From The Economist:
Cairo, a town at the southern tip of Illinois founded in the early 19th century, was given that name because it was expected to grow into a huge metropolis. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it was the transport hub of a region that became known as “Little Egypt” because of its huge deltaic plains where farmers could grow anything.
Today, however, the name is redolent of lost civilisations. To walk around is a strange experience. Turreted Victorian houses gently crumble, being reclaimed by the weeds. What was once downtown (pictured) resembles an abandoned film set. Cairo has no petrol stations, no pharmacies and no hospitals. It has gone from six schools to two, both half-empty. “When I was growing up in the 1970s, we had two grocery stores, we had two gas stations. You know, a lot of businesses were still open,” says Toya Wilson, who runs the city’s still operating and beautiful Victorian library. One modest grocery store remains, but it is run at a loss by a charity and, when your correspondent visited, was deathly quiet, with many bare shelves.
Cairo is on its way to becoming America’s newest ghost town. Its population, having peaked above 15,000 in the 1920s, had fallen to just 1,700 people by the 2020 census. Alexander County, Illinois, of which it is the capital, lost a third of its people in the decade to 2020, making it the fastest-shrinking place in America
Link to the rest at The Economist
Unfortunately, Cairo (pronounced like the Karo in Karo Syrup) is not an isolated case.
PG grew up in rural Colorado and rural Minnesota. Every place PG lived during his K-12 years has a smaller, usually much smaller population than it was when PG was living there. The elementary schools and the high school where PG was a student have been demolished and not replaced. Today, the students who live where PG lived are bussed to school, riding at least 30 minutes each way.
The American Midwest contains some of the most fertile soil in the world, but farming finances are becoming worse and worse for family-owned farms. They’re simply too small and undercapitalized to support a family these days. So the owners, often quite old, are selling out to investment banks and other large financial enterprises, typically located on the coasts of the United States.
Somebody needs to operate the farms, so the large financial owners hire professional farm managers are hired to handle that task. Because of their size and financial strength, the large banks and financial enterprises have access to financing on far better terms than an individual farmer can obtain, they can purchase expensive new farm equipment that is far more sophisticated and efficient than anything a small farmer can afford.
Large finance enterprises hire a professional farm manager to handle all their holdings. The farm manager then hires a few middle managers to supervise the hiring and supervision of low-cost labor, importing such workers from other countries to handle the day-to-day work.
Laborers are likely organized in work groups to be moved about regularly so they can do the manual work of operating a large number of former family farms. Basically, farming is run like a factory, and nobody has roots in the many small farm towns that previously survived by providing goods. services and education needed by family farmers, spouses and their children.
