- BOWBELLS, N.D. -- The heart of the fastest-shrinking county in the United States
shrank a little bit more a few weeks ago, when elevator manager Mark Grove
packed up his wife and four kids and moved away.
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- "It was for a new job, sure, but
part of it was -- look at the town, look at the future," Grove said.
"I hate to say it, the writing's on the wall."
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- Elton Peterson says business is so bad
at his grocery/variety store that he doesn't know how much longer he can
remain open.
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- With the Groves' departure, the population
of Bowbells slipped closer to 400 and the population of Burke County closer
to just 2,000 people sprinkled across more than 1,000 square miles.
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- Burke County is one of hundreds of counties,
most of them on the rural Great Plains, that are undergoing something unprecedented
in U.S. history: They are slipping back in time, becoming frontier again.
While some parts of rural America blossom, as city dwellers flee metropolitan
life, the dwindling number of people on the Plains are being left behind.
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- This summer's farm crisis in the Upper
Midwest is merely the latest insult (and a localized one at that) in a
long, losing battle. From western Minnesota to eastern Montana, from the
Canadian border to the Texas panhandle, populations are dropping, farmers
are giving up, Main Street businesses are shuttering and schools are closing.
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- Years of study and lip service have been
trained on this phenomenon by government officials, academics and think
tanks, but no solution has been found. And people closest to the edge have
begun talking resignedly as if none will be.
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- "There's the perception that life
in rural America's pretty good, but there's a real disconnect between the
national idea of a rural resurgence and the reality of these little towns,"
said Jerry Nagel, executive director of the Crookston-based Red River Trade
Corridor. "If you're in a high-amenity place like Brainerd or the
Madison River Valley in Montana, life is good. But in between, it isn't.
People in the empty middle are really struggling."
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- At the Red Lake County Co-op, the walls
are plastered with farm auction notices; the surviving customers are swaddled
in gloom. "It's a real scary situation," said Doug Knott, the
co-op's manager. "It's gotten so depressing around here it's unbelievable.
So many people are getting out -- it's a natural resource that's disappearing.
And urban people have to hear about it."
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- Stark Statistics
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- The unsettling of the rural Plains is
illuminated most starkly in population statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau
recently reported that 265 counties in the six states that make up the
central and northern Plains lost population between 1990 and l997 -- about
110,600 people in all. And that loss, a combination of deaths and migrations
away from rural areas, occurred during a period when the six states altogether
added more than 625,000 people, mostly in suburban areas and mid-sized
cities.
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- Although shrinking counties are scattered
throughout the nation, the heaviest concentration exists on the Plains.
Eight of the 10 fastest-shrinking are in North Dakota, led by Burke County,
which lost nearly one-fourth of its residents in just seven years. Every
single one of the 50 counties with the greatest population losses is located
on the Plains.
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- In Minnesota, 29 rural counties, mostly
in the west, lost about 11,600 inhabitants between 1990 and 1997.
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- While these losses have outstripped projections
made just five years ago, the decline of the rural Plains has been underway
for most of the 20th century. Ever-more-massive machinery has made it possible
for farms to expand, with little need of additional help. Young people
have fled to metro areas, lured by careers and bright promise. Towns with
no rational economic reason to exist have shriveled.
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- But the new farm crisis that has assaulted
Minnesota and North Dakota (particularly in the Red River Valley) has accelerated
the hemorrhaging and the fear that this collapse could be the terminal
one. During the past two years, 2,511 of North Dakota's 30,500 farms went
out of business; anything less than an average harvest will probably cause
another 1,800 to disappear this year. In Minnesota, about 20 percent of
the valley's farmers quit last year; the Minnesota Farm Service Agency
reports that as many as 30 percent of its borrowers in the northwestern
part of the state probably will quit farming this year.
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- But it's a mistake to view this as strictly
an economic crisis, said Lloyd Omdahl, a political scientist and former
North Dakota lieutenant governor. "The leadership is gone from these
communities -- a whole class is disappearing," he said. "Everyone
in rural America realizes this transformation is underway. It's usually
framed in economic terms because it's happening in the ag sector, but we're
talking about an entire society that needs to be reinvigorated. And we're
not responding."
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- 'Everything' at risk
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- This is how the future looks from Warren,
Minn.: "If something isn't done quickly, we're going to lose an entire
culture," said Mayor Dick Nelson. "We're so dependent on agriculture
that when the farming community struggles, it starts to hit home. We could
lose downtown, the schools, the hospital -- everything."
