Courtesy of Cake Eater Pal, J., my newest (and probably my only) reader in Basel, Switzerland, we have this New York Times op-ed about Iowa's brain drain.
Lately the Iowa Legislature has been trying to find a way to solve a basic problem: how to keep young people from leaving the state. Right now, Iowa's "brain drain" is second only to North Dakota's. The Legislature is toying with a simple idea, getting rid of state income tax for everyone under 30. This proposal was front-page news in California, where most of Iowa moved in the 1960's. Let me translate the economics of this plan. The State Legislature proposes to offer every young tax-paying Iowan a large delivery pizza - or its cash equivalent, about $12 - every week of the year. But smart young Iowans know this is only an average figure. The more you earn, the more state income tax you save. {...}Iowans are resolutely practical about such proposals. One state legislator, quoted in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, said: "Let's face it. Des Moines will never be Minneapolis." He might have added that Council Bluffs would never be Kansas City. Another Iowan, when asked what the state needed to keep its young people, said, "An ocean would help." This is the kind of big thinking Iowa has always been famous for.
But $600, the average yearly state income tax for Iowan 20-somethings, is not enough to undo decades of social erosion. The problems Iowa faces are the very solutions it chose two and three generations ago. The state's demographic dilemma wasn't caused by bad weather or high income taxes or the lack of a body of water larger than Rathbun Lake - an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir sometimes known as "Iowa's ocean." It was caused by the state's wholehearted, uncritical embrace of industrial agriculture, which has depopulated the countryside, destroyed the economic and social texture of small towns, and made certain that ordinary Iowans are defenseless against the pollution of factory farming.
These days, all the entry-level jobs in agriculture - the state's biggest industry - happen to be down at the local slaughterhouse, and most of those jobs were filled by the governor's incentive, a few years ago, to bring 100,000 immigrant workers into the state.
Business leaders all across Iowa have been racking their brains to think of ways to spur economic development. But nearly every idea leaves industrial agriculture intact. That means a few families living amid vast tracts of genetically modified soybeans and corn, with here and there a hog confinement site or a cattle feedlot to break the monotony. {...}
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Iowa's brain drain is all big agriculture's fault. If you're failing to follow the logic on this one because you don't come from an ag state, well, it goes something like this: family farms go belly up because of one crisis or another. Agribusiness (seed, pesticide, fertilizer companies, just to name a few) moves in, provides jobs and paychecks in a part of the country where no one else wants to live or do business because they think it's a backwater type of place where they can't get Guinness on tap. Because of Agribusiness' decision to do business in a place where, ahem, people know something about agriculture, of course it's responsible for shutting every other type of opportunity out. Hence there's a brain drain in the state. Because young graduates who did not graduate with a B.S. in AgBus go elsewhere. And it's all because of the loss of the family farm!
Pffft.
I think not. While I'm generally not a fan of agribusiness, it is nonetheless the future of agriculture. We can only bemoan the loss of the family farm as if it were a Norman Rockwell painting that was destroyed in a fire for so fucking long, people. At some point in time responsibility will have to be taken, and I can't freakin' wait for it to happen. The government, if it actually wants the family farm to survive, needs to end subsidies to farmers and work toward a free market solution. Quite simply, this will get farmers the decent prices on crops that they've wanted---and have been bitching about---for years. Family farmers, however, are not blameless here either. For years, farmers borrowed money for $100,000 tractors and land buys on crops they had yet to plant, let alone sell. When the market price of those crops collapsed, they went belly-up or were bailed out by the government. When the "Freedom to Farm Act" was passed through Congress as a way to relieve debt levels of family farmers, the running joke in Des Moines was that it wasn't the "Freedom to Farm Act," but rather the "Freedom to Buy a New Truck Act", because farmers used the money to reconsolidate the debt they already had, getting a bit of cash in the meantime and a new truck or new tractor, rather than strictly paying off the old debt, as the Act intended. It's been my observation---as someone who has lived in the Midwest all her life and whose ex-banker father gave out a lot of those aforementioned loans---that some family farmers work the system in such a way that they don't want to go off the government dole, no matter how much they bitch to the contrary.
