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Rural Kansas is dying

107 points by neaden 9y ago

Retric 9y ago
I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen. PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.
- deleted 9y ago
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- rcthompson 9y ago
  I assume that average is the arithmetic mean? The mean household net worth is almost certainly inversely related to the population density.
- jonknee 9y ago
  Average household net worth is meaningless. Charles Koch himself is worth ~$60,000,000,000 which comes out to a cool $55,562 per household in Kansas. And that's just one guy!
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    Such a large outlier! When rural farmers move out of Kansas, they increase the average household net worth in Kansas - when they move away, they stop "dragging down" the average. We shouldn't maximize this metric.
  - Retric 9y ago
    That's true specifically because the population is low. Someone is going to own the land and industry of the state. Extreme outliers are also part of the national average weath, but your u will find a lot more multi millionaires per capital in Kansas than most other states.
- coleifer 9y ago
  Johnson county, in Kansas City, has crazy property valuations. Lawrence, where the university of Kansas is, similarly high. So that's not a very meaningful measure to kansans.
  - madengr 9y ago
    Not really. The typical $250k house here in JOCO would be $2M in the Bay Area.
- prewett 9y ago
  That's probably because all those farmers own land and farming equipment. So it has a lot of net worth (capital), but return on capital isn't very large. It's kind of like people who have lived in the Bay Area for years and whose house is now worth a million or two. Yes, they are millionaires, but that capital is only useable (in the "I'm rich!" sense) if they sell their house and move somewhere cheaper. And if farming is your career, you'd have to switch careers to use that net worth, which is daunting and maybe not very likely to be successful.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Household net worth would include the value of your house and the land you own. If you're a farmer with a square mile of land (that's in the region of median farm size in Kansas), that's $1 million of net worth right there. That median net worth sounds high, but most of that is captured as land, and the actual income and liquid wealth is quite poor.
Mononokay 9y ago
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- poulsbohemian 9y ago
  This doesn't seem entirely accurate - Minnesota and Iowa, for example, are crawling with well-respected private liberal arts colleges. The problem historically hasn't been producing an educated population, it has been keeping them there.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      > Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing. It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed. Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.
      - wyclif 9y ago
        Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).
        enervate 9y ago
        Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever they can get and then re-invest the money?
ComputerGuru 9y ago
TThe only mention of corn in the entire article: While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the crowd. Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn’t even touch upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn’t mention corn subsidies that keep corn prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how boosted production has dropped wheat prices.
- mrguyman 9y ago
  Sorry, but this is wrong. Wheat production is also heavily subsidized. Corn prices have also dropped precipitously since 2012. The problems described are endemic to both crops.
- jonknee 9y ago
  Well it's not like you have awesome urban living around corn fields either. Huge fields and few people kind of get in the way of vibrant towns.
  - sverige 9y ago
    Small town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium-sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000 people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90 minutes away. Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the country as a whole.
    - jonknee 9y ago
      > This is a loss for the country as a whole. Is it? It seems like that’s the direct result of increased productivity. Even if it’s a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain. tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in United States terms. It seems a win for the country.
jonknee 9y ago
This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities. We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.
- typomatic 9y ago
  > This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline Can you expand on this? Is it because you don't care about farmers in comparison to industrial workers, or is there a deeper meaning?
  - jonknee 9y ago
    Kansas was never bustling, the rust belt was.
    - sverige 9y ago
      Did you live there? There was a definite vibrancy to the network of small towns in the Midwest that is being lost, similar to the rust belt. The cultures were very different, though, so perhaps one person's "bustling" is another's unmentionable adjective.
    - typomatic 9y ago
      What is "bustling"? People lived there and enjoyed their lives, raised children, and participated in a culture. Who are you to look down your nose with "bustling"?
- mobilefriendly 9y ago
  With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.
mjevans 9y ago
As far as I'm aware, there's no procedure or help for the orderly shutdown of a locality that is no longer necessary for the greater community of any level of government. I'm not even aware of there being such procedures in place in other countries, let alone the US where this has context.
- FooHentai 9y ago
