Writer: What about the 98 percent of rural Americans who don't work in agriculture?

President Obama arrives at Farm Bill signing ceremony
(Photo by Rod Sanford, Lansing State Journal)

The Farm Bill and its signing ceremony put a big emphasis on creating agricultural jobs, with the Obama administration and members of Congress touting how it will improve rural economies. But most rural areas rely largely on means other than farming to support their economies, and nine out of 10 jobs rural areas lost since 2007 have not come back, Tim Marema reports for the Daily Yonder: "Since the start of the Great Recession in 2007, rural counties have led the nation in net job losses. While metro employment has returned to pre-recession levels, non-metro counties have 800,000 fewer jobs today than they did in 2007. Even though the recession is over, rural job losses continue to mount."

Counties that represent less than 20 percent of the U.S. population had 90 percent of the net job loss," Marema points out. "The rural unemployment rate remains higher than the metro rate, despite fewer people in rural counties looking for work. From 2010 to 2012, for the first time on record, the number of people living in non-metro counties went down instead of up. That’s historic by definition. Net farm income may be up, but real household income in rural America is down – 8.7 percent in micropolitan counties (counties with small cities) from 2007 to 2011 and 6.8 percent in non-core counties (ones with no small cities) during the same period."

Those job losses and high unemployment rates won't be fixed by the Farm Bill, Marema writes. "As important as farming is to the rural economy, it's one piece of a much larger puzzle. Farmers, though economically vital, are a small minority of the rural population. And most people who farm earn more money in town from an outside job than they do from working their land."

"We can’t allow our leaders to continue to talk about agriculture as synonymous with rural, any more than we can allow energy production to represent the entirety of the rural economy. Or manufacturing, or services," Marema writes. "We need a new rule. If you put the word 'rural' in the title of the report, you should have to say something of substance about the 98 percent of rural Americans who don’t earn their primary living from farming. The fact that we can get a glowing report about agriculture at a time when other rural economic news is grim should tell us something. There’s a much bigger story out there. We need to be clear about that, or we’re history." (Read more)