Our Patchwork Nation by Dante Chinni

Author:Dante Chinni [Chinni, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-19T18:30:00+00:00

PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM

Tractor Country can be thought of as the broad empty space in the middle of the United States. It comprises 311 counties, in a vast expanse of terrain mostly in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Montana, that together hold 2.2 million residents. And as the rest of the country grows, Tractor Country is getting even emptier. It lost about 2 percent of its population between 2000 and 2006, and it’s the oldest of the twelve community types in the Patchwork Nation. Nearly 40 percent of the people here are age fifty or older, and 18 percent are sixty-five or older.

Tractor Country is also the least diverse of all our communities, a distinction it shares with the Mormon Outposts. The population of both community types is 96 percent white. But Tractor Country has begun to see an influx of Hispanics, who now represent 3 percent of the population here. They continue to arrive to work on the farms and for other agricultural businesses such as meat-packing facilities.

Like Sioux County, all Tractor Country communities rely heavily on working the land. Twenty percent of people here are employed in agriculture in some way, compared to only 7 percent for the average county nationwide. As a result, these aren’t wealthy places. The median household income here is a modest $32,600, $4,400 less than nationally. But that might not be as painful in reality as it looks on paper. The cost of living in these communities is lower than average, too, particularly where housing is concerned. A five-bedroom, three-bath house with a two-car garage is only $250,000 in downtown Sioux Center, and the percentage of families living in poverty in Tractor Country is lower than the national average.

Still, the Co-Op’s Hansen believes that the writing is on the wall for the area economically. The people here may still be driving pickup trucks here a decade from now, but fewer of them will be hauling farm equipment. When he arrived in Sioux Center, in the mid-nineties, someone’s going into farming from scratch represented a real possibility. Land was relatively cheap at $2,500 or $3,000 an acre. It’s about $7,000 now. And that’s before purchasing the necessary machinery, all of which has become more expensive and technically complicated.

“Our company prided itself,” he recalled. “We could take young farmers that wanted to get into farming, help them set up with the livestock operation, and they could generate enough income just to live on the farm, probably build up some equity and start to grow that way. But because of the cost of operation anymore, that’s probably not the case anymore.”

That economic escalation, combined with Sioux Center’s changing demographics, is affecting the community in ways that reach far beyond the fields—albeit very slowly, at a pace befitting the town’s special style of conservatism.

In the 2008 presidential race John McCain received 81 percent of the vote in Sioux County. In Tractor Country as a whole McCain earned 64 percent. George W. Bush captured 68 percent of the Tractor Country vote in 2000 and 68 percent again in 2004.

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