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- The town on the eastern edge of the Red
River Valley has shrunk from 2,100 souls to fewer than 1,800. An attempt
to lure jobs into town has largely been a bust, meaning that as many as
one-third of adult residents have to find jobs elsewhere -- Nelson included:
He commutes 100 miles each way to Fargo, where he works as a trauma nurse.
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- The reason he needs that job is because
he decided four years ago to quit the farm his grandfather started in the
1920s.
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- "No one gets out because he wants
to get out -- I just saw it coming," Nelson said. Low prices, lousy
weather, disease and a collapsed global market have pushed thousands more
farmers to the edge.
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- "You try to pass on the culture
you come from, but our destiny is not in our own hands anymore," Nelson
said. "The farm culture of the Nelson family is gone and that'll never
be back. That door is closed."
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- 'Just as serious'
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- About 35 miles to the east, in Pennington
County, is the Christensen farm, headed by Clyde Christensen, who has farmed
all of his life on the spread started by his father in 1929, the year before
he was born.
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- "I started on my own in 1961 and
it was sweet," Christensen said. "Now, there's nothing. Never
in all my experience have I seen the kind of hurt that's in this country."
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- Christensen is mostly retired these days,
having turned the operation over to four sons and a son-in-law. They work
2,500 acres growing wheat, beans, corn, sunflowers, canola and honey bees.
Christensen assumes they'll lose money for the second year running.
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- "When you have a disaster like Grand
Forks' flood or the storms in southern Minnesota, the politicians all show
up with tears running down their faces," Christensen said. "But
the homes being lost around my place are just as serious. These people
are losing their job, their home -- everything. And their tears are just
as real."
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- His grandson Todd is a high school senior
who wants to farm after college -- only one of two members of his 170-member
graduating class who even plan to farm. But he's not hopeful. "I love
the farm, living in the country, outside," Todd Christensen said.
"But there's no future in it, really."
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- In western Pennington County, Michelle
and Mark Naplin have one of only three surviving operations in all of Black
River Township on a farm started by his great-grandfather.
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- They farm 2,700 acres, trying to buffer
the markets by diversifying their crops. They do all the work with one
hired man and two teenage kids.
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- The Naplins started the year knowing
they would lose money; last year more than $500,000 went through their
hands and they ended up with a taxable income of exactly zero. "I'm
to the point where I'm really ready to throw in the towel, but even if
you sell off, most of it goes to the IRS," said Mark Naplin, 44. "I
don't want to lose this place -- I've got two kids I'd like to pass this
along to -- but I just don't know where we're headed."
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- The Christensens and the Naplins were
among a dozen farmers from northwestern Minnesota who spent a recent morning
detailing their operations. None are confident they'll be in business next
year.
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- "I was concerned in the '80s, but
I'm scared to death now," said Howard Person, Pennington County's
extension agent.
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- Said Monte Casavan, another farmer at
the meeting: "There isn't one day that goes by that I don't try to
think about a way to make changes -- change the mix of my crops, change
my methods, change something."
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- Same Conclusions
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- Farm auction announcements hang in an
antique store front window in the North Dakota town of Velva.
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- But the track record of the past 60 years
shows that changing the way life is lived in the region is far easier said
than done.
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- In 1936, a presidential commission concluded
that the problems plaguing the Plains -- agricultural collapse, economic
stagnation and depopulation -- could be fixed only if massive changes occurred.
The economy had to diversify, farmers had to do a better job of adapting
to the harsh reality of the Plains' climate -- and the federal government
would step in and help make these things happen.
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- Twenty-one years later, another presidential
commission reached virtually the same conclusion. So did a 1967 commission
that concluded that the nation's rural population had become "The
People Left Behind."
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- Then, last year, the Northern Great Plains
Rural Development Commission took another run at the issue; it issued detailed
recommendations that could bring what it called "fundamental change"
to the Plains. So far, none of the recommendations have been implemented.
And, notably, the experts studying the Plains are not looking to the federal
government for help -- tacit acknowledgment that the days of significant
federal assistance are past.
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- "In the long run we've got to take
responsibility for our own future out here," said Jerry Nagel, who
served as executive director of the 1997 commission report. "We're
not falling into the trap of saying this is the federal government's problem.
And in the long run, the changes that need to happen are psychological
and emotional as much as ones that can be accomplished with public money."
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- People need to come to terms with the
fact that some towns will die because there's no economic reason to exist,
Nagel said. People must accept that some farms will go out of business
because they can't compete in a world market.
