Rural California going to pot

Hayfork, California's 1,900 residents are located in Northern California, 60 miles West of Redding in Trinity County. The Los Angeles Times describes it as a town with no stoplights, no home delivery of mail, and few jobs--but lots of marijuana.California's 1996 Compassionate Use Act permits marijuana use with a doctor’s recommendation for patients with cancer, AIDS, “or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” The breadth of this law has been said to effectively legalize the growing, distribution and use of marijuana in California. State law also permits large-scale operations to exist by pooling individual growing rights within cultivation cooperatives.

These cooperatives have taken root throughout rural California. Favorable weather, lax law enforcement, persistent poverty and high unemployment have brought a particularly virulent strain of the medical marijuana boom to Hayfork. In Hayfork the decline of the logging industry left a vacuum in the local economy. Marijuana entrepreneurs bought up parcels of land for just $3,500 and now there are tens of thousands of plants being grown throughout the town. These lots now change hands for upwards of $50,000 – marijuana is now everywhere."Kids stroll much of the year past pungent plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black clad Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the gridiron from nearby houses. Some students talk openly of farming pot after graduation, about the only opportunity in this depressed timber town.” The town of Hayfork is just one example of rural California going to pot in our continuing statewide experiment with quasi-legal marijuana. A similar storyline is playing out throughout Trinity County. “Growers have flocked to Northern California's ‘Emerald Triangle’ of Trinity, Mendocino and Humboldt counties for cheap land, a good climate and loose oversight.” Trinity County consists of 3,200 square miles and just 14,000 residents, a density of just 4 residents per mile. That’s 160 acres per person.

Until Burger King arrived in 1999 Trinity County did not have a single chain store or restaurant. Trinity County, all 3,200 square miles of it, has no incorporated cities, no freeways, no parking meters, and no stoplights. Per capita income comes in at $16,868, with 18.7% of residents living below the poverty line. Unemployment is just shy of 16%.

Trinity County’s 15 police officers are responsible for enforcing law throughout all 3,200 square miles. Rural communities fear that growers will be encouraged by U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.’s recent statement that the federal government will halt raids on legal dispensaries.Marijuana cultivation is resulting in massive changes to rural culture, "It's just torn the fabric of our society," said Judy Stewart, a 69-year-old retiree who has lived in Trinity County for more than 50 years. "It's pitted people against one another." Arcata, another northern California town consumed by marijuana, has seen entire sections of houses turned into permanent grow operations – blighting neighborhoods and increasing fires and break-ins. All this change has also resulted in a considerable influx of cash. "The only thing that keeps this economy going is the growers," said Dennis Cooney, owner of the Northern Delights coffee shop in downtown Hayfork.

As explored earlier on Legal Ruralism many rural areas have seen increased violence due to illegal growing on federal lands. Perhaps a quasi-legal approach, with lower violence and positive economic impact, is actually an acceptable outcome.

Too fat to graduate?

No longer are the requirements for graduation purely academic. A recent story in The New York Times (and a related blog) reports on a university policy which requires students with a body mass index (BMI) over 30 to take a "Fitness for Life" exercise, health and nutrition course in order to receive a diploma. A normal BMI range is 18.5-24.9; over 30 is considered obese. As of this fall, 16 percent of the senior class had not had their BMI tested (or taken the fitness class).

Lincoln University, a primarily black college in rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, (population 4,300) instituted this rule as a way to combat obesity among its students and to encourage healthy lifestyle habits that will continue post graduation. The 3-hour/week course involves walking, aerobics, weight training and other physical activities, as well as information on nutrition, stress and sleep. Black populations in the U.S. tend to have the highest percentages of obesity in the country (36%), with Pennsylvania one of the highest ranked states.

So it seems college administrators have a genuine interest in helping a target population. But, is this legal?