  You mean in terms of governance, or the physical presence itself? For the presence, there are precedents. For example where small communities in e.g. Alaska get government assistance to move and merge into other communities nearby. However those approaches seem to be taken very rarely, and you can imagine the attitudes of those residents who hold out.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Cities can disincorporate when they run out of funds, or be disincorporated by the state when they are abandoned. In 2012, the State of Kansas officially disincorporated the city of Treece.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  this is a thing that exists, it's called "municipal disincorporation".
- megaman22 9y ago
  In Maine, where I grew up, it's not uncommon for dying towns to disincorporate and revert to Unorganized Territories. Services formerly provided by the town revert to either the county government or the state departments. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4697054 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=469705...
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Connecticut disbanded counties, either hoisting services up to the state or pushing them down to "towns".
davidw 9y ago
I enjoyed this book about modern-day 'frontier America': http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-nowhere-tales-from-americas.html http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-n... It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.
bsder 9y ago
The problem is quite direct: people do not wish to live there. Getting 100 people to decide that town X is going to be their telecommute hub and doing it is simply not that hard to organize nowadays--if people actually wanted to do it. The fact that nobody wants to do this says more than any amount of development initiatives.
- daxorid 8y ago
  Speak for yourself. Plenty of us want to do it, and are doing it. Cities are rotten.
mcone 9y ago
The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option for much longer. See http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....
- vwcx 9y ago
  “It comes down to the luck of where your ancestors settled,” Wilson says. “Or where you bought ground.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...
Sophistifunk 9y ago
It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them. Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international economic migrants do.
- theseus7 9y ago
  The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return. Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move. This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.
DanAndersen 9y ago
The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering in tech hubs.
- sologoub 9y ago
  Agree that the promise of remote work hasn’t quite panned out, yet. However, the article is also noting something related: > Today, operators sitting at computers hundreds of miles from the farm can easily steer gigantic harvesters via satellite. Kansas’s agricultural landscape needs fewer and fewer human caretakers. In a way, they are realizing “telecommuting” for harvester operators and impacting local population. I wouldn’t be surprised if one operator is able to command multiple machines in multiple fields, thereby reducing the total number of operators you need, even concurrently. As for most “tech work” these days, I feel like we could absolutely do well with remote teams. In some cases I would miss the white boarding sessions, but that’s something you could fly people in for if it’s really needed or use myriad of other tools for.
  - chrischen 9y ago
    The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.
    - sologoub 9y ago
      Don’t know if VR/telepresence has given any real benefit to typical tech work. That said, my team at a prior employer was distributed between our offices in LA, SF, Seattle, Bozeman MT, Toronto. We met in person no more than once a quarter and did everything else via hangouts, conf calls and slack. Even though we were very spread out, the team was one of the most productive in the org. I don’t know if any tech would have made us measurably more productive. One argument could be made that we worked on an existing system, but we actually rebuilt completely, while also keeping the old one operational. There was a lot of greenfield work done and a lot of ideation. Periodic in-person sessions helped, but it’s really hard to make an argument that these same ideas would not have come to be without those in-person meetings. Where I think you need the density you described is in searching for new work and/or funding/company creation. It’s pretty hard to sell convince someone to be your first customer when you never met face-to-face in person. Hiring remotely should be pretty doable, but requires a leap of faith that many are unwilling to take.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
It is cruel, but as long as they continue to vote Republican, they'll see themselves stomped to bits. The reason Donn Teske can't get much out of the Republicans in the legislature is that he's no money to offer them. There's little left for the large businesses to steal from except their land and they'll get that through automation and debt. There's few public services to privatize into the hands of Republicans' sponsors except the roads. And those meatpacking plants? They will automate as soon as they can and scrap the workers. Meanwhile the national Republicans want to replicate The Kansas Experiment across the country. Expect more pain as the Republican Party's ideal is implemented elsewhere. Survival of the fittest and the Republican voters have showcased they weren't the fittest in themselves or their vote.
- ryanx435 9y ago
  I think you have drunk too much of the anti-republican and anti corporate koolaide. They are not the entirety of the problem and it's weird that you think they are. A counter example is Texas: majority Republican and a very strong and growing economy.
  - curtis 9y ago
    It's entirely possible that there's an area the size of Kansas inside Texas that has experienced negative growth in the last few years.
  - sykh 9y ago
