Hey all! I'm a crop scientist who's been working in "real America" for decades.

I'm also a political operative, organizing in the rural red-state South since 2007.

This is absolutely spot-on.

Here's my plan- speaking from inside the belly of the beast- on what we need to do. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1307349468245827590

Rural areas are ultra-conservative because they've been engineered to be that way on purpose.

The narrative about "agribusiness taking over and forcing family farms to compete with each other"

is nearly 100% fabricated. That's not what happened.

So what DID happen?

Tenant farming & sharecropping were commonplace in most of the rural US- not just the South.

20th century landowners replaced farmworkers with machines. This wasn't just about money. It was about purging radical laborers out of rural areas.

Have you ever noticed that we have a split mental image of what "family farmer" means?

We have a mental image of struggling dirt-poor farmers.

We also have a mental image of comfortable, clean, secure, independent families.

Tenant farming is why. The struggling dirt-poor farmers we remember were the tenants.

The prosperous, thriving families were the ones who owned the land.

Tractors & other farm automation got their start as a way for landowners to evict tenants. Not "compete against each other."

The New Deal sped this. So did the Civil Rights movement.

Sharecropper & civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer saw our day coming. She saw landowners evict her & other Black farmworkers just for registering to vote.

It was a project to starve political opposition out of the South.

The Midwest, PNW, California, & other regions underwent the same in the 20th century- if much quieter due to the lack of a civil rights movement.

Incarceration of Japanese American farmers in WW2 and the ~mysterious disappearance~ of small midwestern family farms? Same thing.

It was a series of racial & class purges. They weren't just economic battles over land. They were deliberate projects to consolidate property owners' political power over huge blocs of territory.

And thus, the Senate, EC, & national policy.

Hamer saw the writing on the wall. She saw where mass evictions of Black farmworkers would mean if it was successful.

Black folks would gain the vote, & it wouldn't even matter that much because they'd all been herded out of their homes into a few concentrated urban districts.

We're living in the world Fannie Lou Hamer tried to stop.

She launched a coop farm in the Mississippi Delta to give Black farmers a place to go after eviction.

It quickly grew to 680 acres, under the stewardship of experienced Black farmers flooding in from all over the South.

But thanks to an economic crash from the oil crisis, 2 years of severe flooding on the Mississippi, & the Hamer's failing health after years of beatings & attempted assassinations, the farm folded.

It was a last bulwark of Black land ownership, & it was allowed to fold.

The 50-odd years after Hamer's experiment have proved her right. We desperately need equality, economic opportunities, and diverse voices in the countryside

but they're not there

and that's on purpose.

I've written on this...uh... a lot. https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1303033211661045764

We need to finish what Fannie Lou Hamer started.

We have, at our feet, all the elements we need to bring people and jobs back to the countryside. But we're going to have to DIY it bc there's no way in hell we're getting that done through the political process right now lmao.

We have a mighty need for farms and food processing that are employee-owned, closer to the consumer, and more accountable for how they farm than today's private farm estates.

We have a lot of grown farm kids who know how to farm & have connections to land

who are outraged at how their own families have wrecked the environment, destroyed local infrastructure, & enabled abusers with land & power to run unchecked in their own communities.

(yeah the family farming system is corrupt as hell & a lot of farm kids are starting to speak out against it. in real life, family farmers are problematic faves at best.)

We have a tech industry that's about to shed tens of thousands of remote white-collar workers into the countryside.

I really worry for these folks- that a lot of them are going to try & do small farms, bc that's what we're told the good life is

and there are so many ways it can go badly. You can lose all your money, just wind up gentrifying the area you're trying to live in, wind up leaving due to total lack of infrastructure, or worst of all, assimilate into the local landowning elite lmao.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

If we play techxodus right, it can bring a lot of quality, accessible jobs to rural areas.

It can combine really well with employee-owned farms that reinvigorate and rebalance today's carved-out, beat-up countrysides.

"Playing it right" is challenging. It takes support. Truly rural areas are off-limits for a lot of remote workers thanks to lack of high-quality data connections. That means it takes a commitment to build some infrastructure, not just a "woohoo let's go" effort.

But it's what we need to do. I truly believe there's no other real solution for the trouble our democracy's in. We have to finish what Hamer started.

That's it for today. Right now, we need to be focused on corralling senators & winning the election.

Watch this space for more.