What do soybeans have in common with bed-and-breakfasts? Or wineries with Wal-Marts? What does suburban sprawl have to do with sprawling hog farms? Or forests with farm income?

All affect the survival of rural communities in Illinois. A five-year project at SIUC seeking to strengthen rural economies is examining what makes those communities tick. 

A team of SIUC faculty, students, and staff researchers is exploring the ties that bind agriculture, small towns, and urban areas. Their project, called Rural Development Opportunities (RDO) and now in its third year, has been funded by $896,000 from the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research. The aim? Boosting rural economic development through research. 

"Agriculture is changing very rapidly due to technological change," says Roger Beck, a professor of agribusiness economics. "That presents problems and challenges for rural communities."

The issues are many: The loss of small family farms. Rural poverty. Lack of jobs, causing young people to move to big cities. The withering of small-town downtowns. Fights over land use, especially where suburbs eat up farmland. Environmental sustainability. 

Beck co-directs RDO with Andrew Carver, an assistant professor of forestry. Part of the project’s mission is to measure the contribution of agriculture, particularly family farms, to rural communities—and to find ways to strengthen that contribution. 

"We believe the viability of our rural communities and our small family farms is a good thing. Policy makers, community leaders, and farmers themselves need information related to that," says Beck.

RDO also is looking at the "entire natural resource base," says Carver—not just agriculture. He notes that Illinois law allows local governments to create land and resource management plans. 

"We want to give rural communities more tools to compare alternatives, to create a vision of what they want their county to look like," he explains, adding, "Illinois hasn’t had such an integrated research program in rural economic development." 

RDO is making up for lost time.
 

The Lay of the Land

When the farm economy hits the skids, diversification can save the day, especially for smaller farms. The most resilient rural communities—those that rank highest in employment and income growth—are those that have most diversified their economic base, studies show. 

For farmers, diversification could mean putting some acreage in specialty crops, such as buckwheat, canola, grapes, or organic produce. It could mean preserving wildlife habitat and leasing land for hunting. It could mean managing farm woodlots for timber—or maple syrup production. It could mean agritourism, which can encompass everything from U-pick berry farms and bed-and-breakfasts to barn and winery tours.

It could also mean more-innovative marketing. Beck gives an example: Illinois, now the top soybean-producing state, has no facility for roasting soybeans. "The roasted soybeans at our food co-op don’t come from Illinois," he says. "Dairy cows eat roasted soybeans, but Wisconsin dairy farmers aren’t able to import them from Illinois. My hypothesis is that Illinois agriculture has been so productive for so long, we haven't had to think about alternative products and ways of keeping family farms viable."

Now we do.

Josh Walker, a junior in agribusiness economics, and RDO researcher William Peterson recently projected trends in Illinois agriculture. They found that about one-third of our remaining small farms—those under 500 acres—will disappear by 2007, while farms over 2,000 acres will increase by 22 percent. 

"What are the effects on the rural community of having a lot of small farms [in the area] versus having one mega-farm? If there’s one mega-farm, the rural community may disappear," says Beck. 

Why? Small farmers are more likely to buy and sell goods locally—and many of them hold part-time jobs in nearby towns. In Illinois, more than half of farm family income comes from off-farm sources.

Despite their common concerns, business and agriculture groups in rural communities don’t interact very much, Beck says. "They've been compartmentalized, to the detriment of both." 

He adds, "Water quality, land use, jobs—they're all part of a rural quality-of-life continuum. Unless you can put all of those issues in a comprehensive local planning effort, you're going to miss the boat." 
 

Computers as Crystal Balls

"It allows you to look at the ripple effect of a change across an economy," Beck explains. He and Peterson recently overhauled the program so it can also be used to predict how changes in one region would affect another region's economy.

Determining how much economic development is possible in a region given various limits on resources—say, land, labor, or capital—can be done with a second program, GAMS. Matthew Rendleman, an associate professor of agribusiness economics, and Valerica Vlad, a doctoral student in economics, are working with this program.

Students are tailoring some of the data needed for economic modeling. Justin Richards, a freshman in agribusiness economics, is compiling data from farm budgets, which quantify the inputs needed for a given output. For instance, producing so many bushels per acre of corn takes so much seed, so many pounds of fertilizer, so many hours of labor, etc.

And economics doctoral student Ernesto Valenzuela, who won SIUC’s outstanding master’s thesis award in 2000 with a model he created to analyze interstate trade, is organizing data for Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Useful in many disciplines to visualize patterns and predict change, GIS is used to generate maps illustrating economic, demographic, natural resource, and other kinds of information by geographic area.

Economic modeling and GIS can show the likely outcomes of ag policy decisions. Starting in 2002, the RDO team will use these and other tools in case studies. For example, the Kaskaskia River Basin Planning Commission has asked the team to analyze the economy of this large watershed—3.6 million acres stretching from near East St. Louis to Champaign. The commission is especially interested in the economic impact of different farming and conservation practices. 

Doctoral student Joshua Buchheit has already laid the groundwork for this study. He’s created GIS maps down to zip-code scale showing land use in the watershed—urban, forests, pasture, row crops, and so forth. Other maps show employment, income, and population data. Ultimately, maps and data will appear on the RDO project’s web site, a resource for farmers and policy makers.
 

A Graphic Look at Planning

"GIS also lets us look at the environmental impacts and the constraints to economic development from a land use perspective. You can ask 'What if?' questions and let people see the effects."

Take mega?hog farms, for example. Legislation proposed in Illinois in 1999 would have increased the buffer, or setback, zone between large hog farms and residences to nearly two miles. Using satellite data, Carver and master’s student Nathan Damery created GIS maps of two agricultural counties, Franklin and Hamilton, showing how much land would be left available for locating new farms if the legislation passed.

