Introduction
The sun looks down on the small town of Gardner, reaches out with its long warm fingers over the Gardner Butte and lights up the one street running through town. The mountains create a circular embrace around the deep valley where the town is located, and on this bright morning, the only one around to take note of this natural spectacle is the one lonely tumbleweed that rolls through the town’s main street. Rural change is nothing new to the history of the United States. Smaller towns gave rise to bigger towns, and things grew and expanded as population grew. Yet, now there is a new event taking shape, the shrinking of rural areas. They do not get bigger, they do not expand and intersect with other towns, and they do not stay small and quaint as in the olden days, instead they shrivel up and wither away. Rural decay is the breakdown of rural areas. It happens when a small town is no longer central to its own relevance and has no economy of its own. The people cannot support themselves either through their work or their old support systems. They can no longer make their own things nor grow their own food, and older skills and knowledge die out instead of being passed on to younger generations. Streets become ridden with potholes; cardboard and plywood becomes more common than glass; people drive farther and farther for a routine medical check up; and community events are replaced with long hours in front of the TV.
Rural decay is a heartbreaking and often misunderstood event that is taking place in my hometown of Gardner, Colorado, and in other rural areas all across the United States. This paper is my attempt to better understand the dimensions that constitute this breakdown of rural communities and to look more in depth at one of its root causes, industrial agriculture. By doing this, I hope to gain a working knowledge of this problem and find key areas where changes can be made to reverse this process. I believe that industrial agriculture is a main driving force behind rural decay, and that by implementing local food systems and changing government policies to favor small farmers, rural communities can once again start to thrive.
The first section of this paper will explore rural decay by looking at the small rural town of Gardner and its experience with this problem, and then relating this to trends that are affecting rural areas across the whole United States. I will do this by investigating various statistics, literature, and relating trends to my own experiences. The second section will examine how industrial agriculture has contributed to this problem by looking at literature and government websites surrounding the issue. The final part of this paper will look at how rural decay can be overcome by increasing local, organically produced food.
Figure 1: Picture of Colorado, highlighting Huerfano County where Gardner is located