    To be specific it's Brownback and people who think like he does when it comes to economics. Such people are overwhelmingly Republican. I don't know the percentage of people who are Republican who think similarly though so I can't say that a majority of Republicans hold similar views.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    Texas is more diversified from Kansas' farm economy, in addition to having a huge agriculture base, Texas is probably #1 or #2 in energy production/consumption in the USA. As long as oil is not in a slump, Texas can coast while other places without the natural energy resources would suffer. A large number of decent middle class lifestyles can be supported with or without a college degree with work around the oil fields. Even with this natural advantage, there was a staggering amount of underfunding for public schools statewide in Texas over the decade that the GOP has been in power in Texas that will mimic what happened in Kansas. The legislature continuously moves more and more of the onus of public funding to local property taxes and decrease the amount of funding from the state. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/28/texas-am-lori-taylor-public-education-funding/ https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/28/texas-am-lori-taylor...
Animats 9y ago
Progress! More food from fewer farmers! You want millions of peasants tilling the land by hand?
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population. Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer". Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?
  - jarvelov 9y ago
    With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to other activities. Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on people's vanity. However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries. Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?
      - durkie 9y ago
        Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.
vinhboy 9y ago
> "We feel the prejudice in the cities against supporting small towns" No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.
coleifer 9y ago
This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and across many industries.
chrissnell 9y ago
I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee shops, a great local library, decent restaurants, and a couple of solid cocktail bars. Kansas State University is here, so that brings us a nice performing arts center that gets nationally touring acts and Big 12 football and basketball teams that you can't help but love. My only "commute" is driving my kids to school and driving myself to the coffee shop. We have a great little airport with free parking and I can leave my home and be stepping onto the jet bridge in twenty minutes and SFO is an easy hop through DFW. It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.
- swampthinker 9y ago
  I think a big deciding factor is kids/age. I'm young and still prefer the city life, so 1 college just isn't going to cut it for me.
  - beaorn 9y ago
    I would agree that kids and age play a big part in the appeal of Manhattan for people outside of college age range, but it has other things going for it besides just K-State. https://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-live/2018/ks/manhattan https://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-li... Kansas City is only a 2 hour drive away to go do bigger city stuff.
    - pnutjam 9y ago
      Two hours is a looong drive outside of Kansas. We happened to drive through Kansas on the way to a Colorado wedding, during prom season. It was interesting to see all these prom kids dressed up and meeting at truck stops to take pictures or carpool.
lurquer 9y ago
Much of Kansas is comprised of the most uninteresting topography in the United States. But for wheat and corn, nobody would live there. The author claims she grew up in Kansas. I doubt her job requires her to be in Los Angeles. So, why isn't she in Kansas? As a Midwest resident, I'm annoyed by patronizing West and East Coasters who claim fly-over country is dying. Many folks in the Midwest stay here precisely because the thought of living amongst smug nitwits like the author is so revolting.
sp332 9y ago
Living somewhere rural isn't hell. It means you might get bored some of the time - and that's not the end of the world! It also means you get to do what you want, instead of depending on other people to entertain you every minute until you die. Having some empty time between events happening is fine. Living more independently can even be great sometimes. You don't want to live in Kansas, that's fine, I'm just worried that a lot of people in the comments here are acting like there's no reason anyone could want to live there.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
In the main banner photo of that article, rural Kansas has better and more street lighting than some parts of Los Angeles, for whatever that's worth.
sudosteph 9y ago
I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets? When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than ridiculously bitter IPAs.
- niftich 9y ago
  The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit. Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.
theseus7 9y ago
The increasing concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer, larger farmers is the result of declining property taxes on land: http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality_&_Falling_Prop_Tax_Rates.CV.pdf http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality... Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land is worth very little relative to urban land. A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are highest.
sargun 9y ago
Is there a reason to worry about it dying?
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't post flamebait here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AdamM12 9y ago
Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.
nanomonkey 9y ago
This reminds me of a story about Slovakian Protestant Farmer's and how they died out because it became social acceptable for each family only had one child. If the child died the family died. If the child lived they would marry another farming family's only child and the farms would combine, growing larger. Suicide by Culture (http://250bpm.com/blog:113 http://250bpm.com/blog:113)
deleted 9y ago
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ataturk 9y ago
I always find it odd when stories describing anywhere that has a population drop to be some kind of massive tragedy in the making. Meanwhile, world population is surging towards 8 billion!

