Subsequent Population Shifts - Step 3
Basic Aspects of the Issue
With land and labor now falling second to purchased inputs in terms of the productivity increase they could generate, farm sizes hasd t increase adn labor had to be cut. However, difference between land and labor as inputs and pruchased inputs is that purchased inputs are much more flexible in their degree of usage. Land and labor uses are very slow to change compared to purchsased inputs, so lead-time is needed to change their utilization. Land needs at least one year and sometimes more led tie before a crop can be changed. Often new machinery or fittings muct be purchased in order to seed and harvest a new crop. New procedures and arrangements must be established, new techniques learned, and new rythms of the season addressed. If seed has been carried forward, then new seed must be purchased.People take even longer t make a transition to another occupation if an industry or sector declines in its use of manpower. Not only does it take a while to re-educate orretrain staff, it often takes several years for peole, particularly in the agricultural sector to deal with the "entitlement" issue, that is their felt right orentitlement to farm as a way of life. The social change inthe agricultural sector once more put pressure on this entitlement for a great many people.
Tweeten notes how the lower rural educational standard in hte ruralareas in hte United States served the needs of most people adequately until the time of rapid tansition emerged after the second war and then it caught up with the country in a big way. He notes studies which indicate that a great deal ofthe urban unrest in hte 1960's was due to disaffected rural black youth streaming off the farms into the cities with unrealistically high hopes for work and finding none for which they qualified. (__)
The government in the United States (as elsewhere) attempted to mitigate the effects of the shift of populatio to the cities by a number of initiatives. One of the bestknown was The establishment of price supports for farm produce in order to support small farmers who wanted to stay on hte land but lacked the capital to increase their acerage or pay for expensive inputs. The golden years of farming (1900- World War I) were used as a baseline index in order to work percentages from in estabishing base prices for products. The term that was coined for theis baseline was "parity". If the government supported a price, below which a product would not fall, then it was referred to as, for example, "65% of parity".
A variety of arrangements were established in order to solicit farmer participation (usually opt-in voluntarily after a vote on the matter), and to deal with the mechanics of the support process. For example, the government woud contract to buy a farmer's crop for a given price when it came in. If themarket price was below that price, the government jsut kept the product for whatever social program it wanted to use to disperse it. If the market price was over the agred floor price,then the farmer coudl takeadvantage of that bonus.
One big problem with this system is that the benefit usually goes to the farmer with the greatest amount of land and who needs it the least. The real purpose ofit, according to Tweeten, is to buy some time for marginal farmers to retrain and make the transition to other work in an orderly fashion, selling his land off to farmers who needed to increase their land base to a viable size. He feels that any such program must be tailored so that it meets its objective. Once again the problems of "entitlement" emerge. Here, it is the common feeling that every farmetr should hav access to all programs and not be unfailry cut out merely becasue he is able to be more proddcutive, successful, or is able to have a larger land bse with which to start.
As population drops from the farms, the personnel needed in the towns which support the farms alsodrops, making for a masive migration from the rural countryside to the urban areas.
Tweeten notes that the children of industrial size farms have an easier time with the trasnsition to the cities than those of the samll family farms partly because of the education base tehy often have oportunities to access, and partly because the home "culture" is closer to the urban one into which they are moving.(___) In Manitoba, especially away from the skewing effect fo the commuters t big cities, this depopulation effect is seen quite clearly. In a populatio study conducted in 2001 by the Rural Development Institute some towns in the north western section of the agricultural part of Manitoba have lost 50-65% of their populatio over the last thirty years. Fully 75% of Manitoba's population lives in the Winnipeg "Capital region", with the greatest bulk of the remainder living in Brandon and three sub districts.(___)
The esodus tothe city isnot new, although there has been a large spurt in the post second world war period. The effects of this migration of populatio to the cities over the past one hundred and fifty years has had a major impact on,or as some woulld put it, it has exacerbated industrial growth. In that, this population shift was the third domino t fall - the third step on the road to thepresent situaoion.
Aspects of
Rural Development Institute Research Studies
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