How are Rust belt towns different from Farming towns besides the obvious?

[mateo45]

Originally Posted by Teddy52

not true.

The farmers who are still in business have had to adapt to more ...change....than many of their urban counterparts.

If they still are trying to farm in the 1950 mindset, they would have been long gone.

Understood and partly true, although since most agriculture nowadays is owned and run by wealthy families and corporations, that actually amounts to very few individuals within the local community, while the majority of whom actually doing the work, still have little education, skills, or incentive for "adaptation".

[StealthRabbit]

Originally Posted by mateo45

Understood and partly true, although since most agriculture nowadays is owned and run by wealthy families and corporations, that actually amounts to very few individuals within the local community, ....

I think you come from a different part of the 'country' than many of us 'farmers'.

The folks I sit next to at the ballgames, fair, church, school, Co-op board meetings are not 'Big-time' wealthy, or 'worker-bees' from corp/ farms. Neither are the folks that come out to help with community projects and our neighbor's in need.

They are Just average hard working and purposed families for the most part (AFAIK).

Maybe they have all sold out to ADM and didn't tell me

I will stick with rural (AG based) living. I still trust my neighbors (thankfully).
Having a Fruit Farm, I have had to hire MANY local kids for labor. I will take the farm kids in a heartbeat if they are available. They can do it all... help customers, run equip, take CASH and put it in the drawer... Weight produce and containers, and even do MATH!!! Something that I find lacking in many of the youth I have to FIRE.

[mateo45]

^ ^ Before retiring to CA, I actually used to live in WA State, so we can talk about the "Norman Rockwell" small town life all you want, but we both know the economic reality is that the big acreages which grow the majority of the hops, apples and grapes that WA is famous for, aren't owned by "Aunt Bea" or "Ma & Pa Kettle"…. they're actually owned by large conglomerates, and affluent physicians who wanna have a (tax deductible) vineyard, and wealthy families who've owned those hundreds, even thousands of acres for generations (and often receive huge federal subsidies to boot).

Which is just like here in Cali, where we grow over 40% of the country's groceries, and where the actual hard work of planting and picking those crops, nowadays is done not by the local "kids", but by THESE kinda folks below, mostly because owners can't find enuff local "natives" to do the work, even after offering higher wages.

And BTW, I still own property in Wenatchee and rent to a lot of 'immigrant labor', who are all very nice, hard-working folks, who pay their rent on time, and can probably drive the hell out of a tractor… but to speak to my earlier point, "techies" they ain't (heck, many of 'em can hardly speak english)!

[StealthRabbit]

I don't live in WA much... I was there 3 weekends last yr. I'll stick with the farmers, You are welcome to whatever you have experienced in CA or WA.

And Hurray on all your wealth and experience... not sure it is appropriate to
How are Rust belt towns different from Farming towns besides the obvious?

but... whatever toot's your own horn!

[mateo45]

^ ^ How is the 'reality' of current 'rural life' not relevant? I can understand if you don't have a good reply, but you know it might help if 'ya at least followed the thread and your own train of thought here before making a comment (especially such a defensive one)!

[Tom Lennox 70]

One BIG thing is that small towns in rural areas have a much more promising economic future. I live in West Virginia outside Charleston and there are plenty of old coal towns which are not the same as Weirton but have some similarities. Economically, the farmland will always be there, things will always grow so typically farm towns are more prosperous than the small towns in Rust Belt and coal country. Coming to West Virginia it was actually a weird feeling seeing small towns that are NOT agricultural cause I previously lived in Maryland and Louisiana and most rural areas were centered on farming and fishing.

In terms of "diversity" a lot of farming regions actually have a lot of illegal immigrants while that is less of a problem in a steel town or coal town with the union jobs. But at the same time the mindset IS different with the union/industrial history. I think Rust Belt folks are still heavily Democrat and have that group mentality fostered by the unions and collective labor, while most farmers are very independent and self sufficient people. Farmers usually own their land and farms and do not work for a company. So they are basically independent business owners who do not depend on the government are hurt by government regulations, taxes, etc.

