numbers of people are found at a given scale. Thus, the moniker is used to refer to rural regions, rural states, rural counties, rural towns, or the rural countryside.
A second use is a conception of people that occupy rural places--an identity. This identity has both a social and an individual aspect. The social identity is often expressed from “us” versus “them” perspectives. The rural “us” often touts one’s rural credentials as a member of a unique community (of rural people), while a rural “them” casts rural as outside the non-rural mainstream. This use reflects and reinforces an idea of rural community that is wrapped up in both place and identity.
The social identity is closely related to individual identity. This aspect of the term is a “more malleable, amorphous and ultimately more interesting lifestyle-based definition” of rural. (Pruitt, Rural Rhetoric) It associates a number of traits to rural people. These traits are hardly limiting, ranging from the “pejorative” to the “idealized”. (Pruitt again) They are stereotypes that often depend on who is describing whom.
Matters are more complicated than this, and there is a great deal that can and has been written about the complexity of rural identity. But these two uses of the term--as place and identity--are sufficient for offering some thoughts on the relationship between agriculture and rural.
"Agriculture"
To consider agriculture's rurality, it is worth spending some time identifying what we mean by “agriculture.” From cranberries to corn, rice to rye, strawberries to swine, and kohlrabi to cattle, it is a difficult concept to pin down. The diversity of production methods, labor needs, economic structures, and human uses (food, fiber, and fuel) defy generalizations. In that sense, agriculture is much like rural: theoretically coherent but practically fraught—far from monolithic.
This diversity leads to important differences in agriculture's rural presence and the policies that tend to its interests. Generally speaking, however, agriculture involves the production of animals and crops for human uses (food, fiber, and fuel). That production can be broken down into farms, farmers, input suppliers, and farm-product buyers. Often, perceptions of agriculture are limited to farms and farmers. But farms and farmers occupy one place (the "farm level") in a massive web of agricultural interests operating at international scales, with a full complement of financial ties and a high level of government sponsorship. Because agriculture is such a large economic force when the non-farm segments are included, it generates a great deal of political interest. And agricultural policy tends to these interests in one way or another. I return to this web of agricultural interests near the end of this post, but for now it is important to understand the obvious point: farms and farmers are an important aspect of agriculture.
Agriculture and Rural: Of Land and Farmers
With these working concepts and a healthy general sense of complexity, we can begin to broach the relationship between agriculture and rural. As it relates to rural, farms are often (though not always) found in rural places. That's where the farms are, that's where farmers are found, and that's where agriculture's outputs are produced. So from a place-based perspective, the farm level of agriculture is most definitely rural.
And because of its presence in rural areas, farmers are often found in the catalog of rural stereotypes. Indeed, farmers are what many people think of when they think of rural people. This stereotype persists despite the fact that very few rural residents are farmers.
Consider, for example, Nebraska--a quintessentially rural state that many people think is full of farmers. The biggest number on this page from the 2017 Census of Agriculture is 151,000 people in producers' households. My geographically large state only has 1.9 million people in it. If we look at categories of people doing enough to constitute farming (a very difficult concept to pin down), the number is nearly halved under the broadest definition to 77,000 and drops as low as 46,000 for the "primary" producer. So farmer households might make up 8% of the state's population. Farmers are more like 4%, and the number may be as low as 2.4% of the population. Those percentages, of course, increase as we separate rural from urban at smaller scales. A very sparse definition of rural changes the denominator to approximately 600,000 people who live outside of census places of 2,500 or less (page 8, here). Of course, assuming that all farmers (however defined) or farm households live in that version of rural areas is a significant assumption. But the point remains: there just aren't many farmers in rural places. Rural is much more than farmers.
There are many reasons for the persistence of this rural=farmer stereotype. In some ways, it is carefully cultivated. Non-farmer agricultural interests tend to align themselves politically within popular conceptions of rural, specifically leveraging the farmer identity. Farmers may allow this leverage because of their small numbers. To both groups, defining a rural “us” that expands the scope of political influence is beneficial. Other non-farm rural interests often also allow alignment with farmers and agriculture in pursuit of political clout. What results is a rural and agricultural facade that draws upon stereotypes of both place and people to secure a vision of rural interests that wields some political power in state legislatures and at the federal level. As a result, agriculture and rural are often combined.
Increasingly Anti-Rural Agricultural Policy
Agriculture's persistent rural status illustrates the power of place and identity. But agriculture's farm roots may be insufficient to maintain its rural political cover as agriculture pushes for increasingly anti-rural policy. Farmers live in rural communities, spend money in local economies, and may be good citizens. But the policies that agriculture pursues at individual, local, state and federal levels are often inconsistent with, if not harmful to, the interests of farmers' rural non-farm kin.