107 points by neaden 9y ago

I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen. PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.

deleted 9y ago
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rcthompson 9y ago
I assume that average is the arithmetic mean? The mean household net worth is almost certainly inversely related to the population density.
jonknee 9y ago
Average household net worth is meaningless. Charles Koch himself is worth ~$60,000,000,000 which comes out to a cool $55,562 per household in Kansas. And that's just one guy!
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Such a large outlier! When rural farmers move out of Kansas, they increase the average household net worth in Kansas - when they move away, they stop "dragging down" the average. We shouldn't maximize this metric.
- Retric 9y ago
  That's true specifically because the population is low. Someone is going to own the land and industry of the state. Extreme outliers are also part of the national average weath, but your u will find a lot more multi millionaires per capital in Kansas than most other states.
coleifer 9y ago
Johnson county, in Kansas City, has crazy property valuations. Lawrence, where the university of Kansas is, similarly high. So that's not a very meaningful measure to kansans.
- madengr 9y ago
  Not really. The typical $250k house here in JOCO would be $2M in the Bay Area.
prewett 9y ago
That's probably because all those farmers own land and farming equipment. So it has a lot of net worth (capital), but return on capital isn't very large. It's kind of like people who have lived in the Bay Area for years and whose house is now worth a million or two. Yes, they are millionaires, but that capital is only useable (in the "I'm rich!" sense) if they sell their house and move somewhere cheaper. And if farming is your career, you'd have to switch careers to use that net worth, which is daunting and maybe not very likely to be successful.
jcranmer 9y ago
Household net worth would include the value of your house and the land you own. If you're a farmer with a square mile of land (that's in the region of median farm size in Kansas), that's $1 million of net worth right there. That median net worth sounds high, but most of that is captured as land, and the actual income and liquid wealth is quite poor.

Mononokay 9y ago

poulsbohemian 9y ago
This doesn't seem entirely accurate - Minnesota and Iowa, for example, are crawling with well-respected private liberal arts colleges. The problem historically hasn't been producing an educated population, it has been keeping them there.
- wyclif 9y ago
  It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    > Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing. It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed. Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).
      - enervate 9y ago
        Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever they can get and then re-invest the money?

ComputerGuru 9y ago

TThe only mention of corn in the entire article: While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the crowd. Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn’t even touch upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn’t mention corn subsidies that keep corn prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how boosted production has dropped wheat prices.

mrguyman 9y ago
Sorry, but this is wrong. Wheat production is also heavily subsidized. Corn prices have also dropped precipitously since 2012. The problems described are endemic to both crops.
jonknee 9y ago
Well it's not like you have awesome urban living around corn fields either. Huge fields and few people kind of get in the way of vibrant towns.
- sverige 9y ago
  Small town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium-sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000 people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90 minutes away. Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the country as a whole.
  - jonknee 9y ago
    > This is a loss for the country as a whole. Is it? It seems like that’s the direct result of increased productivity. Even if it’s a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain. tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in United States terms. It seems a win for the country.

jonknee 9y ago

This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities. We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.

typomatic 9y ago
> This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline Can you expand on this? Is it because you don't care about farmers in comparison to industrial workers, or is there a deeper meaning?
- jonknee 9y ago
  Kansas was never bustling, the rust belt was.
  - sverige 9y ago
    Did you live there? There was a definite vibrancy to the network of small towns in the Midwest that is being lost, similar to the rust belt. The cultures were very different, though, so perhaps one person's "bustling" is another's unmentionable adjective.
  - typomatic 9y ago
    What is "bustling"? People lived there and enjoyed their lives, raised children, and participated in a culture. Who are you to look down your nose with "bustling"?
mobilefriendly 9y ago
With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.

mjevans 9y ago

As far as I'm aware, there's no procedure or help for the orderly shutdown of a locality that is no longer necessary for the greater community of any level of government. I'm not even aware of there being such procedures in place in other countries, let alone the US where this has context.

