Vilsack sees renaissance for rural U.S.
HILLSBORO — Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has been touring the country over the past year, gathering the thoughts, concerns and ideas of America’s farmers, hoping, he says, to put together a strategy for revitalizing rural America.
At the National Summit of Rural America held Thursday at Jefferson College, Vilsack underscored his worries about rural communities — and his hopes that they can be reborn, in part, through renewed commitments to biofuels, new conservation technologies and regionalized food systems.
"It’s a whole new day in rural America," Vilsack said. "I think we’re at the cusp of a second opportunity here."
In recent decades, rural communities have seen incomes decline, educational levels drop and populations slide as young people seek opportunities away from home. The most recent Department of Agriculture and census data show that people living in metropolitan areas earn roughly $11,000 more on average than rural residents and are twice as likely to have a college degree. From 2000 to 2008 more than 56 percent of rural areas lost population.
"Unemployment levels are high, the work force isn’t educated. Ninety percent of the persistent poverty counties are in rural America. There’s an aging and declining population — that leads to loss of political representation," Vilsack said in an interview. "So these are challenges we need to make sure the country understands."
On Thursday, Vilsack outlined new initiatives and announced grants aimed to boost job creation and rural businesses. Vilsack said the department was teaming up with the Small Business Administration to provide guaranteed loans.
Through another program, Vilsack explained, the department will provide $45.1 million to encourage lending to new businesses. Vilsack also announced $22.5 million in grants for business development and marketing.
The secretary also stressed his commitment to the development of bio- fuels, saying that more lawmakers have to come together to generate consistency and momentum to sustain biofuels producers and markets.
"We are very committed to this, because I am convinced this is the way to revitalize rural America," Vilsack said.
Charles Whittington of Grammer, Ind., came to the summit just a few days after firing a dozen people at his soy biodiesel refinery near Indianapolis. Whittington told Vilsack that the recent expiration of a federal credit program triggered the plant’s closure.
"That was the nail in the coffin," said Whittington, adding that he agreed the biofuels industry needs political will to guarantee a market.
"If you know you’re going to lose your job in six months, you don’t buy a house," he said. "It’s the same principal."
If they had not known it already, the farmers, ranchers, farm advocates and policy makers gathered at the summit learned this: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a sprawling agency with a unwieldy breadth of responsibilities.
In addition to Whittington airing his frustrations about biofuels policy, farmers and advocates lined up to tell Vilsack how the department’s policy had, in their view, gone astray.
Some complained that department policy had encouraged a consolidation of power in agriculture. Others underscored the role agriculture should play in helping rural schools. And, as Vilsack gears up to create a 2012 farm bill, some attendees complained that rules and regulations from the 2008 farm bill had yet to be implemented, frustrating farmers, ranchers and dairies across the country.
"This is a very complex organization," Vilsack explained. "It has many, many missions."
Filed under: money by Wolf