Environmental destruction is the story here, but with one misunderstanding.
> Rural America is eroding. If you talk to farmers such as Short and Roger, they lament it. But almost nobody thinks it can be prevented. More efficient farming...
The new farming isn't more efficient physically, chemically, or biologically. It consumes without replacing resources like topsoil, biodiversity, water, etc. It looks more efficient financially only by neglecting the future costs to restore those resources.
I wouldn't call willful, determined overuse "erosion," though. I would call it destruction.
We've created financial incentives to eat our seed corn as a culture and the article presents one place it's playing out. Destroy the environment and people will leave it.
> The new farming isn't more efficient physically, chemically, or biologically. It consumes without replacing resources like topsoil, biodiversity, water, etc. It looks more efficient financially only by neglecting the future costs to restore those resources.
B.S. Farmers aren't stupid, they still remember the lessons of the 1930s. They all plan to farm until they're physically unable to, and hope that the family farm will stay in the family for generations to come. Their biggest asset is that land, and they'll be relying on it for decades to come.
That's why they're adopting methods like zero-till and cover crops to prevent soil erosion, why they carefully manage their straw cover et cetera.
They also don't listen to city folk who think obviously silly things like "organic is better for the environment". The alternative to glyphosate is tillage, and farmers have first hand experience with how destructive tillage is to the soil, how it erodes the soil and the subsequent erosion destroys the waterways.
Every farmer I've met, seen interviewed, etc, seem like they are at the top of their game. I usually end up surprised at how they have their hands in every aspect of every operation in their business. They seem very knowledgeable, while still dealing with the notion they are some hick with hayseed hanging out of their mouth.
We have farmers learning programming in order to hack their John Deere tractors, working with lawyers to sue John Deere for the right to do so, and having the ability to rebuild the tractor itself.
> They all plan to farm until they're physically unable to, and hope that the family farm will stay in the family for generations to come.
And small family farms are an ever-decreasing share of where our food actually comes from. Over 70% of the farm acreage was held by the top 10% of the largest farms in the US in 2011[1].
Most of our agriculture today is not good old Farmer John and his wife and eight kids going out to hoe the beans at dawn. It's massive operations with hundreds or thousands of acres, huge agricultural machines, and, yes, loads of chemicals treating the soil to make it produce even when we've stripped it bare of nutrients by forcing it to grow the same crops year after year. (It's also many thousands of migrant farm workers doing the actual physical labour, but that's a separate issue...)
There are good permaculture movements springing up that seek to return to more sustainable methods, but they're almost exclusively individuals or small-community groups.
As for glyphosate...OK, sure, it can help to reduce the mechanical damage to the ground caused by repeatedly tilling the soil. But count me in the Extremely Skeptical camp as to it being "totally harmless" to humans, particularly given how influential Monsanto's money is in shaping the research into the subject. (And that doesn't even touch on the effects on the environment from spraying it all over the place, year after year, and letting it run off into waterways...)
> And small family farms are an ever-decreasing share of where our food actually comes from. Over 70% of the farm acreage was held by the top 10% of the largest farms in the US in 2011[1].
Those large farms are also small family farms. I know a guy who owns 15,000 acres but it's a 3 man operation: him, his wife and a single hired man. That's the norm in Saskatchewan.
> as to it being "totally harmless" to humans,
Of course it's not "totally harmless". It's just better than the alternatives.
Agree with the other responder to this comment, this is BS. But oddly there are lots of passages in the actual article that directly refute this thesis, e.g.:
> Also, farms are reducing erosion. “We’ve gone from 100-bushel corn [per acre] to 250-bushel corn because we’re saving our soil,” Short said.
I see that other commenters have already addressed this but the issue here is a confusion of timelines. The farming you are referring to is a caricature of first generation Green Revolution farming. Farming techniques being adopted today are designed to preserve soil, and to minimise water use. Biodiversity is not as much of a focus, that is true.
> Biodiversity is not as much of a focus, that is true.
Not yet, but it's coming, for a couple of reasons:
- biodiversity helps soil health and disease resistance
- bi-cropping potentially means the ability to harvest two different crops from the same field without significantly impacting the yield of the primary. Twice the gross per acre is a pretty big incentive for adoption.
The destruction of farms has nothing to do with soil erosion. It's all about government policy that has destroyed producer prices.
One example is the changes in terms how anti-trust policy has evolved over time. Today, cartels of produce buyers collude to keep prices low. There's also the lobbying and market pressures to transform away to manufactured food processes (fake meat, milk, etc).
The environmental devastation is yet to come, and it will come from the commodity crops that are depleting water tables.