As reported on NPR, the policy has caused an uproar among some on campus and in the community. Students want to know what BMI has to do with their ability to successfully complete their college education. They feel that health statistics have no place in assessing their academic abilities. In fact, they claim it is outright discrimination. If the university is so concerned about health, why single out only the overweight? Why not encourage universal health and require all students to take the class? Dr. James DeBoy, Chair of the university's Health, Physical Education and Recreation department responds, saying the BMI policy is just a test, which, like any other college test, assesses, and therefore, discriminates by its nature, but that it serves a rightful purpose. University officials believe they have an obligation to educate their students about the risks of obesity and promote healthy lifestyles. In their view, a college degree is not worth very much if these overweight students are highly likely to experience a major health crisis once graduated.

So why students? Poor eating habits and lack of sleep are familiar to college students and also happen to be factors that lead to obesity (see an earlier blog post on sleep's relation to health and rurality). In fact, students think the university's contradictory policies bear some responsibility as a cause of the obesity problem. The administration imposes this health requirement on their students, yet continues to offer unhealthy foods in the cafeteria (think: hamburgers, fries, pizza). The response? Isolation and lack of funding. Officials say the school's remote, rural location makes it difficult to provide fresh, healthy food options for its students. That, on top of the school's designation as an HBCU (historically black college and universities), which tend to be underfunded, prohibits it from offering healthier options.

According to Dr. DeBoy, "How do you keep costs in line? Unfortunately, one way to cut is that you have food that is going to probably be less costly. Healthy foods cost more; that's a reality . . . [w]e are who we are. We live where we live. Yes, there are certain things that you cannot control, absolutely, but some of the things you can, and they're the ones we're trying to, you know, embark upon as far as changing."

But is Lincoln U. really isolated? The university is only 45 miles southwest of Philadelphia and about 25 miles west of Wilmington, Delaware. It seems that if there was a will, there'd be a way to get fresh food in from the cities, that is, if there were no local supplying farms closer to the campus. Funding is a bigger issue, perhaps. But it still seems unfortunate that a college can't offer fresh, healthy food options to its students, even if on federal funding. You would think the government would want to encourage healthy eating, especially in the nation's schools. Aren't there other areas that could be cut back first, before fresh food? Vending machines? Landscaping budgets?

It seems that the university, while perhaps well-intentioned, is not quite pulling its own weight in the solution to this problem.

[The policy comes up for review by staff members at a meeting on Dec. 4].

Shotgun stimulus: the economics of hunting

While the markets may be mulling over Black Friday returns for signs of life in the American consumer, a different sort of economic indicator makes its yearly debut today. Deer gun-hunting season opened up in Ohio this morning. Much like the first snow a ski resort, the opening week of deer season represents an influx of money into the region. Much of the money spent by hunters often ends up in rural business that may not get the benefit of other economic boosts, such as Christmas shopping rush or a federal stimulus package. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources expect about half a million hunters to spend just shy of $900 million dollars in the state during this hunting season. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that hunting as an activity generates about $76.6 billion dollars a year nationally, with a relatively high proportion of that spending going to small, rural businesses in the form of gas, supplies, food, and lodging. For instance, back in Ohio many small convenience stores in rural areas that get infrequent traffic during the remainder of the year double as sign-in stations for the hunters and benefit from their business after the hunt. The goal every year in Ohio is to attract as many out of state hunters as possible, because out-of-staters are more likely to patronize hotels and restaurants and out-of-state tags cost more for the hunter. In turn, the revenue from these tags are used by Ohio for biological conservation projects, protecting some of the very same land the hunters use every year. This process sounds suspiciously like how the multiplier effect is explained in the context of a broader economic stimulus.