FooHentai 9y ago
You mean in terms of governance, or the physical presence itself? For the presence, there are precedents. For example where small communities in e.g. Alaska get government assistance to move and merge into other communities nearby. However those approaches seem to be taken very rarely, and you can imagine the attitudes of those residents who hold out.
stephengillie 9y ago
Cities can disincorporate when they run out of funds, or be disincorporated by the state when they are abandoned. In 2012, the State of Kansas officially disincorporated the city of Treece.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas
nerfhammer 9y ago
this is a thing that exists, it's called "municipal disincorporation".
megaman22 9y ago
In Maine, where I grew up, it's not uncommon for dying towns to disincorporate and revert to Unorganized Territories. Services formerly provided by the town revert to either the county government or the state departments. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4697054 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=469705...
maxerickson 9y ago
Connecticut disbanded counties, either hoisting services up to the state or pushing them down to "towns".

davidw 9y ago

I enjoyed this book about modern-day 'frontier America': http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-nowhere-tales-from-americas.html http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-n... It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.

bsder 9y ago

The problem is quite direct: people do not wish to live there. Getting 100 people to decide that town X is going to be their telecommute hub and doing it is simply not that hard to organize nowadays--if people actually wanted to do it. The fact that nobody wants to do this says more than any amount of development initiatives.

daxorid 8y ago
Speak for yourself. Plenty of us want to do it, and are doing it. Cities are rotten.

mcone 9y ago

The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option for much longer. See http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....

vwcx 9y ago
“It comes down to the luck of where your ancestors settled,” Wilson says. “Or where you bought ground.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing-midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...

Sophistifunk 9y ago

It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them. Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international economic migrants do.

theseus7 9y ago
The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return. Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move. This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.

DanAndersen 9y ago

The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering in tech hubs.

sologoub 9y ago
Agree that the promise of remote work hasn’t quite panned out, yet. However, the article is also noting something related: > Today, operators sitting at computers hundreds of miles from the farm can easily steer gigantic harvesters via satellite. Kansas’s agricultural landscape needs fewer and fewer human caretakers. In a way, they are realizing “telecommuting” for harvester operators and impacting local population. I wouldn’t be surprised if one operator is able to command multiple machines in multiple fields, thereby reducing the total number of operators you need, even concurrently. As for most “tech work” these days, I feel like we could absolutely do well with remote teams. In some cases I would miss the white boarding sessions, but that’s something you could fly people in for if it’s really needed or use myriad of other tools for.
- chrischen 9y ago
  The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.
  - sologoub 9y ago
    Don’t know if VR/telepresence has given any real benefit to typical tech work. That said, my team at a prior employer was distributed between our offices in LA, SF, Seattle, Bozeman MT, Toronto. We met in person no more than once a quarter and did everything else via hangouts, conf calls and slack. Even though we were very spread out, the team was one of the most productive in the org. I don’t know if any tech would have made us measurably more productive. One argument could be made that we worked on an existing system, but we actually rebuilt completely, while also keeping the old one operational. There was a lot of greenfield work done and a lot of ideation. Periodic in-person sessions helped, but it’s really hard to make an argument that these same ideas would not have come to be without those in-person meetings. Where I think you need the density you described is in searching for new work and/or funding/company creation. It’s pretty hard to sell convince someone to be your first customer when you never met face-to-face in person. Hiring remotely should be pretty doable, but requires a leap of faith that many are unwilling to take.

kevin_b_er 9y ago

It is cruel, but as long as they continue to vote Republican, they'll see themselves stomped to bits. The reason Donn Teske can't get much out of the Republicans in the legislature is that he's no money to offer them. There's little left for the large businesses to steal from except their land and they'll get that through automation and debt. There's few public services to privatize into the hands of Republicans' sponsors except the roads. And those meatpacking plants? They will automate as soon as they can and scrap the workers. Meanwhile the national Republicans want to replicate The Kansas Experiment across the country. Expect more pain as the Republican Party's ideal is implemented elsewhere. Survival of the fittest and the Republican voters have showcased they weren't the fittest in themselves or their vote.