The destruction of farms has nothing to do with soil erosion. It's all about government policy that has destroyed producer prices. It's certainly an issue in this town, but it's a small part of the whole.
One example is the changes in terms how anti-trust policy has evolved over time. Today, cartels of produce buyers collude to keep prices low. There's also the lobbying and market pressures to transform away to manufactured food processes (fake meat, milk, etc).
It's working now for me. I've seen that multiple times lately: an article is intermittently hidden. It may be marketing games whereby they make it open to attract links from commenting forums such as Reddit and this one, and then switch on "subscriber only" mode when traffic comes. If intentional, that's evil in my book.
No judgement on this particular opinion piece, but just for sake of clarity in case people are unaware, the Washington Examiner has a rather pronounced conservative and Republican bias.
> The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[2] Van Zandt describes himself as someone with "more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[4]
Totally fair, thank you. But you left out some important bits from your response, including that several academic groups have used the site for building fake news classifiers:
> The site has been used by researchers at the University of Michigan to create a tool called the "Iffy Quotient", which draws data from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsWhip to track the prevalence of 'fake news' and questionable sources on social media. The site was also used by a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in initial training of an AI to fact check and detect the bias on a website. [3]
Despite publications in academia using the site, you may also note the following:
> In 2016, Kyle Pope, who had served as the editor in chief of The New York Observer, was announced as the new editor and publisher of [Columbia Journalism Review]. [1]
> In 2016, the New York Observer became notable for being one of only a handful of newspapers to officially endorse United States presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Republican Party presidential primaries.[18] The newspaper's owner and then publisher, Jared Kushner, is Donald Trump's son-in-law. [2]
...I'm not sure what to think of the above pedigree for CJR's editor, but IMO I suspect he either fell to one end of the political spectrum or the other.
> But you left out some important bits from your response, including that several academic groups have used the site for building fake news classifiers
No I didn't. My quote from Wikipedia included this: "The Poynter Institute notes, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific [emphasis mine].""
The fact that some AI group used it to train a classifier is not a very strong endorsement in my opinion. AI researchers aren't journalism subject matter experts, and Media Bias/Fact Check is obviously a very convenient data source, but covenience is not good indicator of quality.
> Despite publications in academia using the site, you may also note the following:
> ...I'm not sure what to think of the above pedigree for CJR's editor, but IMO I suspect he either fell to one end of the political spectrum or the other.
You seem to be trying to synthesize two disparate observations to imply the idea that Kyle Pope is some kind of conservative and therefore too untrustworthy to evaluate Media Bias/Fact Check, but that betrays a poor understanding of how newspapers operate. In a well-run paper, there's a separation between the newsroom and the opinion/editorial pages. For instance, the WSJ has a famously conservative editorial page. You might think its reporters have the same ideology, but (IIRC) its newsroom staff is even more liberal than that from the NYT, a fact that seldom shows because they're so professional. The newsroom exists to report the facts, and the editorial pages to voice the opinions of the owner/publisher. That Jerod Kushner had his paper endorse Donald Trump in no way reflects on Kyle Pope's judgement as a journalist.
Furthermore, Kyle Pope's own Wiki page has him saying:
> In an interview with Brian Stelter of CNN, Pope stated that after the election of President Donald Trump, the news media needs to rethink how it covers the news in order to "retake the agenda from this man who so hungers for attention, and how do we tell stories in a way that reflects the scale and sweep of the moment we're in?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Pope)
The tone of that kinda confirms to me that your quotes are two puzzle pieces that don't actually fit together.
I'm inclined to trust the CJR's editor's judgement on journalism topics (topics which include the Media Bias/Fact Check website), because the CJR is the professional journal of the most prestigious American school of journalism.
Excellent points. I'll concede my arguments were pretty speculative and weak re: Pope.
At the end of the day I suppose I am still curious where/how I can gauge the political bias of a given news source? Does CJR do something like this on their own?
I only pointed it out because people might not be aware since it's a smaller publication. Nobody needs to be told about Mother Jones' or Fox News' bias.
Please don't post flamebait to HN, and especially not things like regional or national slurs. It's of course fine to talk about your personal experience; but not fine to express it in the form of generic angry putdowns.
Not every small town is like whatever place you were obviously abused in. I couldn't imagine having to move back to the city. It's exciting and fun to visit the city, but the indifference people display to each other is taxing on my soul. The drug addicts over-dosing, people with mental health issues wandering, the rent being too-damn-high, etc...
People actually care about strangers, and go out of their way to be friendly to you here. Also, every company I've worked with recently is embracing remote work.
