Wichita County: A study in farm subsidies and outmigration

 

Wichita County ranks 19th in the state for population decline since 1980.

The 2000 U.S. Census also shows that in Wichita County: 405 people are 65 and older; 86 percent are white; 15 percent have bachelor’s degree; the median family income is $41,000, with about 43 percent of families making less than $35,000 a year.

Additionally, about 750 people were employed on the farm in 1980. That number dropped to 400 by the year 2000.

 

By Amy Bickel

The Hutchinson News

 

LEOTI – A sign on an empty storefront signals a plea from residents: Move to Leoti.

This county-seat town of Wichita County sits on the High Plains of western Kansas, a community framed by the surrounding fields of wheat and corn, as well as a mammoth grain elevator.

The once thriving center for family farming and a commercial hub for the region has been losing population for nearly 40 years.

The Duckwall’s store closed, as did the lumberyard. The Land O’ Lakes feed mill that employed eight stopped operating in July.

“That doesn’t seem like a lot of people,” said Sharla Krenzel, the county’s economic development director, of the eight jobs.

But it’s a blow for a county of 2,300 that has lost 200 people since the last decennial census.

From Montana and the Dakotas, down to the Texas Panhandle, the rural Great Plains has been losing citizens since World War II.

“It seems like every time we take one step forward, we take three back,” Krenzel lamented.

 

Rural ghettos

 

Kansas is the nation’s leading wheat state with production at more than 400 million bushels in good years. The state also ranks No. 1 in grain sorghum production, 10th for soybeans and seventh for corn.

In addition to crops, the state also harvests taxpayer dollars, which last year amounted to about half of producers’ net farm income, according to the Kansas Farm Management Association.

The U.S. government has shelled out billions to crop farmers, including more than $9 billion alone in Kansas since 1996. Wichita County received $127 million of that money over the last 10 years – ranking 16th in the state for total subsidies.

Yet rural Kansas exports its youth to the bright lights of the cities, leaving communities like Leoti facing questionable futures. One in four rural U.S. counties lost population from 1990 to 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. 

In Wichita County, population has fallen 31.7 percent and farm employment 40 percent since 1980, the census shows.

Local farmer Charles Ayers said farm efficiency has moved farming toward more of a corporate structure.

In the struggle to remain competitive, operations have steadily increased in size but the expansions don’t necessarily help small-town business, schools, churches and hospitals, some argue.

While there once was a family on each quarter section of ground, today most economically viable operations are 10 to 20 times larger, gobbling up small farms. And operations of 10,000 acres or more are sprinkled across the region – part of a group that receives the majority of support checks from the government.

Today’s farmers sit on their neighbor’s fence line, waiting for them to sell out, Ayers said.

Government subsidies, said Ayers, are “shutting down the American farming industry. And rural America is getting smaller.”

Ayers, who also is chairman of Sunflower Electric Power Corp., the non-profit corporation that operates six rural electric distribution cooperatives, said the situation is what he and other observers call a “rural ghetto.” Communities are losing jobs, people and wealth, as well as an educational drain.

“If our kids get educated, they leave town,” Ayers said. “The future of Leoti is going to be significantly less influenced by the movement of agriculture.”

 

Fewer farmers

 

In western Kansas, one has to drive a long way to many destinations.

That includes residents in Leoti, a town that is an hour from the regional hub of Garden City.

Location – too far from population centers or not near a major railroad line or Interstate – is one reason for rural flight. It makes attracting business difficult, especially without a sufficient labor pool, said Troy Dumler, a Kansas State University agriculture economist.

When farm policy was first enacted, more than 20 percent of Americans earned a living from the farm, Dumler said. Now it is less than 2 percent.

Fourth generation farmer Jerry Gillen said he may be the end of the family line.

The farm bill has kept him and other farmers in business, he said, but that doesn’t mean his two sons want to take over the farm. Both are engineers in Kansas City, Gillen said. One contemplated coming back to Leoti a few years ago, then changed his mind.

So Gillen, at age 57, decided to cut his farming operation by 30 percent.

He’s managed to remain successful but says it hasn’t been easy. His farm just came off a multiyear drought before he cut 60-bushel wheat in June.

Crop insurance helps farmers stay afloat, he said, adding he also is for some type of farm bill price support that pays farmers when prices are low.

“For those of us who have been here, we probably wouldn’t have been able to stay here and be viable farmers without subsidies,” Gillen said.

Statistics bear that out, Dumler said. Over the last five years, he noted, subsidies have accounted for 60 percent of farm income.

 

Taxing dilemma

 

On this 100-degree day, a soft breeze rustles corn stocks as water churns out of a center-pivot irrigation system on Gillen’s cornfields.

It’s that piece of ground that keeps him farming, he said, with a passion often associated with Kansas farmland. Gillen remembers when his father drilled the farm’s first irrigation well on that section in 1956.

The well pumped 1,700 gallons a minute back then. But the Ogallala Aquifer, the underground water cache in the region, is declining. Now the well pumps just 280 gallons a minute, and Gillen said someday his farm will rely only on rainfall.

