The Report from Riceville-November 9, 2004-Demographic Dilemmas edition

Brain drain is a problem for Iowa. Most of the very top students either leave the state after high school to study elsewhere or after college never to return for much longer than it takes to eat a turkey or shoot off some fireworks. Lack of economic opportunity is at the bottom of it. The problem is magnified at the level of the small town. The engine of the small Iowa town is, in almost every case, farmers and the ag industry.

In most towns the story is one of traditional farming communities struggling against the pressures put on them from the modernizing urban centers which has been going on roughly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Farming equipment developed with new technology is increasingly efficient and increasingly expensive. The incresed efficiency means that fewer people are needed to produce the same amount of agricultural goods resulting in a declining population. The increased expense means that only the wealthiest farmers are able to directly reap those gains in efficiency; only they can buy the more efficient machinery. This means that less wealthy farmers are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage and sooner or later they lose the farm to the bank or sell it to their more successful neighbor. This also puts downward pressure on population.

The population decline has a number of effects. The small town school is one of the first to feel them. Declining enrollment means declining money for teachers resulting in fewer of them and less competitive salaries to attract the best of them. Less competitive salaries can result in a situation where older, experienced (higher-paid) teachers are encouraged to retire early making room for recruits fresh from college who take the low salary, but leave after a few short years to market their experience to a better-funded school. Teachers do a great deal for the culture of small towns and losing them or having a new batch of them pass through every few years is harmful to establishing and fostering the kind of social and intellectual community that might be useful in retaining more of the brightest kids. Teachers are college-educated; their kids are more likely to go to college; with familial ties to the community, those kids are more likely to grow up and contribute to the growth of that community.

I could go on at length about some of the other economic and cultural tectonics that are occurring in rural Iowa in general, but this is the Report from Riceville so I’d better return that shining city on a hill. The interesting thing about Riceville is that, unlike other towns whose chief threat to their existence is the inability to adapt to the aforementioned pressure of modernity, Riceville must also adapt to the pressure of antiquity, counter-modernity in the form of an increasing Mennonite population beside an already existing Amish population.

Before I go any further I want to make perfectly clear that I mean to cast no aspersions on either the Mennonite or Amish communities. In my experience with them, members of both sects have been some of the most courteous, respectful and genuinely nice people I’ve come across. An Amish acquaintance of my dad’s visited him when he was sick and Mennonite carolers came and sang for him at Christmas time. My dad even took me once to a Mennonite church service when I was very young. Mennonites have been the most entrepreneurial people in Riceville in the last five years and could add a great deal to the town life.

Mennonites are, however, distinct and their self-segregation adds to the downward pressure on population among non-Mennonites. They will not attend the public school, but administer their own schools instead. Even when a farmer loses or is forced to sell his land the house is often occupied by someone who has or could have kids who would go to the public school whose centrality in the life of the town I touched on above. If a Mennonite were to buy the same tract of land he would also live in the house but would send his kids to the Mennonite school. It seems to me that the pressure on population from this phenomenon would be significantly smaller compared to those I talked about a few paragraphs ago, but many in Riceville see this as a big problem. (In a small town, unfortunately, this is more of a zero-sum game than elsewhere. That is, there is relatively little available property and few available businesses so when a Mennonite buys something it is seen as taken from the column of the traditional townspeople. In a larger market individual purchases would represent smaller portions of the whole pie and hence would not be as contentious.) The problem is not with the Mennonites as a group. My experience of them as nice people is typical. There is some resentment that they are buying a lot of land, but the problem is less with Mennonites (and Amish) coming into the town as with the ‘native’ culture dying. People in Riceville are worried that the town they know will cease to exist.

What Riceville needs of course are smart, entrepreneurial people to start businesses and create jobs. It does have some things going for it. A few years ago the school received a hefty bequest from an area farmer that gives students who enter agricultural, medical and technological fields a $2000 per year scholarship. This will probably increase since enrollment has declined in the four years since it was first disbursed. The school has also produced the Dinger ambassadorial duo and, most importantly, is perennially good at football.