However, if Black Friday returns were a little less robust than expected this year, Cross-hairs Monday could be even worse for rural Ohio. Wisconsin, whose deer gun season ended on Sunday the 29th, reported a 10% decrease in tag sales. A 10% decrease in tag sales equates to a much larger drop for the surrounding economy in reduced traffic and sales. Many hunters guessed that harsh weather had reduced the size of herd during the past winter, leading to less robust deer (which are less appealing to the hunter) and less deer overall. Weather is being blamed for slow hunting in Pennsylvania as well, but for its effects on the hunters themselves, not their quarry. Cold, rainy weather may be keeping hunters in bed, instead of outside and spending on tags, beer, and bags. Just like Black Friday sales, the rural hunting economy is tied to the quality of the product and the conditions of the day.

Hunting regulations are also an excellent example of local incentives at work. There is always a greater demand than supply for tags and permits, giving the wildlife departments great leeway and convenience in determining how best to manage their herds. For instance, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reduced the price of antler-less deer tags this year. Shooting bucks does very little to control population, which the ODNR's stated goal for the hunt. Therefore, by redirecting hunters' attentions toward does, the ODNR hopes to increase the actual number of hunters while at the same time stabilizing the deer population in the state. In Wisconsin this year, the state Department of Natural Resources decided to kill two birds with one stone. With the issuance of a small game permit, hunters in the state were licensed to shoot at will at feral pigs, deemed a pest species that carry diseases which may affect livestock. Out West in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, the debate centers around the appropriate number of tags and appropriate length of season to distribute for the recently un-endangered gray wolf. Some have speculated that, because anti-wolf sentiment runs so high among locals, the price of permits could be set extremely high and the permits would still sell out. One plan calls to set permit prices at a level to completely cover compensation costs to the farmers for livestock allegedly killed by wolves. Whatever else may be said about hunting, at a time when the whole country is undergoing a crash course in macroeconomics, the effects of and issues surrounding hunting in rural areas serve as a reminder that all economies, like politics, are truly local.

Make that 60 million and one...

Well, it finally happened. I accepted an invitation to start farming on Facebook. FarmVille is Facebook's number one application, with 60 million users and counting. Farmville allows the user to plant and harvest crops for virtual cash that you can then use to... well... buy more crops, of course. Commentator Ivor Tossell pretty accurately described the gameplay as "diversions for the mildly concussed" (read his blog about Farmville here). I'd be insulted if it wasn't so true. I spent the holiday weekend with my pre-teen nieces who are both fans of Farmville, so I felt less guilty about partaking in what is absolutely a silly waste of time. But, I have to admit I enjoyed designing my own plot of land and choosing my crops, and was disappointed when crops went bad because I didn't harvest them in time. Naturally, I began to wonder whether I was responding to some deep-rooted connection to land, human history, and biology, or if I had just fallen pray to a superbly sneaky web application.

The big irony over the past week was that I was spending time with family members who actually farm, albeit on a very small scale. At my sister's house there is a chicken coup, three chickens, two cats, a white picket fence, a wheelbarrow, fruit trees, seasonal crops, a shed; all items that I either have or want on my virtual farm. My sister lives in a suburb on less than an acre. Needless to say, while I weeded plenty of my friend's virtual farms over the weekend, I didn't pull a single weed on my sister's property. I did go out to the actual chicken coup to collect eggs, but the chickens were loud and a little scary, and in the end I sent my niece in to do the task (they are her chickens, after all...).

My sister wasn't very sympathetic to my need to log on and check my crops. But, neither did I have any desire to go out in the freezing Northwest rain and get my hands dirty. Which makes me wonder how much the farming aspect really matters to the games success. A recent Washington Times article quotes the vice president of Zynga (creator of the game) saying, "there's something fundamentally human about planting and growing, especially food." Even if there is some truth in that statement, however, I'm inclined to agree with the article's other commentator, who argues that the game is popular because it's easy - it requires no skill, and you're constantly rewarded for even the smallest success.