[ki0eh]

It's interesting to see in this thread a number of regional differences. Farmland is still being abandoned in upstate NY and northern PA and reverting to forest (or gas wells in PA). Most farmland actually in production in this area may be family owned, although one old family still farming might be renting from several other old families (or old family land sold to hunters from a larger city a few hours' away) in the locale. Amish/Mennonite folks take up some of the better ground that comes up for sale even in high property tax NY state. Ag services are being more highly centralized - large feed mills seem to serve several counties so no more feed mill every 8 miles, farm implement dealers are centralizing like the auto dealers. I would agree with the general point that a "farming" town is a bit more diversified so both rises and declines are more moderated compared to small non-metro industrial or mining towns. But the grocery and hardware stores in the smaller towns are gone, and maybe barely staying alive in the county-seat or equivalent town that has Walmart, Tractor Supply, and maybe Peebles on the outskirts. The box-store power center towns might be 1 per 2 or 3 counties, communities at this level are probably in an MSA and the kind of places that maybe once had a score of factories and still have 2 or 3.

[ki0eh]

Oh, the Rust Belt non-metro town might be more likely to have a prison now than the farming town. But in the East the rust belt small town may still have some fairly extensive family ties among the ethnic group remaining, probably at least some intermarriage now among the two or three ethnicities too.

[arwenmark]

Originally Posted by Tom Lennox 70

One BIG thing is that small towns in rural areas have a much more promising economic future. I live in West Virginia outside Charleston and there are plenty of old coal towns which are not the same as Weirton but have some similarities. Economically, the farmland will always be there, things will always grow so typically farm towns are more prosperous than the small towns in Rust Belt and coal country. Coming to West Virginia it was actually a weird feeling seeing small towns that are NOT agricultural cause I previously lived in Maryland and Louisiana and most rural areas were centered on farming and fishing.

In terms of "diversity" a lot of farming regions actually have a lot of illegal immigrants while that is less of a problem in a steel town or coal town with the union jobs. But at the same time the mindset IS different with the union/industrial history. I think Rust Belt folks are still heavily Democrat and have that group mentality fostered by the unions and collective labor, while most farmers are very independent and self sufficient people. Farmers usually own their land and farms and do not work for a company. So they are basically independent business owners who do not depend on the government are hurt by government regulations, taxes, etc.

I disagree about the political affiliation. WV is a Republican state and Weirton seems to be mostly Republican as well.

Of course in Weirton there is not much left of the Steel industry that is active now. They have been trying to find other sources of income and interest, such as the Movie industry, "Super 8" etc. and other things, and of course the Marcellus Shale situation has hopes up in the whole are in general as far as economic growth and improvement, and I have seen improvement even over the time since we bought in 2010 though we have only been there a few times.

[ohio_peasant]

The Midwest (and the Rust Belt, which strongly overlaps it) is not monolithic. In the Eastern half (Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, bleeding over into Appalachia) towns tend to be a combination of market-town for agricultural products, and industrial-town for a few industries (automotive, machine-tools, small manufacturing such as sheet-metal for HVAC ducts,…). In the Western half of the Midwest, presumably, there is a higher frequency of purely farm-market towns.

For some reason there are many towns of between 5000 and 20000 people. In my part of the Midwest (Ohio), it's rare to find the truly small town, with only a few hundred residents. However, population density never really peters out to only a couple of people per square mile. It's better described as a very very low density exurb, with residences on acreage ranging from 5 to say 100 acres, filling up the space between cities that might be 100 miles apart (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland). This means that the small-town culture isn't purely "small town", but probably more akin to what the OP describes about Weirton.

But I do observe one notable difference from what the OP describes: ethnic original and cultural identity. In my part of Ohio, the overwhelmingly dominant ethnicity is Scotch/Irish, with some German thrown in. One does not see many former immigrants from Southern Europe or Eastern Europe - or from elsewhere in the world… at least not in the towns.