For Wichita County, it means fewer people are needed to farm the acreage; dryland farming is less labor intensive. Farmers and machinery have become more efficient, too, Gillen said. All that leads to a declining tax base in a county that doesn’t even have a single oil well.

A school bond issue to replace the county’s elementary school, which is more than 80 years old, has failed twice. School officials plan a third attempt.

“We need a new school but the tax base isn’t good,” Gillen said.

The base fell to $24 million in 1996, Wichita County Clerk Karla Ridder said, after cattle and farm machinery were exempted from the tax rolls. It went up to $32 million after Seaboard moved hog facilities into the county, but since has fallen to $29 million as land values fluctuate.

“That’s all we have to tax – personal property and real estate,” Ridder said. “Increasing the tax base, we don’t know where to find it.”

 

Money trickles out of state

 

While millions in farm payments trickle to farms like those in Wichita County, Ayers said he suspects out-of-state landowners receive a fair portion of Wichita County subsidies.

Of the $15 million in subsidies handed out in 2005 in Wichita County, $3 million went to those not living in the county, according to the Environmental Working Group. About $1.2 million of that went to absentee landowners living in other states.

A portion of the $486,000 received by Whit-crop, the farm that received the most subsidies in 2005, went to Lamar, Colo. Four of the county’s top 20 farm payment recipients had ownership interests out of state, including two primary operators with addresses in McIntosh, S.D.

In all, about 77 percent of the dollars go to farmers in the county, accounting for just 41 percent of the total number of payments made by the local Farm Service Agency office.

Gillen said he tries to buy locally, which includes a new auto-steer tractor he purchased last winter from Leoti Greentech, a farm equipment dealer. But many farmers, he said, look elsewhere – including the Internet – for their implement purchases.

 

Slowing the trend

 

Without subsidies, there might have been an even greater exodus from the farm between the Great Depression and today, contends K-State’s Dumler. Government payments have let the marginal farmers continue farming.

“It’s kind of like putting a Band-Aid on it,” Dumler said. “Subsidies may be slowing some things down, but they also aren’t solving the long-term problems these communities face.”

For communities to survive, they will have to lose their dependence on farming, said Terry Woodbury, president of Kansas Communities LLC, which works with rural communities to revitalize rural America. He also has interest in his family’s Wichita County farm.

“Subsidy – just listen to the word,” Woodbury said. “It isn’t about growth, prosperity, attractiveness and development. It has very little do with the ability of rural America to grow in size.”

Woodbury works with 11 communities, including nearby Greeley County, where a new dairy is being built. A start-up company formed last year builds hazardous material collection boxes for hospitals.

However, it isn’t just about expanding business, Woodbury said, it’s also about lifting self-esteem.

Communities “compare themselves to others, they see their best and brightest children leaving and going someplace else,” he said.

“They see their population shrinking, and in a sense, they are on welfare.”

That means creating a community that works together, focuses on their assets, Woodbury said.

In Greeley County, officials created an adult softball league, generating eight teams. Hodgeman County leaders created a fall festival.

 

Reversing decline

 

In Wichita County, folks continue to fight the strong tide of decline, economic development director Krenzel said.

City leaders hired Krenzel, who also farms with her husband in the county, in 1996. In 1999, the county received a $2.5 million, 10-year grant through USDA’s Rural Development office because of its dwindling population.

The grant, which labels them an Empowerment Zone Enterprise Community, requires a local match.

“For every dollar of EZEC money spent, we’ve brought in $5 in cash or in-kind services,” Krenzel said.

Krenzel said Congress hasn’t appropriated all that’s been promised each year. But with money received so far, officials have torn down old buildings and built a business incubator. They retained and added about a dozen businesses and recruited a dentist.

There are other positives, Krenzel said. Though the lumberyard closed, a local farrier who operates an Internet business mulls reopening his shop.

Talk of a wind farm has circulated for several years. That hasn’t developed, and neither have other industries. The town’s struggle to stay viable shows, even with the best civic
intentions.

For Ayers, it’s visible in the two failed school bond issues. Rural America can endure much. But death comes when the school closes, he noted.

Not that this will happen anytime soon in Wichita County, Ayers said, which has a 2A high school. But as state legislators talk more about school consolidations, Ayers wonders if that means a merger with nearby Scott City schools isn’t far off.

“When we don’t pass a school bond issue, that’s a mark that Leoti is dying, not growing,” he said. “We want the county to grow, but we have schools that are needing to be updated and wonder why people don’t want to come live here.”

On the flip side, Leoti has amenities to offer residents that the many urban cities have lost: homegrown produce, a quiet country lifestyle, knowing your neighbor.

Students can participate in everything from track, wrestling and cross-country to basketball, football and golf. The Dairy King boasts great root beer floats and shakes and Charlie’s Mexican Restaurant has been a staple since 1962.

Those are the assets communities should promote in order to thrive, Woodbury says.

“The subsidy culture chips away at our dignity,” he said. “Even if it puts money in our pocket, it doesn’t make you feel better. Thinking the federal government is going to be the salvation of rural America – we can’t attach our existence to that.”