There may be another explanation, too, and Stephanie Smith, who writes an entire blog devoted to Learning from Farmville, argues that critics shouldn't be so quick to disregard the potential benefits of this online community. According to Smith, FarmVille and other similar applications can help people learn about community. She describes it as "values-based edu-tainment", saying it is feeding people's need for more knowledge and practice in "communal culture". Maybe Smith is right; there is something wholesome about fertilizing your friends crops for points, and who knows, maybe 60 million neighbors down on the farm will spread good-will beyond the confines of their virtual world.

Well, I'm equal parts hopeful and skeptical on that one. All I know for sure about FarmVille is that I am going to have to let my land go fallow for the next couple of weeks. But I'll be back in time to plant some mistletoe for Christmas.

The irony of food poverty in California's agriculturally rich Central Valley

A September 2009 Wall Street Journal article aptly summarized an ironic recent turn of events in California's Central Valley: As a result of “the combined punch of drought, water restrictions and recession... officials are handing out tons of food in the heart of one of the nation's most productive agricultural regions.”

The article briefly described the blights that have fallen upon the area in the past few years and the steps the state has taken to try to remedy the crisis:

The Central Valley… has suffered in the recession amid low demand for products like milk and almonds as well as a collapse in its once-booming housing market. At the same time, the region is grappling with drought and federal environmental rulings that have reduced water shipments to local farmers to as little as 10% of their normal allotments. Some farmers have sidelined much of their acreage, throwing packers and field pickers out of work.

In response, Governor Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in Fresno County in July 2009. At the same time, he approved four million dollars in food aid to alleviate the problems of hunger and unemployment in the region.

But the last food give-away was completed in mid-November and hunger in Fresno County is far from eradicated. The well intentioned assistance from the state seems to have merely highlighted the paradox of food poverty in California. And a 2008 report from the California Institute of Rural Studies (“CIRS”) adds another layer of irony: “[f]arm workers [and their families] are disproportionately impacted by the food problem.” The CIRS measured food security, “define[d] as access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle,” amongst Central Valley farm workers. As reporter Pauline Bartolone states in a radio program on the same topic, “in Fresno many people don’t know what that’s like.”

An image Bartolone described in the broadcast, “When Food Gets Trucked into a Breadbasket,” captures the apparent injustice. She watched the last day of the dispersal of food aid in Huron, California, as the farm workers who put fruits and vegetables on our tables lined up to receive canned food which they could not afford to buy themselves. The unfortunate realities of the drought and the recession notwithstanding, the question still begs, why are people starving in a region of so much natural bounty?

Bartolone’s report for the National Radio Project illuminates many of the underlying causes of the predicament. First, she points out that farm work is seasonal and low paying, with farm workers earning between “$800 a month at best, and $500 at worst.” With such limited resources, healthy food choices are beyond the budgets of most farm workers supporting families. In past years, workers could augment their regular earnings by taking home produce from the fields. This used to be an easy and convenient source of fresh foods. After the recession hit, however, farmers changed their policies. Workers are no longer allowed to take any of the fruits and vegetables that they pick, according to Nayamin Martinez, of the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities, who is quoted in the broadcast. Farmers “say they are losing money” because of the practice, she states.

Furthermore, farm workers have limited access to fresh food because of where they live. Ms. Martinez explained that, “[i]f they live in the rural areas, the grocery stores… do not sell those products or if they sell them they are not good…. So if they want to consume those products they need to travel all the way to Fresno.” For many, the cost of gas for that drive is prohibitive.

The problem of food insecurity among farm workers is compounded now as more and more people who lost other jobs in the recession seek to enter the occupation. Ms. Martinez estimated that there are now ten times more farm workers “looking for the same job and less land being harvested.” With shortened harvest seasons due to drought further cutting into farm workers’ earnings, the need in California’s Central Valley has grown to epic proportions. Dana Wilkie, chief executive of the Fresno food bank, reported in the Wall Street Journal article that her volunteers are now serving up to 80 percent of the residents in Fresno County.