Nuisance and Land Use Regulation
At the individual level, take for example the law of neighbors—nuisance. Recent litigation in North Carolina, and a slew of cases across the country, have pitted agricultural interests against those of rural neighbors. Loka Ashwood will be talking about this soon. Often this occurs in the livestock sector with modern production methods. These sorts of facilities generate odor, flies, dust, traffic, and noise that can have significant impacts on neighbors. Indeed, recoveries for nuisance liability have been substantial.
One might expect a rural community to deal with this problem through land-use planning and zoning, like what we saw emerge in urban areas in the early to mid-1900s. Instead, agricultural interests have pushed for less local government capacity to regulate the location of livestock production, outright prohibitions or restrictions on nuisance recovery, and constitutional amendments enshrining the “right to farm” as a limitation on legislative authority to protect other rural interests. All of this is inconsistent with the interests of non-farm rural populations.
Property Tax Relief
Other local examples of a disconnect between rural and agricultural interests exist in states like mine, where agricultural interests are continuously arguing for discounts on their property tax bills. This reluctance to pay the freight for local amenities like schools, roads, and natural-resource improvements is not consistent with rural community membership. In a state like Nebraska, this is particularly inconsistent with community values as property tax revenue can only be used for local purposes. Nonetheless, the agricultural pillars of our rural monuments demand fractional assessment, use valuation, and property-tax credits on state income-tax returns. More recently, agricultural interests have attempted to band together with residential real-estate owners to demand property-tax reform, while conveniently omitting the much more favorable treatment that agriculture gets under the existing property-tax regime.
However, property-tax fissures are complex. As farmers own more and more land, wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a few rural community members. Under those conditions, a property tax becomes a significant redistributive mechanism, placing a disproportionate funding burden on ag landowners. This is a reasonable objection.
Property taxes also reach rural and farmer owners who live outside of the taxing district. Such owners have no vote to protect their interests, so the local structural mechanism for limiting spending fails. This too engenders resentment. A close look at these disenfranchised landowners also reveals a significant (and growing) non-farmer, non-rural contingency.
Restricting Absentee Corporate Landownership
The law of property has been a fundamentally problematic aspect of agricultural development and rural policy, as Jess Shoemaker demonstrates. To offer but one example, state-level agricultural policymaking once included an effort to maintain rural-community prosperity by preserving local land ownership. Prohibitions on absentee corporate ownership have been in place for a number of years in many midwestern states. Agricultural interests have funded challenges to this legislation and successfully restricted the use of such limitations under the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, effectively prohibiting states from restricting land ownership through entities that involve limited liability. This has, in turn, helped facilitate the ownership of agricultural lands for investment purposes, relegating local farmers to tenants in yet another supply-chain pressure point for farmers. The extent of this investment ownership is currently not well known, but renewed scrutiny is emerging, along with attention to the sources of credit that are the main drivers of these developments.
Federal Financial Supports
At the federal level, there are two broad categories of policy worth mentioning that may have detrimental effects on rural populations. The first is financial. The current slate of farm program mechanisms and ad hoc assistance provide relatively more benefit to those who produce the most agricultural commodities. Federal support is more interested in production than farmers. That is, it doesn't matter much to modern federal ag policy who does the farming, as long as it gets done. Thus, as federal dollars flow to the most productive operators, it helps these operations expand and facilitates the exit of less productive operations. As operations consolidate, and as technology advances, the labor needs (and sometimes the profit margins) of modern farms decrease and fewer and fewer people in rural areas can find farm work. While other opportunities emerge in financial and other supporting occupations, government payments centered on the status quo may contribute to rural population loss or, at the very least, contribute to increasing disparities in wealth between the remaining farmers and other rural residents.
Wealth disparities, more generally, persist with other federal policies that facilitate wealth transfers, including stepped-up basis and large inheritance tax exemptions. While these tools help preserve wealth within family farms, they can prolong the ownership of agricultural lands in ways that stifle new entrants and rural innovation. Again, tenancy and consolidation may persist to limit the number of farmers, farm profitability, and the related local economic impact of people working in rural areas with good jobs.