Suburban gated communities != rural areas, no matter how well they cosplay rural culture.
blamestross's assessment of rural culture is the most accurate I've seen in this thread, it's mostly teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, property crime, and suicide. I don't see a good way out with our all-against-all culture where trust and cooperation make you a mark for exploitation.
It's not entirely their fault, I'd hate to see how NYC or San Francisco would fare if 70% of their industry picked up and moved out in 5 years.
(I'm also from small town rural America, if it matters)
You're correct that I haven't lived in every small town in America, thus having no direct experience, but I routinely enjoy the small towns more than cities. It rubs me the wrong way to see a comment about them only existing because of teen pregnancy.
I am not from small town America - but I think this attitude which is openly celebrated among many is sickening. Its the kind of rhetoric that leads people to believe in ideas like "white genocide" and other frankly dangerous and violent partisan ideas.
I interpret fears of white genocide as anxiety specifically about Latinos, and not blacks or Asians. Whether or not people espouse cruel language for rural white America, the Latinos are a <much> bigger than story than one of linguistic framing. People can change how they talk, but that doesn't really address the fear.
It is dangerous and very pathetic to see these opinions solely because the populace that is dying are mostly white.
Though, this is what we asked for, and no one cared to stop it. It's obviously a massively multi-faceted problem, but one of the bigger parts is: along the way we lost the idea of what our local community is. We instead replaced it with social media, and listened/espoused the opinions of people on the other side of the country who had never lived outside of a city.
That sounds like trouble for the urban way of life, too. Where do all the young urban types come from? Not from downtown. Where do all the older folks go when their savings or mobility dwindle? Not downtown.
Support remote work and rural infra investment (shoutout to Bernie Sanders and his rural internet investment plan). I want to live in rural areas while still being able to work a job that isn't going to (needlessly) require me to be onsite in a downtown core (Disclaimer: I work remotely).
> We need a new "small town culture"
100 percent. Community building is hard, not profitable, but necessary. It used to be churches. Not sure what it looks like today. If I had to hazard a guess, something like Mr Money Mustache's coworking setup [1] [2].
I couldn't agree more. I'd love to live in deep rural but I really need at least 10 mbit/s duplex reliable (rare downtime, low ping/jitter) internet connection (at a reasonable price), Amazon/eBay/etc delivery and a train to get me to the city in no longer than a couple of hours on any day I need. Once these are available I'm movin'
No ISP is going to invest in high-speed internet to rural areas without a built-in base large enough and willing to pay for it. In any case, I'm pretty sure that they'd charge somewhere north of your reasonable price. As for trains, even less unlikely. Running a train is a massive expense in capital costs and maintenance. Any trains still remaining today are exclusively freight save for Amtrack which only follows its limited routes.
As for trains the situation already is perfect all over (well, perhaps not all over but everywhere I've been to) the Europe. Cheap, comfortable, everywhere. The situation with the Internet connection and delivery services is somewhat worse but improving and I hope Startlink etc are going to revolutionize the market by delivering Internet everywhere.
I believe Internet everywhere really is an essential thing every nation has to get to revitalize rural development.
Because life without friends is hard on the mental health.
If you can make friends in a rural area, they're likely going to be the best friends anybody could ever ask for. But when there are approximately 5 people your age and gender within a 25 mile radius of your farm it's pretty hard to find someone with any sort of shared interest.
I took that part of my comment out, I thought it wasn't relevant. But since we're here: I am unlikely to meet people like myself (or those who I would friend) in an urban core. More likely, I will end up friends with people I work with remotely or the parents of my kids' friends. And quite honestly, on a Friday or Saturday night, I'd rather be working on my workbench on a project alone after the kids are asleep.
I prefer to take my chances in a rural area, and having to bootstrap community, versus tolerating an urban lifestyle.
Funny thing about predicting the future is that it is usually based on assuming current trends will continue forever but there almost always are unexpected trends that pop up to alter this course.
There are plenty of examples of trends that continued until their practical limit. For example, the downward trend in the fraction of transportation accomplished using animal power that began with the introduction of the motor vehicle. While it's possible that urbanization will be the other kind (cyclic), it doesn't seem especially likely.
> Rural America is eroding. If you talk to farmers such as Short and Roger, they lament it. But almost nobody thinks it can be prevented. More efficient farming...
The new farming isn't more efficient physically, chemically, or biologically. It consumes without replacing resources like topsoil, biodiversity, water, etc. It looks more efficient financially only by neglecting the future costs to restore those resources.
I wouldn't call willful, determined overuse "erosion," though. I would call it destruction.
We've created financial incentives to eat our seed corn as a culture and the article presents one place it's playing out. Destroy the environment and people will leave it.