The second farm crisis in two decades is upon us. It is occurring in a dynamic context that generates much to discuss. From our vantage point in a leading southwestern city, rural Minnesota appears to be vanishing. It is on the verge of becoming fodder for future historians to reconstruct. Closings, mutations and consolidations of rural institutions occur at accelerating rates all around us.
Local businesses disappear as franchises spring up everywhere.
Mergers of professional firms, hospitals, schools and churches multiply. Newcomers from everywhere appear here. With this melancholic foreword, I shift the conversation between my friend and me to a comparison between the farm crisis now and the prolonged agricultural crisis in the mid-1980s, which turned uniquely on the depreciation of farm assets and an accompanying loss of credit. The crisis then was witness to intensification of long-term agricultural trends. As the 1990 census made indisputable, farms increased in size while the number of farm families diminished.