(Note: This is the second in a series of stories investigating the decline in rural Kansas and efforts to reverse it. Read part one here.)
DIGHTON, Kansas ? A billboard along Interstate 70 boasting about the productivity of Kansas farmers may say more about what?s happening in agriculture than those who put it there realize.
The message seems simple and straightforward: ?1 Kansas Farmer Feeds 155 People + You!?
A closer look reveals it?s been crudely updated ? an indication that the tally changes with some frequency.
The steady escalation of the number of people fed by a single Kansas farmer ? from 73 in the 1970s to 155 today ? reveals how lots of small farmers have been replaced by large farmers intent on getting even bigger.
That trend threatens scores of small towns that sprouted on the prairie in a different time, when larger numbers of small farmers depended on them.
Many of Kansas? small towns look weathered, worn and neglected after more than a century of exodus. Most rose up more than a century ago, to meet the basic needs of farmers. They established banks and churches. Grocery stores and implement dealers prospered.
Consider Atwood, the childhood home of former Gov. Mike Hayden.
The Atwood that Hayden knew growing up during the 1950s was a bustling town of about 2,000 people tucked into the northwest corner of the state. Well-kept shops lined Main Street. Hayden recalls six grocery stores, five car dealers, at least one pharmacy and a thriving local newspaper.
?It was,? he said, ?Norman Rockwell?s America.?
Since then, the town lost nearly half its population. Most of those foundational businesses, Hayden said, ?eroded away? and took the community?s core of civic leaders with them.
As governor in the late 1980s, Hayden spoke defensively about the decline of rural Kansas. A pair of East Coast academics ? Frank and Deborah Popper ? proposed returning expanses of rural Kansas and other Great Plains states to the buffalo as part of a massive nature preserve.
Hayden ridiculed the idea.
?I came out guns blazing,? Hayden said. ?I thought the Poppers were off base and that they should perhaps go back east and we?d be just fine out here.?
He now says he was wrong.
