All of this.

There's a myth out there that rural brain drain is caused by "cities vacuuming away all the young/smart/ambitious people."

Bullshit. Rural areas & small towns kick them out. On purpose.

Spoilers: this thread has SOLUTIONS in it, keep scrolling : ) https://twitter.com/buttpraxis/status/1302585488818106374

"but cities aren't great either"

Yeah & everyone already knows it.

Meanwhile the élites of rural areas & small towns are still spinning this "boohoo cities are carving us out" BS & getting away with it. sit down & shut up while I learn you something

*Everywhere* has an élite. The grodiest meth-country counties all have a nice subdivision somewhere.

Seriously. Where do you think the people who own the pawn shop/liquor store/gun shop combo strip malls live?

The urban/rural divide is a myth. They're both run by greedy assholes who are running their surroundings into the ground for profit. Where is the difference?

Anyway, back to how this plays out in rural/small town life.

There's a certain kind of folks who are attracted to small town/rural living because IT'S EASIER TO BE A BIG FISH IN A SMALL POND.

You know what's the easiest way to stay a big fish? Keep the pond small.

Even better, drain it dry.

This goes triple in places where the only game in town is land. Either through agriculture, mining/drilling rights, or (in niche cases like Fayetteville, a city w no economy besides property rental, thx Ft Bragg) res/com real estate.

That's because land is a zero-sum game.

If you and/or your clique own all the land, nobody else can live or do business there without your blessing.

Assumptions that make sense in urban areas, like "if you want to be rich & powerful you do it by seeking profit," go out the window in locales w land-based economies.

Plantation owners actively prevented cotton mills from being built in the pre-Civil War South *even though they knew mills were more profitable than plantations*

because they introduced a giant free working class that slaveowners couldn't beat, evict, or run out of town at will.

sheds a whole new light on that "whaaaaa the North stole all our money by having all the cotton mills" talking point, doesn't it

gee. how did the South, a region with a 100% cotton-based economy (that THEY RAN) wind up with NO MILLS?

they did it to themselves, the stupid fucks

Ever notice how ICE raids against "farmworkers" never actually seem to happen at farms? Always at meat plants?

Same dynamic. Meat plants are year-round operations, w lots of people that landowners don't have the same control over as they do farm workers. So they call for backup.

The real story of "the death of family farms"? Mostly big landowners evicting sharecroppers & tenants. Not just in the South- nearly half of Iowa's "family farmers" in 1920 were actually tenants.

That's why the countryside "used to be radical" & now it's super conservative.

Folks who make their living owning property, btw, are also terrified of LGBTQ+ reality because their wealth is all about dynastic accumulation. Social-climbing through marriage is a HUGE component of their livelihood.

So how tf are they supposed to keep a lock on wealth without compulsive heterosexuality? They NEED it.

Hence these folks being militantly anti-LGBTQ+. Along with all the general racism and misogyny that also prop up these estates' wealth & status.

The funny part is this "big fish drain the pond to stay on top" phenomenon is REALLY well-documented

in poor countries & oil oligarchies.

But the vast majority of the United States (in terms of square miles) behaves the exact same way.

It's called resource curse.

If there's a significant natural resource, you often wind up with a small wealthy clique that owns it. They refuse to invest in any other kind of business or infrastructure (including basic civil rights).

That way, they own everything and everyONE.

It's a cheap way to be powerful. They're happy to be super-wealthy if it's easy to do so (see: oil oligarchs)

but "middling wealthy while everyone else around me is desperate" is fine too. Hence, stifling economic development to stay on top.

Again, most of the US's square mileage operates this way.

@buttpraxis if you feel like we're being herded into slums, you ain't wrong.

There's ~20-30 urban cores where the ruling class figured out how to monetize the post-1940 flood of rural refugees.

This drives up basic costs of living.

Everywhere else? Resource curse.

Anyway, it's one thing to know what the problem is

and a whole nother thing to DO something about it.

Which is something I've been thinking a lot about the last couple years, watching Fayetteville NC's élite curb-stomp anything & anyone that could challenge their supremacy.

I'm also thinking about it a lot as I'm writing a book rn on all the livelihoods that agriculture COULD support- if farmers actually invested in their businesses instead of doing the Southern cotton planter thing where they offload processing onto outside partners

and then bitch about how they only make a tiny portion of the consumer dollar.

That's bc farming is only a tiny portion of the work that goes into making the food. To make FOOD instead of bulk commodities, they'd have to invest in creating real jobs & shit.

And farmers don't want to do that because (despite the rhetoric about how small farmers = Jesus)- in the grand scheme of rural economics, the vast majority of farmers are really just biggish fish in a small pond.

Who do NOT want to build their local economy & infrastructure.

All this is to say- if we're serious about fixing the food system, I think big employee-owned farm/food operations are the only way to fly.

And WHAT A COINCIDENCE, they could also fix this "we're all being herded into expensive slums and it's destroying our democracy" problem.

A lot of co's are switching to 100% remote work. I heard rumors Salesforce just did so? That's 40-50K people with a lot more freedom to just get up & go.

So now, there's a Discourse about general tech & office workers moving to rural areas for lower cost of living.

This isn't w/out potential downsides.

1. Gentrification or the "Cary NC" model. Instead of bringing jobs to rural areas per se, it just leads to new exclaves. These are soon gerrymandered into irrelevance just like the old blue cities.

thread break, brb

2. White-collar tech & office workers aren't THAT universally progressive

3. These are jobs that are more or less inaccessible to folks already living in rural areas

For reasons #2 & 3, you don't want to put all the eggs in the tech worker basket. You want diverse economic activity in rural areas, not just a tech exodus.