Unfortunately, finding solutions is as complicated as the problem itself. Food aid from the Governor cannot be depended upon indefinitely given the current fiscal crisis facing the State of California. Schwarzenegger asked President Obama in June to declare Fresno County a federal disaster area, hopeful that federal funds would “help finance food shipments to the county. But officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency rejected the request, saying state and local entities had adequate resources.”

Solutions at the grassroots level are just as elusive.

Martinez says her organization is working on a community garden project in Farmersville, but they have run into obstacles. ‘First, there are not a lot of people who… let you borrow the land. Community organizations or even the people don’t have money to buy land so they must rely either on the government or a private person willing to let you use the land. So just getting started is hard.’

Martinez also cited legal problems such as difficulty drawing up contracts for use of the land without professional help as another challenge. Another appealing avenue for change, unionization of the farm workers to fight for issues such as higher wages, is not a viable option either given the National Labor Relations Act does not protect the rights of agricultural workers to bargain collectively.

Hopefully the national news coverage garnered by the irony of the situation will not be all for naught and someone will come to the rescue of farm workers in these troubled times. Perhaps this story can be used the jumping off point for the expansion of domestic Fair Food projects such as the one reported on by this blog earlier this week. Fair Food asks consumers to pay more for their food to ensure fair wages and working conditions for farm workers. Although the economy is not what it once was, the recession should not be an excuse to ignore the plight of farm workers so provocatively dramatized by this story.

What about the rural children and families?

This story in today's New York Times is about the dramatic increase in receipt of food stamps--now formally known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)--during the recession. According to the story, SNAP is now feeding (or helping to feed) one in eight Americans and a full quarter of U.S. children. Here's an excerpt that ignores the rural aspect of this phenomenon:

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

A subhead of the story is "Suburbs are Hit Hard." Later, however, rural residents and a few rural places do get mentioned, as here:

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.

* * *

The counties [where at least a quarter of the population receive food stamps] are as big as the Bronx and Philadelphia and as small as Owsley County in Kentucky, a patch of Appalachian distress where half of the 4,600 residents receive food stamps.

Many of the report's anecdotes are from the six-county area outside Cincinnati, which the story describes as "small towns and rolling farmland." At least one of those counties, Clinton County, is nonmetropolitan, with fewer than 50,000 residents.

In spite of the increase in receipt of SNAP benefits, the story tells us that, nationwide, food stamps are reaching only about two-thirds of those who are eligible. Approximately 15 million eligible individuals do not receive food stamps according to the undersecretary of agriculture who oversees the program.

A slide show and this interactive map accompany the story. You can click "All recipients," "Children," "Whites," "Blacks," or "Change since 2007" to see very detailed county-level data for each category. The last of these--Change since 2007--is very interesting to me because it depicts places (including my home county) where poverty has long been so high that the recession has not changed the rate of receipt of SNAP. I note that the same is true for some other persistent poverty counties. And, in fact, the authors also implicitly acknowledge this trend in noting that the rates of receipt are growing fastest in some of the nation's richest counties, albeit from small bases.

Universal health care in rural New Hampshire town

NPR’s Morning Edition broadcasted a story earlier this month about a rural New Hampshire town that provides free health care to all of its residents. Tamworth, situated in Carroll County, is home to the Tamworth Community Nurse Association, an organization with more than 80 years of providing nursing services to the town’s 2,510 residents.

TCNA’s services are available to all of Tamworth’s residents irrespective of ability to pay and access to health care. These services include everything from home visits for treatment or emotional support, making a nurse available to the public and running a meals on wheels program. TCNA represents a unique response to an all too familiar problem in rural America: inadequate access to health care. According to the broadcast:

Like many rural communities, Tamworth has more than the average share of elderly, many who find it hard to get around. And then there's that other rural problem, not enough doctors. There's one doctor in Tamworth. He's so busy that he can't take walk-in patients. The town nurses do. Last year, [Joanne Rainville, the Director of TCNA,] and two part-time nurses fielded 7,000 visits, many in their clinic at the back of town hall.

