I agree it is cultural. The problem is the amount of work living rural—particularly on a large piece of land requires. Until the culture remembers and celebrates that work is a virtue—good for the spirit, sadly people will continue to live like subjects in metropolitan regions where they have access to “services” and “culture”.
For those of us who have made a different choice, we must highlight how much better one’s life is with wide open spaces, the small-town feel of rural communities, and with endless tasks that a small piece of land or farm requires. Leaving a high-cost locale in California for rural North Country was the best thing I ever did for my soul.
Part of the issue, which you rightly mentioned, is the massive rise of industrial agriculture and the dramatic loss of family farms.
People are still eating chicken and drinking milk and wearing cotton, but the likelihood that that those resources came from generational farms owned and operated by families is far less than it was even 25 years ago.
The farm adjoining ours comes up for sale because its ownership was inherited by nieces and nephews long moved away. Our family nor the others adjoining cannot buy it “cash only” but an international poultry suppliers can (or pay a huge amount to lease/build barns on it). Or maybe someone will buy it as “an investment” to hunt on or one day retire to. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not, but the farming is gone and often resentment moves in among neighbors.
The country life is wonderful in many ways, but costs are (as with so many aspects of modern life) high not just in financial terms but relational losses.
Sadly , the young people are part of the problem. They don’t want to put in the work for a rural property and are only marking time until they can retire, thinking the government will take care of them at 65. True rural folks know that they can’t just walk away at a certain age and are more likely to treat a rural purchase as a lifetime investment. The days of “moving to town” and letting the young folks carry on, is over.
I agree it is cultural. The problem is the amount of work living rural—particularly on a large piece of land requires. Until the culture remembers and celebrates that work is a virtue—good for the spirit, sadly people will continue to live like subjects in metropolitan regions where they have access to “services” and “culture”.
For those of us who have made a different choice, we must highlight how much better one’s life is with wide open spaces, the small-town feel of rural communities, and with endless tasks that a small piece of land or farm requires. Leaving a high-cost locale in California for rural North Country was the best thing I ever did for my soul.
Part of the issue, which you rightly mentioned, is the massive rise of industrial agriculture and the dramatic loss of family farms.
People are still eating chicken and drinking milk and wearing cotton, but the likelihood that that those resources came from generational farms owned and operated by families is far less than it was even 25 years ago.
The farm adjoining ours comes up for sale because its ownership was inherited by nieces and nephews long moved away. Our family nor the others adjoining cannot buy it “cash only” but an international poultry suppliers can (or pay a huge amount to lease/build barns on it). Or maybe someone will buy it as “an investment” to hunt on or one day retire to. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not, but the farming is gone and often resentment moves in among neighbors.
The country life is wonderful in many ways, but costs are (as with so many aspects of modern life) high not just in financial terms but relational losses.
Sadly , the young people are part of the problem. They don’t want to put in the work for a rural property and are only marking time until they can retire, thinking the government will take care of them at 65. True rural folks know that they can’t just walk away at a certain age and are more likely to treat a rural purchase as a lifetime investment. The days of “moving to town” and letting the young folks carry on, is over.