And for reason #1, whatever the approach is, you want to cover a LOT of area. Not just make a few new exclaves.

Here's a great example of an investment in rural areas & land-based livelihoods. There's tons of demand for high-end dairy products that's filled by imports bc we don't make much fancy cheese here.

Could give you a 20-page report on why, but it boils down to "dairy farmers have a cotton planter problem & that's why they're all swirling the drain rn but nobody will admit it." : /

Like the resource curse problem causes a SHOCKING amount of rural pain & suffering

and nobody notices bc it's always blamed on "agribusiness" & everyone says "yeah that sounds legit" : /

BUT WHAT IF THERE WERE JUST BIG-ASS CSA'S THAT YOU COULD LIVE ON/NEAR, AND THEY MADE GOOD FUCKIN CHEESE. AND IDK, SOUP

This is a little similar to the "agrihood" concept. Except agrihoods seem to be neo-country clubs where the golf course was replaced by what a "working farm" that probably isn't

agrihoods also kinda look like the exurb from Get Out if we're being honest. no thanks!

Big, employee-owned farms that make finished goods, not just bulk commodities are a big fuckin mood.

They're great on their own! But can be strengthened a lot by having lots of white-collar workers nearby.

Played right, they can also help ease a lot of the tensions that otherwise crop up when white collar workers flood into rural areas- which can turn into just plain old gentrification in a hurry.

If you come bringing real jobs, people don't get THAT mad that you're there.

A core org like a big employee-owned farm can also help with the infrastructure problems that otherwise tend to keep tech worker out of rural areas, like quality child care, clinics, & high-speed internet.

these are also super useful to the people who ALREADY LIVE THERE.

Since someone asked about intentional communities, here's the deal

I grew up mormon. it's the smoking wreckage of an 1830's intentional community that went horrifically sideways

that's why I'm Strictly Business with this concept. Jobs. infrastructure. the rest is up to you

It's also a very bad idea to have white-collar & tech workers living directly *on* the farm imho.

You really don't want pet dogs or personal gardens *in* a farm, for ex, and farms can just be really noisy at 5am in ways that don't mesh well with full-on residential living.

So this is another area where I don't think the agrihood/neo country club model has legs. They're restricted to play farms by the nature of the high-end inhabitants they're courting.

I want me a big fat working-class real farm that actually feeds people? Who live NEXT DOOR

IDK there's just something about having lived an hour north of The Villages for several years that makes you think "lol sure why NOT just invent new patterns of residential/commercial activity"

it SHOULD go without saying that if big, employee-owned farms or the texodus neighborhoods near them are super white, A Great Error Has Been Made

please see every thread I ever wrote about BIPOC farming & Indigenous food systems restoration

Texodus could do SO MUCH to support Indigenous land & food systems that have been stamped out largely to support white landowners' resource curse hustles. Controlled burns, old-school agroforestry, etc are important food systems that got replaced by timber plantations for ex.

But that's assuming there's good information &. like. onboarding for incoming white-collar workers.

"yes there's going to be fire sometimes, yes it's ok, and you might see people hunting wild hogs. because they're invasive species that destroy everything"

Which I think speaks to the importance of having a land management org play a coordinating role

it can be a farm

it can also be *gasp* a reservation or other tribal org

sometimes it's both! see Yakama Nation Land Enterprises, Gila River, & other Native land orgs

tagging @SylvanaquaFarms even though I have no idea if they wanna fuck with residential lmao

Addendum

If you're about to reply "Did you mean cooperatives/communes/a kibbutz/the Grange?"

NO

if I had meant any of those things, I would have SAID those things

I literally mean a strictly-business, super-vanilla, company

that farms and makes food

and is employee owned & governed

that's it

it's already hard enough to build livelihoods & infrastructure. I don't think it's reasonable to expect an org to provide a social life too.

As already stated in the thread: I grew up in the remains of an intentional community & it was a fucking nightmare. Never again.

"Having a community" is not a replacement for self-actualization.

And when you take the boot off people's neck, we're plenty capable of building community ourselves.

When people have decent livelihoods we don't NEED dedicated orgs to do that for us.

Cooperatives, by & large, just enable shitty landowner "us vs them" politics IME. So no, I really don't mean cooperatives.

Kibbutzim & communes have their own history of troubled-ness that's very educational & folks should avail themselves of that.

It's also really telling that folks never ask about moshavim, another form of intentional community in Israel with a better history of functioning well

but they were more popular with Mizrahi/Sephardic communities so most US progressives seem to not know they exist

The Grange & other "old-fashioned radical farm orgs": almost universally racist as fuck, & its baked into their principles. Also built around "us vs them" shitty landowner politics. NO THX.

Again: if I meant the thing you are wondering about, I would have SAID the thing you are wondering about

I did not

just trust me on this ok

oh and add permaculture to the burn pile while we're at it

it's cool in theory but in reality it's white hippies on the lecture circuit w shit they either stole from Indigenous farmers or just made up

there's a reason I said "support Indigenous food systems" & not permaculture

welp

all my masks support independent economic activity in a small-town shithole with no jobs, AND the Post Office still works here- all shipments the last month have arrived within a week of being sent. thnx Ft Bragg & your many vote-by-mail soldiers

https://www.etsy.com/shop/FunkyFreshNoFogMasks?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=809244788

FUCK MASKS ARE BAAAAACK