Federal Environmental Law
The second anti-rural federal agricultural policy is environmental. The agricultural lobby consistently resists environmental regulation. Recent fights over the Clean Water Act’s enigmatic jurisdictional scope—”waters of the United States”—have shown agriculture's unwillingness to limit the external costs of production. In addition, agriculture's continued unwillingness to make any unfunded improvements to non-point source pollution problems demonstrates its commitment to rural harm, if not environmental injustice. And lest this policy position be chalked up to a concern for federalism, state-level environmental agricultural regulation is almost unheard of, preferring instead to throw some local dollars in the pot with federal funds to politely ask farmers to make (sometimes temporary) improvement through cost-sharing arrangements.
The list of ways agriculture has demonstrated a disregard for other rural interests could go on. The original expropriation of native lands, discrimination in federal program administration, discrimination writ large, and the agricultural sector's continued exploitation of immigrant labor in fieldwork and packing houses are all signs of an industry that often looks out, if at all, for a very small "farmer" slice of rural communities to maintain a figurehead that a largely urban electorate adores.
Implications and Conclusions
The first step of the Rural Reconciliation Project is to tell the truth. And the truth is that agricultural policy is often at odds with the interests of rural populations. Despite the placement of agriculture, the sector's policy positions should not be taken as consistent with rural needs.
The matter cannot easily be approached with an ag-is-not-rural claim. Those who are still in the business of farming and ranching take a great deal of pride in being part of their rural communities. Volumes can be written on the finer points of rural communities (good and bad), but some level of presence, affiliation, and contribution at social and economic levels is persistent. Farmers--the people on the ground living in rural areas--are a significant part of their rural communities.
To change this, we must understand why it is happening. In the case of agriculture, the relevant drivers go far beyond farms and farmers. The lion's share of political clout (or at least a marginally important amount of political power) comes from non-rural, agricultural interests. Farmers have some level of agency, as Sarah Mock points out often. But they often find themselves at the economic mercy of both their suppliers and their buyers. Indeed, as Neil Hamilton has observed with regard to government spending, “we launder money through farmers to support an array of agricultural businesses.” To the extent those businesses have local rural employment ties, this accounts for some rural support. But the presence of agricultural interests in "the room where it happens" may have more to do with non-rural interests than the interests of those in rural areas (farmers or non-farm rural agricultural workers). Those non-rural interests include food buyers, commodity buyers and processors, input suppliers, financial-services providers, and absentee farmland owners who all have a stake in policymaking.
Financialization forces are, perhaps, the single greatest challenge in figuring out the drivers of agricultural policy. As we spread risk and returns at high-finance scales, the interested and monied electorate changes in complex ways. Take, for example, this chart in a forthcoming Loka Ashwood work, (Corporate Tied and Credit Bound: The Powering of Pork Production) depicting the financialization of hog production:
Following the money (debt, equity, and other risk-bearing structures), is an increasingly important aspect of evaluating the political economy of agriculture. And it is, perhaps, evidence of an emerging post-rural agriculture.
While the subject of a future commentary on this page, it is also worth briefly mentioning the forms of advocacy contributing to the policy separation between rural and agricultural interests. Powerful organizations, many of which receive support from agribusiness and government, claim to represent farmers. These organizations are powerful voices influencing many issues that impact rural communities. For example, Farm Bureau has consistently argued against the environmental regulation of agricultural practices on behalf of farmers, while rural concerns for wetland habitat and water quality go unvoiced. With relatively powerless agents to pick up those rural voices at state or local levels, the political signals become misleadingly clear.
Whatever the cause, as agriculture pushes the boundaries of favorable policy to levels that impose direct and noticeable harm on rural interests, rural populations may be unwilling to lend their support to what would otherwise be regarded as a faceless industrial agricultural enterprise. Farmers may not even support some of the policies being pushed on their behalf.
Despite that risk, there may be little consequence if agriculture pushes the rural too far. If farmers and other rural interests find political clout only by joining forces with larger agricultural interests, then matters are unlikely to change. One has to wonder, however, if there is political power to be found in alliances between rural interests (farmers included) and urban interests. Is there common ground on concerns for education, the environment, equality, food, and the myriad other issues facing people in rural and urban areas? Powerful interests that benefit from maintaining the farmer as an agricultural mascot have a clear interest in cultivating the urban/rural divide that keeps this from happening. But as agriculture pushes the envelope, new opportunities for political alliances may emerge that help rural areas.
In any event, with a fuller understanding of how farmers fit into agriculture, the connection between rural and agriculture can be better understood. In the agricultural sector, farmers are a mascot for a sophisticated and very large agricultural complex of non-rural interests at all scales, nationally and internationally. And with a convincing claim that farmers are rural, what we see dressed up as rural policy is often nothing more than an agricultural policy that primarily serves some powerful non-rural interests.
So, is agriculture rural? In some ways yes. In other, very significant ways, no.