ryanx435 9y ago
I think you have drunk too much of the anti-republican and anti corporate koolaide. They are not the entirety of the problem and it's weird that you think they are. A counter example is Texas: majority Republican and a very strong and growing economy.
- curtis 9y ago
  It's entirely possible that there's an area the size of Kansas inside Texas that has experienced negative growth in the last few years.
- sykh 9y ago
  To be specific it's Brownback and people who think like he does when it comes to economics. Such people are overwhelmingly Republican. I don't know the percentage of people who are Republican who think similarly though so I can't say that a majority of Republicans hold similar views.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Texas is more diversified from Kansas' farm economy, in addition to having a huge agriculture base, Texas is probably #1 or #2 in energy production/consumption in the USA. As long as oil is not in a slump, Texas can coast while other places without the natural energy resources would suffer. A large number of decent middle class lifestyles can be supported with or without a college degree with work around the oil fields. Even with this natural advantage, there was a staggering amount of underfunding for public schools statewide in Texas over the decade that the GOP has been in power in Texas that will mimic what happened in Kansas. The legislature continuously moves more and more of the onus of public funding to local property taxes and decrease the amount of funding from the state. https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/28/texas-am-lori-taylor-public-education-funding/ https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/28/texas-am-lori-taylor...

Animats 9y ago

Progress! More food from fewer farmers! You want millions of peasants tilling the land by hand?

stephengillie 9y ago
Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population. Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer". Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?
- jarvelov 9y ago
  With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to other activities. Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on people's vanity. However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries. Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?
    - durkie 9y ago
      Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.

vinhboy 9y ago

> "We feel the prejudice in the cities against supporting small towns" No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.

coleifer 9y ago

This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and across many industries.

chrissnell 9y ago

I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee shops, a great local library, decent restaurants, and a couple of solid cocktail bars. Kansas State University is here, so that brings us a nice performing arts center that gets nationally touring acts and Big 12 football and basketball teams that you can't help but love. My only "commute" is driving my kids to school and driving myself to the coffee shop. We have a great little airport with free parking and I can leave my home and be stepping onto the jet bridge in twenty minutes and SFO is an easy hop through DFW. It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.

swampthinker 9y ago
I think a big deciding factor is kids/age. I'm young and still prefer the city life, so 1 college just isn't going to cut it for me.
- beaorn 9y ago
  I would agree that kids and age play a big part in the appeal of Manhattan for people outside of college age range, but it has other things going for it besides just K-State. https://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-live/2018/ks/manhattan https://livability.com/best-places/top-100-best-places-to-li... Kansas City is only a 2 hour drive away to go do bigger city stuff.
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    Two hours is a looong drive outside of Kansas. We happened to drive through Kansas on the way to a Colorado wedding, during prom season. It was interesting to see all these prom kids dressed up and meeting at truck stops to take pictures or carpool.

lurquer 9y ago

Much of Kansas is comprised of the most uninteresting topography in the United States. But for wheat and corn, nobody would live there. The author claims she grew up in Kansas. I doubt her job requires her to be in Los Angeles. So, why isn't she in Kansas? As a Midwest resident, I'm annoyed by patronizing West and East Coasters who claim fly-over country is dying. Many folks in the Midwest stay here precisely because the thought of living amongst smug nitwits like the author is so revolting.

sp332 9y ago

Living somewhere rural isn't hell. It means you might get bored some of the time - and that's not the end of the world! It also means you get to do what you want, instead of depending on other people to entertain you every minute until you die. Having some empty time between events happening is fine. Living more independently can even be great sometimes. You don't want to live in Kansas, that's fine, I'm just worried that a lot of people in the comments here are acting like there's no reason anyone could want to live there.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

In the main banner photo of that article, rural Kansas has better and more street lighting than some parts of Los Angeles, for whatever that's worth.

sudosteph 9y ago

I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets? When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than ridiculously bitter IPAs.

niftich 9y ago
The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit. Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.

theseus7 9y ago

The increasing concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer, larger farmers is the result of declining property taxes on land: http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality_&_Falling_Prop_Tax_Rates.CV.pdf http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality... Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land is worth very little relative to urban land. A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are highest.

sargun 9y ago

Is there a reason to worry about it dying?

dang 9y ago
Please don't post flamebait here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AdamM12 9y ago

Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.

nanomonkey 9y ago

This reminds me of a story about Slovakian Protestant Farmer's and how they died out because it became social acceptable for each family only had one child. If the child died the family died. If the child lived they would marry another farming family's only child and the farms would combine, growing larger. Suicide by Culture (http://250bpm.com/blog:113 http://250bpm.com/blog:113)

deleted 9y ago

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ataturk 9y ago

I always find it odd when stories describing anywhere that has a population drop to be some kind of massive tragedy in the making. Meanwhile, world population is surging towards 8 billion!