Republican Governor Challenger Ryan Cunningham Reacts To National Geographic Article
Ryan Cunningham, the radio broadcaster who is working to challenge North Dakota Governor John Hoeven for the GOP nomination in the coming election, has a reaction to the recent National Geographic article about North Dakota that has been causing a ruckus in the state posted on the reader blog.
Cunningham feels that, despite some “puff” in the National Geographic piece, it was actually pretty accurate. While I agree that North Dakota’s rural communities are emptying, I’m still left scratching my head as to why this is such a problem.
Certainly the people that grew up in those communities, and those that still live there, don’t want to see their hometowns shrivel up and die but the simple truth is that times have changed. Technological and social realities that necessitated a state full of small, close together communities no longer exist. These days things like cell phones, computers, modern agriculture technology and even faster cars means that fewer people can farm more land than ever before and do it while not even really having to live on the land itself. Not only does agriculture in North Dakota employ fewer people because it takes less manpower to farm, those people who still work in the ag industry can now do so while enjoying the increased creature comforts of living in the state’s larger communities.
There is no less farming going on in North Dakota. According to government studies the same amount of land is being farmed in North Dakota today as there was 30 years ago. What’s changed is that it takes fewer people to do that farming, and quite a few of the people who are doing it are choosing to live in the larger communities around the state.
Now maybe not everyone likes that trend, but it seems to me that the only way to fix it is to go backwards. Personally, I no more want to go back to the time when small farming communities were a necessity in North Dakota than I want to go back to a time before indoor plumbing. I understand the nostalgia for the era, but let’s not forget that our lives have improved quite a bit since then as well.