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- "We're not going to continue to
have small farms where you just grow wheat," Nagel said. "The
kind of agriculture we had in the past is not going to be the future. We
have to grow what the land will let us raise here -- and what the global
consumer wants."
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- Talk like that was considered heresy
on the Plains not long ago. And it's not much at odds with the Buffalo
Commons, a high-profile concept that roiled the region a decade ago.
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- Frank and Deborah Popper, academics from
New Jersey, published an article entitled "The Great Plains: From
Dust to Dust" in 1987, proposing that portions of 10 Plains states,
some 139,000 square miles, be turned into the Buffalo Commons: the world's
biggest wildlife refuge, with bison replacing humans.
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- Their rationale: Because decline and
depopulation appeared irreversible, the federal government should step
in and hasten the inevitable. "The government would take the newly
emptied Plains and tear down the fences, replant the shortgrass and restock
the animals, including the buffalo," they wrote.
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- The Poppers were vilified from one end
of the Plains to the other, but much of what they described has occurred.
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- Said Deborah Popper, "It's an American
story to move on and leave a place behind when there's no alternative.
We have always assumed growth in this country, but decline and loss have
been part of the American picture, too -- one we've averted our eyes from."
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- Plains people have "done all the
right things, lived their lives the way they're supposed to and they believe
they're being screwed," Frank Popper said. "That's the really
sad thing, that the destruction of a way of life is going on and there's
nothing anyone can think of to turn it around."
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- A Bright Spot
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- But the buffalo have returned to the
Plains in unprecedented numbers, if not exactly the way the Poppers envisioned.
The market for buffalo meat, nearly nonexistent a decade ago, is one of
the few bright spots in the Plains' agricultural economy.
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- The North American Bison Cooperative,
based in New Rockford, N.D., turned its first profit this year after three
years of losses. The co-op's 270 members in 15 states and four Canadian
provinces have 100,000 buffalo grazing on prairie grass -- 10 times the
number of animals that existed five years ago.
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- "I converted my grain farm in '93
to grass because I decided to get out before I was told I had to by my
banker," said Dennis Sexhus, a bison rancher who is the co-op's chief
executive officer. "It's a fun market to be in right now -- everyone's
smiling."
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- The co-op has tapped into the world market,
sending a 747 full of frozen buffalo meat to Europe once a week. Its 46
processing plant employees have some of the best-paying jobs in New Rockford.
But the success spreads only so far, Sexhus said.
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- "The county road from my place to
the highway used to have 11 families on it when I was growing up,"
he said. "Now, every building along that 10 miles of road is empty.
It's unbelievable what's happening up here -- people are just abandoning
this place."
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- 'Not enough people'
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- The same thing is happening around Bowbells.
Although Burke County's farmers have been spared the disease-spawned disasters
that have ravaged the Red River Valley, it hasn't kept a population crash
at bay.
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- A town that once had twice as many residents,
seven grocery stores, three implement dealers, two hardware stores, two
cafes, a bowling alley and a theater is essentially down to Elton Peterson's
grocery/variety store. It was founded by his grandfather exactly 100 years
ago.
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- "We're not making what we should
here," Peterson said. "My son's going to be the fourth generation,
and he'd never make a living if I couldn't just hand the business to him.
There's not enough people to support us anymore."
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- About 120 miles away, Pete Engen has
comparable problem -- on a vastly larger scale. Engen is the owner of Pete's
Tractor Salvage -- an 80-acre yard covered with thousands of pieces of
junked and broken farm equipment, tens of thousands of parts. His rusting
empire is south of Anamoose, in Sheridan County -- which is shrinking almost
as fast as Burke County.
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- "Grain prices are so damn low it's
tough for a person to make a go out here," Engen said. "When
they aren't buying machinery, it hurts me -- and I've got 12 on the payroll
here, making me one of the biggest employers around."
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- His inventory "just eats you up
-- I can only buy so much stuff from these guys going out of business.
I've got 100 pieces here that I can't afford to pick up."
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- A neighbor had just come in and offered
Engen all his equipment. "He's 65 and has nobody willing to take over
his place. I gave him a price. He'll probably sell. And I've lost another
customer."
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- A few miles down the road, Harold Jenner,
80, is spending his summer dismantling a vacant house, one board at a time,
watching essentially the same thing happen to his town of Goodrich, N.D.
Goodrich's 100th anniversary is still three years away, "and I think
we'll make that," Jenner said. "But it's just a matter of time,
I'm sure. It's going fast -- we've got a full cemetery, but the rest of
the place is empty."
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