Rural residents face many challenges to affordable and accessible health care. First, many rural residents must travel considerable distances to visit a qualifying service provider, especially when specialized treatment is necessary. Second, rural households tend to have fewer financial resources than their urban counterparts, which places health insurance beyond the reach of many.

Moreover, the “health status” of rural America is lagging behind the general population, according the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For instance, rural residents are more likely to be age 65 or older. Disability, chronic disease and mortality rates are also higher in rural places than in urban ones, even after controlling for age.

Residents of Tamworth are no exception to the broader trends seen across rural America. So, how is TCNA able to continue providing its own version of “universal health care” to the townspeople of Tamworth?

It's not easy. Rainville writes grants and begs donors for gifts. But she can almost always count on taxpayers for close to a third of her budget. This year, at town meeting, voters said no to cost of living raises for town employees, but they funded the nurses, this time to the tune of $40,000.

With the issue of health care reform creating heated debate and much disagreement, it is interesting to think that one rural town has been offering some form of health care to all of its residents for more than 80 years. It remains to be seen whether TCNA can be viewed as a model for other community's to replicate or if such a program can only exist in this extraordinary community. Nevertheless, TCNA demonstrates the possibility of translating the strong sense of community that characterizes many rural places into a potentially lifesaving service and underscores the ability of rural places to develop solutions to problems that confound policymakers across the country.

An Alaska twist on the rural school funding quandary

William Yardley reported in the New York Times a few days ago about rural school closures in Alaska. The print edition headline speaks volumes: "Saddest math for a Rural Alaska School: 10-1=0." The reference is to the requirement that a school have 10 students--that's right, just 10--in order to receive state funding. But the tiny school Nikolski, Alaska, population 39, in the Aleutian Islands, has just fallen short of that magic number. The Nikolski school, built in 1939 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has just closed, but as Yardley points out, it is hardly alone. Four other rural Alaska schools have recently closed, and dozens of others are at risk for closure.

Here's an excerpt from the story, this part focusing on the quandary facing Alaska, where--as in the rest of the United States--about 20% of the population (and falling) live in rural places.

Concerns over the cost and quality of education in rural areas have long generated tension: can preserving village life be balanced with preparing students for a broader world? A court settlement in the 1970s required the state to build high schools in most villages, prompting an expensive construction boom. But by 1998, with oil revenues no longer soaring, the State Legislature decided that schools with fewer than 10 students would face severe cuts in financing. With some parents leaving villages in pursuit of better education anyway, some lawmakers said saving schools was missing the point.

One particularly interesting aspect of this story for me is what rural schools and parents have done in order to try to remain open: They have advertised for students! For one school in southeast Alaska, the strategy worked. Two families moved to Tenakee Springs, population 104, after the district advertised on Craigslist for families with school-age children.

But Tenakee Springs is only 2.9% "American Indian or Alaska Native," whereas that ethnic group make up 70% of Nikolski's population. As Yardley notes, in Alaska, rural schools are "at the heart of a broader debate ... over the treatment of native communities" which comprise the vast majority of the state's rural population.

The story is accompanied by some terrific audio-visual tools. A map here shows the schools most at risk of closure, and it also reflects population gain and loss for various regions. There is also a video, as well as a slide show here.

Can giant agribusinesses shrink while true organic farms grow?

That's a line from Maira Kalman's Thanksgiving piece in the New York Times. The title is "Back to the Land," and there's a lot in it about democracy, food and the democracy of food.

Here's another great line:

Can the elitism of a farmers' market shift so that the organic farms can be subsidized and that prices are reasonable for all people? That would be a democracy of healthy eating.

Don't miss her photos and missive here. It is the second-most emailed story on nytimes.com on the Friday evening after Thanksgiving.

A terrible autumn for America's farms closes a difficult 2009

On Tuesday, Professor Pruitt linked to and commented on an article that ran in the New York Times that details the hardship facing farmers in and around the Mississippi Delta region as the result of an unseasonably wet fall.

