Greetings from Rock County, Minnesota. I'm in the middle of lunch, where do you think the bun of my fish sandwich came from? A hint: probably more than a hundred miles from here. Most of the worlds grains are raised in a few great granaries, and the great plains are one of them. So what does what happens in the middle of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas matter? Well, the Red River Valley is flooding, it's a late and prolonged flood, and it may leave close to a million acres too wet to plant with wheat and other grains this year. That's potentially a loss of a hundred million bushels or so of wheat and other crop production in a year when carryover inventories are already low.
I diaried about just this subject a week ago, and that diaty went nowhere. But back in 2008 I diaried about the flooding in eastern Iowa and it's consequences... That diary took off and made the Rec list. The difference? There's plenty of Kossacks in eastern Iowa but damn few in the Red River Valley. But the consequences of this years Red River flooding are just as threatening as the floods that hit Iowa in 2008.
That wasn't my first experience with Kossack's urban bias- a couple years back I did a diary asking for advice on how to farm 30 acres in west central Minnesota. With all too rare exception, the advice I got was more appropriate for an urban garden or suburban hobby farm a couple growing zones warmer than here. Sorry folks, but a CSA won't even break even when you're over a hundred miles from your major market.
The ramifications of Kossack's and the progressive movement's big city centrism are hurting us politicly too. I'm sitting about 20 miles from Iowa and South Dakota, and Nebraska and North Dakota are within less than half a days easy drive. How many seats do we need to win to regain a 60 seat filibuster proof majority in the U.S. Senate? There's 8 within easy reach here, all in cheap media markets like Sioux Falls, Fargo, Omaha, and Des Moines. These same states will cast 17 electoral votes, and you can win them a lot more cheaply than you can votes in the big swing states. The rural imperative extends to state legislatures too- here in Minnesota the Democratic Farmer-labor party needs to pick up a few seats to win back the state House and Senate. They can fight expensive battles to win those seats in the rabidly republican outer ring suburbs. Or they can take advantage of the cheap ad rates out here in Marshall, Pipestone, etc. and win over these competitive rural district's swing voters and get a lot more bang for their campaign treasury bucks.
So Kossacks, please think rural! Read up on rural issues, and even if you don't like thousand acre farms (I don't either), understand the reasoning behind them. Learn the land and climate so you'll know why we plant corn and wheat instead of fruit trees in the Red River valley.
Thanks for reading this diary, and hopefully you'll read many more rural diaries. Got to hit the road, talk amongst yourselves...