Case in point: my friend from college, D.'s father's farm was roughly around two-thousand acres large. Now, that's a lot of land for your average, solo family farmer. Most farms are around five hundred acres or so. D . was regularly called home every May and every September/October to help with the planting and harvesting, respectively. I once asked him why, if his Dad's farm was so large, and his Dad couldn't handle it all by himself, didn't his Dad hire out some help? D. laughed. "He only plants about five hundred acres. The rest he's paid to keep fallow." Not only was D.'s dad pretty smart about working the government for subsidies, he also managed to get a fair amount of his debt worked off courtesy of the government as well. With the proceeds from his farming, he was able to buy even more land to let lie fallow. Now, considering this is precisely what agribusiness does---buying up land, applying for subsidies, etc.---how can anyone say that agribusiness is not the way of the future when it comes to farming? It just is. While some family farmers have been able to make their traditional methods work, most family farmers have coopted agribusiness' wicked ways to survive. Agribusiness does not just mean the likes of Archer-Daniel-Midlands or Monsanto, but also Joe Schmoe who farms outside of Pella.
This is the way the business of agriculture is going here in the United States. Yes, Iowa has focused greatly on encouraging agribusiness over the years, but that's because it's what they had to work with. Now they're working on the tech sector. And you know this how?? you're undoubtedly wondering. Well, I can't tell you how many pieces of mail we've received---as Iowa State Graduates who live outstate---advertising how great a place Iowa is to live, and asking us, rather politely I always think, to take another look at moving back. These mailers come from the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce, the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce, the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce. You name a major metropolitan area in Iowa and we've gotten a request from their Chamber of Commerce to move back to a state we haven't lived in for eight years. Because, as these mailers always say, there are jobs here! We need people to take them! These mailers also advertise the low cost of living, the good schools, the family friendly environment and, in some cases, tax incentives.
As far as addressing the true reason for the brain drain, while I will not deny that a lack of non-agricultural jobs was once a major issue, the op-ed author only hints at the real reason: people leave Iowa, on the whole, to experience something of the worldliness that Iowa does not have. While it is a good place to live, it's not exactly ground zero for the sort of excitement recent college graduates seek. Culture is lacking. Currently, if you want a good time, you go to the bar and get drunk. Iowa, however, is a good place to raise a family, as those targeted mailings we receive at least once every two months love to point out. Iowa, for the most part, is not a place overly friendly to young adults who want a little worldliness along with their State Fair butter sculptures. Which is why I think this tax-free business until you're thirty is ridiculous. People leave Iowa. If they don't do it when they're young, they will do it later on in life, when they're less likely to make the move back because of family constraints. I'm sure it sounds horrible, but it's just the way of things in states like Nebraska and Iowa. Some people do stay and are happy there. A lot do not, however. Yet, of that number, a lot of people move back when they have families, as a number of my college chums who bugged out for Chicago or Minneapolis or Kansas City when they graduated have proved when they moved back.
If anything, it's the State of Iowa's failure to accept this trend completely and to work with it that's the problem. Die hard Iowans love their state: they don't see why anyone would want to live anywhere else, and this is an attitude that's incredibly pervasive amongst politicians. Apprarently, they've never gotten used to the idea that someone wouldn't perhaps want to be born, live and die on the same spot of land. This doesn't work, however, when the plot of land the average Iowan owns nowadays doesn't have acreage attached. They keep coming back to this one concept, as this move proves, and it's frustrating because it ignores the reality of the situation.
Focus on the people with families to raise, as Iowa and her various Chambers of Commerce have been doing, and they might just see some results. There is no reason here to bemoan, once again, the loss of the family farm because there is opportunity in the offing. The economy will thrive because these potential Iowa residents will enter Iowa's workforce at a higher pay rate, their cost of living will be much, much less than, say, Minneapolis' and, as a result, will have money to spend. This will lead to an economic boom, and it will trickle down to establishing a culture for its young people that includes more than just getting drunk. Perhaps more than a few of those young people will want to stick around.
Iowa's currently on the right track. I don't know why they don't see it, but it will eventually work out.
Posted by Kathy at February 14, 2005 02:09 PM