Small-town America fights for its life
washingtonexaminer.com
washingtonexaminer.com
> 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.
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.
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.
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...)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-d...
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.
Not using herbicides is totally harmless to humans. It just reduces profits.
Personally, I'm for options that prioritize humans over money.
> 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.
https://landlifecompany.com/ (reforrestation with the aid of technology)
https://www.sensoterra.com/ (smart soil moisture measurements)
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.
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).
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.
"You’ve got better genetics on the seeds,” Roger explained. “You’ve got fantastic technology on the equipment. And so you don’t need as many people.”
It seems content is also fighting for its life.
Here's a similarly-name article that's open-able, at least to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/opinion/rural-america-eco...
... Oh, that doesn't really work here. Sorry.
I was going to delete my comment above, but can't now that you've replied ;-)
The original article works for me, though the formatting is annoying (skinny left-aligned column).
Neutral, perhaps, but also poorly qualified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check:
> 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]
> 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.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Journalism_Review#Edi...
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.
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?
never heard of this newsource before but what kind of clarity is this additional information supposed to provide ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/204.68.2...
The page was subsequently protected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Washington_Examin...
IP info:
https://www.infobyip.com/ip-204.68.207.13.html
(Archive: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.infobyip.com/ip-204...)
but its not obvious what the point of this story actually is
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looking on google
Imogene is about hour outside Omaha
is about 15 minutes away from the nearest Wal-Mart
Kids from Imogene appear to go to school https://www.greatschools.org/iowa/shenandoah/1244-Shenandoah... (which happens to be near the Wal Mart)
there does not appear to be an abandoned main street or factory in Imogene
from the article itself, unemployment is under 2%
what exactly is so terrible about life there?
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Imogene appears to be a small, somewhat out of the way place, and that appears to have always been the case
what exactly is so terrible about that fact?