As the article makes clear, these farmers truly have reason to be concerned, noting that Lester Spell Jr., the Mississippi commissioner of agriculture and commerce, "cited losses of more than 40 percent of the state’s soybean crop, almost 50 percent of the cotton and more than 60 percent of the sweet potatoes."

A quick look at the most recent USDA Census of Agriculture figures for Mississippi, released in 2007, reveal the full economic impact that the projected failures for these crops alone is likely to have. Assuming that crop revenues haven't varied considerably since 2007, and that Commissioner Spell's estimates of crop failure totals are correct, the losses in each sector are considerable. For example, the estimated loss of 40% of the state's soybean crop would result in a loss of somewhere around $400 million in farm revenue, while the 50% of the cotton crop lost to the weather would be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. These figures are highly speculative as myriad factors--including commodity prices, input prices, crop failure figures from 2007, etc--are difficult to integrate into this analysis. I do think, however, that they provide a good sense of the magnitude of the hardship facing these farmers.

Moreover, the impact of the wet autumn experienced in many parts of the country has extended to effect farmers across America. Another New York Times article examines the disastrous impact that the wet fall had on farmers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (and yes, there are in fact farmers in all three of these states). The article notes that many of these farmers also experienced crop losses well above 40%. As the article notes, "It takes a 30 percent loss of any single crop in a county to trigger a disaster request from the federal Farm Service Agency office in an affected state."

The proliferation of "agricultural disaster areas" across the country this fall is bad news for all Americans, producers and consumers alike. Farmers, however, bear the brunt of the blows associated with vicious vagaries of their industry. According to the USDA's 2009 Farm Income Forecast , farm incomes in 2009 fell by an astounding 34.5% when compared to 2008.

(Source: 2009 Farm Income Forecast, USDA ERS)

The 2000s were an unusually bountiful time for farmers. This year's crash in farm income can be partially explained away as a natural market correction, and lower input prices have helped to make up for some of the difference in farmer's budgets. For a capital and planning intensive industry like farming, however, reducing average income by a third is certain to have significant lasting impacts.

I'm concerned that the full effects of what's been a terrible season for many of America's farmers will have a number of unexpected consequences for producers, consumers, and many rural American communities.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XLI): A sheriff on both sides of the law

A front-page headline in the November 19, 2009 issue of the Newton County Times reads, "Former sheriff sentenced," and it reports that 60-year-old Jerry Lynn Jones, formerly the county sheriff, will serve eight months in a federal prison for receiving disability benefits while failing to disclose earnings from self-employment between 1997 and 2007. The federal judge handling the matter also ordered Jones to pay restitution of almost $109,000, as well as a $3,000 fine. The story does not indicate whether the period during which the fraud was committed coincided with the time that Jones was Newton County Sheriff, though it presumably did not given Jones's receipt of disability payments. It would be interesting to know whether Jones's position as sheriff or former sheriff had anything to do with bringing this fraud to the attention of federal authorities.

In other law enforcement news, a story on the back page reports that a big rig stolen in Missouri wound up in Newton County after the man who stole it led law enforcement officers on a chase that ended there. Even after the truck became disabled, the driver fled on foot but was soon apprehended.

The November 5, 2009, edition of the Newton County paper reports on another alleged criminal's efforts to elude law enforcement. The headline is "Manhunt ends with arrest," and it tells of David Middleton's escape from custody. Apparently Middleton and his wife were both handcuffed and placed in custody while law enforcement officers (a multi-agency effort) executed a search warrant at their residence in Mt. Judea (not even a Census Designated Place). Middleton, who at the time was free on $5,000 bond in connection with previous criminal charges, escaped unnoticed during the search. He was located several hours later. Meanwhile, the search resulted in confiscation of firearms and vehicles with VIN numbers that appear to have been altered. Middleton and his wife are also facing new charges of methamphetamine delivery.