| At the height of the farm crisis of the 1980s, Wendell Berry wrote in a new foreword to the “The Unsettling of America”: “Farmers are losing their farms, some are killing themselves, some in the madness of despair are killing other people, and rural economy and rural life are gravely stricken. ... We are closer every day to the final destruction of private ownership not only of small family farms, but of small usable properties of all kinds.”
The great “unsettling” detailed in Berry’s book unfolded as agriculture became industrialized in the 1970s and 1980s and government policy pushed farmers to scale their operations and produce larger yields per acre. As a result of the spiraling cycle of rapid expansion and the implementation of factory-style farming techniques, fewer farmers did more work with greater debt loads. Then, in the 1980s, an increase in interest rates, a drop in exports, and a plummet in land and crop prices pulled the rug out from under the whole unstable system.
Many farmers went bankrupt, and farming families were displaced from their farms and driven to the cities by economic necessity. With the evaporation of small family farms and the corporatization of large ones, economic opportunity in rural America dwindled.
There was no longer a sufficient population nor sufficient economic health to maintain local economies. Many small rural towns became virtual ghost towns as a result. Their once-vibrant main streets consist of boarded-up, disheveled, and dilapidated old buildings standing blankly beside an empty street, a kind of architectural cemetery of a past America.
Commenting on that collapse, business consultant, entrepreneur, and Iowa native Danna Larson told The Epoch Times, “The farm crisis was devastating to rural America, especially the Midwest, and it left a lot of people with no option but to leave.”
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