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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Part of this has to do with how we've been able to drive down agricultural costs by means of automation over the last century which has driven a move away from family farms to larger corporate farms. In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent.[1]

Sure the coasts are creating more economic output by far, but people need to eat food. Agriculture is always going to be important, but lot less people are involved in it than ever before. This is part of what's led to the urban/rural divide where the rural folks feel left out - there just aren't as many of them as populations have migrated to cities. This is why people in rural areas feel increasingly left out. It's mostly due to economic forces that are out of their control.

[1] http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2016/6/26/the-evolution-of-americ...

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I definitely don't think we should ignore or minimize the contributions of rural Americans. I do think we need to do a better job of making the costs associated with rural life more explicit. This is a big deal in California, where people have pushed further and further into the wilderness, putting themselves at huge risk for wildfires while also increasing the number of miles of power lines that need to be built and maintained; these very power lines are one of the main causes of wildfires.

New power lines are almost never the cause of wildfires. Old, poorly-maintained lines are. For example, the Camp fire that killed 86 people was caused by a hundred year old line that hadn't been serviced in decades. For miles of line around the origin site of the fire the C-hooks looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/r42KsHR.jpg

Total installed powerline length vs population is a problem.

Whether they're new / old or well / poorly serviced is just a difference of a few decades.

If there isn't money to service old lines now, then there won't be money to service formerly-new lines in 30 years.

It's not a question of insufficient funds. They spent five billion dollars on shareholder dividends while corporate documents show they were completely aware the equipment was breaking down and posed a wildfire risk, and they broke multiple state regulations to do so.

Some background to add to the above: https://twitter.com/tubetimeus/status/1306366930899460097 and https://www.buttecounty.net/Portals/30/CFReport/PGE-THE-CAMP...

The Camp fire report was riveting after-work reading. The financial engineering to avoid opex and instead magnify capex as a way to bilk the ratepayer is ingenious and evil. Further, their operating procedures and culture seem carefully engineered as a liability dodge. Read the report, it's amazing.

You have to be careful with the 80/20 US Census split numbers between urban/rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on 100 acres next to even more conservation land. One neighbor has an apple orchard. Another a Christmas tree farm. The town I'm in is considered urban because we're near a major city and adjacent to another small city.

But you are urban. You are near a major city, and adjacent another small one like you said. Urban versus rural is not a measure of closeness to nature, it's a measure of closeness to other humans.

It depends on your definitions. A lot of people would object to defining urban as encompassing having to drive anywhere except to connect to immediate neighbors. I can basically go to my two immediate neighbors. Otherwise I have to get in a car. Is that urban?

Sounds like a suburb. The real inefficient structures.

In what suburb do you have only two neighbors within walking distance?

Does America have a concept of walking distance?

It's a country road. There are no sidewalks. So no. It's not something you walk along. (And hardly unique to the US.) The ESRI categorization is ex-urban. The basic point is that the census bureau categorizes areas as urban unless they're really rural, as in small and pretty far from an urban center.

Rural is defined in USA here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...

So that basically says that essentially no one in the state of MA is rural and that almost no one in the state of CA is rural. Which probably doesn't correspond to how average people think about rural vs. urban. So the fact that I can look off my back deck and see nothing but trees is a reasonable urban environment.

> and that almost no one in the state of CA is rural

Kinda crazy to see the entire I-5 length between San Francisco and Los Angeles classified as "metro". Perhaps the metric they're using doesn't work so well when counties (which is what they classify) are so large, and they primarily care that some city of over 50k people exists in it "somewhere". Some of those counties appear to be as large as or larger than some of the smaller states in the Northeast.

I'm sure there are reasons for the current classification. But there are certainly differences between I live on a hundred acres but I have decent shopping and culture relatively accessible and the nearest Walmart is 100 miles away.

As you suggest, a lot of what is classified as urban is not urban especially by the standards of someone who barely considers the South Bay as urban.

Huge parts of the California desert are also classified as urban as the counties are so large, some of those places are extremely remote. Even the western central valley, other than i5 cutting through it is remote and sparsely inhabited.

And, by the way, if you're going to go with binary definitions, it's perfectly reasonable to say that within 30 minutes of a Walmart and within a couple of hours of a significant city is a reasonable benchmark versus truly back of beyond rural. Just just don't expect that to correspond to an urban environment as many people understand that to mean.

Certainly I can normally go into town for an evening of theater but most people would consider my house to be in an urban setting.

I don't think your definition of rural matches with people who live in rural areas. Maybe that's why conversations around Urban vs Rural never make sense.

Statistically, most "towns" are considered urban, regardless of where they are located.

Farms have gotten bigger, but family farms still dominate.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-structure-...

I guess you can argue that a large closely held company isn't a family farm, but it isn't what "corporate" is meant to conjure up either.

The majority of production comes from a small minority of farms with > $1MM ARR. Most are still family owned, but I would argue they are “what corporate is meant to conjure up” in the sense of the scale and methods driving the farming operation (just not the legal structure and governance.)

That’s why the overall number of farms and farmers has gone down - the little guy can’t make it work economically.

But they are the little guys, they just swallowed a few neighbors.

People complaining about corporate farming are talking about outside money coming in and taking the land.

But only a slim slice of rural living is on farms, or are you talking about immigrant Latinos who are left out of the political picture?

The supermajority of people working American farms and meat shops are Latino immigrants.

This has also happened to manufacturing and coal mining to a certain extent. But, unlike agriculture, the demand for certain resources like coal is significantly less than it used to be, but people in the affected areas haven't been able to find work in other fields.

Because they're not willing to move.

It takes money to move, and it's unlikely they have the financial resources to handle living in an area with a significantly higher cost of living, unless the job pays very well. Given the fact that public school graduation rates are relatively low where they live, it's unlikely they would be able to secure one of those high paying jobs if they don't have at least a high school diploma or GED.

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