Although only 4.2 percent of land in Franklin County qualifies as urban, the wider setbacks would have put about 71 percent of the county off-limits to large livestock farms. In Hamilton County, where towns occupy only 0.7 percent of the land, the proposed setback limits would have tied up another 27.2 percent. 

"This shows that agricultural-urban land-use conflicts can occur even in counties with low populations," says Carver. Wider setbacks may be appropriate, he says, but to plan wisely, we need to know the economic implications.

GIS may help bring about new businesses in some of the poorest counties in southern Illinois. Tom Butcher, a senior in forestry, is working with Carver and with Daniel Selock, an aquaculture specialist in SIUC's Office of Economic and Regional Development, to identify promising areas for fish farms. 

The team is focusing on Pulaski, Alexander, and southern Johnson Counties, which make up a federally designated empowerment zone for economic development. Using GIS, Butcher can "layer" data on topography, water resources, soil types, infrastructure such as roads and power lines, and other factors to zero in on the best potential locations. 

A quick computer tour shows the power of GIS in land use planning. Butcher clicks once to draw up a map showing floodplains in the empowerment zone—areas off limits to development. Another click brings up a map showing where sand-and-gravel aquifers are present. Click. A map of bedrock aquifers. Click. A combined map showing where those aquifers overlap. ("I thought those would be the best places for fish ponds, since you have to pump water for the ponds," he says.) Click. A map showing existing wells.

By, in effect, layering these various maps, Butcher can design composite maps highlighting prime areas for catfish ponds. Other data will be factored in to find the best specific sites within those areas.

"The grain market is not very good right now, and a lot of farms are going under—but the majority of the catfish eaten in Illinois is produced elsewhere," says Butcher. 

"Maybe this could be a way to save these farms."
 

Living with Urban Sprawl

Can both town and country be accommodated? Carver and former master’s student Anthony Caselton have explored the issue by using St. Clair County, Ill., as a case study. This mostly agricultural county has rapidly expanding urban areas. A county commission has drawn up a land use plan with areas earmarked for low- and medium-density residential development, farmland, and forest/recreation areas. 

Within the low-density zones, Carver and Caselton identified land most suited to remain agricultural based on three factors: degree of land fragmentation, distance from urban areas, and soil quality. They found that cluster development—one strategy of so-called "smart growth"—would work here. 

"Instead of putting one house on three acres," says Carver, "group them on large city-type lots surrounded by conservation easements where farmers can still farm—not necessarily row crop production, where you can get pesticide drift, but maybe specialty crops or grazing."

GIS showed that cluster development would accommodate the same number of people, but would preserve considerably more farmland. "Everyone wins," says Carver. 

The team’s data may help the commission modify its land use plan. Because St. Clair has explosive growth, a lot of prime agricultural land, and what Carver calls "some of the most important forested tracts in the state, areas important to migratory songbirds," he finds it a perfect place to research the challenges that urban sprawl poses to rural areas. He expects the RDO team to do more case studies there.
 

Pricing the Intangible

For instance, family farms give us more choices in the marketplace. "If enough consumers want to eat range-fed chicken or brown eggs or organic produce, there's a place for that kind of agriculture," he says.

And agriculture offers benefits beyond food production: open space, scenery, preservation of wildlife habitat, better air quality than cities. They often don’t figure into planning because they don't carry a price tag. But a research technique called contingent valuation gets around that by asking people to assign a value to such things given certain circumstances, choices, or markets. It's harder than it sounds.

Jean Mangun, an assistant professor of forestry, specializes in the "human dimensions" of natural resource management. For instance, she’s studied people’s attitudes about recreation activities on public lands. The RDO team recruited her to study attitudes about family farms and rural economic development.

"Eventually we’ll do a survey asking people how much more they’d be willing to pay for things like eggs and milk if they knew those products came from a sustainable family farm," she says.

"But first we’re trying to determine how people’s backgrounds—occupation, where they live, familiarity with rural areas, things like that—influence attitudes toward rural economic development."

Mangun and Valbona Ylli, a Fulbright scholar from Albania who’s spending her leave at SIUC, have been administering a two-part survey to community leaders in rural and urban areas. The participants fill out a questionnaire covering the above issues and more. Then they’re shown photos of different rural businesses and scenes—from chain stores to roadside fruit stands—and asked to react to them by choosing one in a series of paired keywords, such as profitable/unprofitable, wholesome/unwholesome, and so forth. "We’ve borrowed a technique used by psychologists to measure attitudes," Mangun explains.

The findings will be of special interest to alternative and organic farming groups, she says. "They want to see how much of a challenge they face in getting their message across" about the value of their products and their stewardship of the land.
 

Keeping Country Dollars at Home

The owners of a bed-and-breakfast and antiques barn in Cobden recently wanted to add a blacksmith business, as a "living-history" draw and a training/sales facility. Flanagan took their information and drew up a business plan, including marketing strategies and a detailed financial analysis. Things looked favorable; the Shawnee Hill Smithery opened this spring.

Fragrant Fields, a plant business and restaurant, tapped Flanagan’s expertise to figure out how to add a bed-and-breakfast. Both businesses are located in Union County, where Flanagan is focusing her outreach efforts. It will serve as a model for other counties interested in agritourism.

Another strategy to boost rural economies is to develop community foundations—nonprofit agencies that fund community projects and programs. The idea is to leverage dollars, investing local wealth locally.

"Value-added" enterprises do that too. Take timber harvesting in southern Illinois. Harvesting more timber—sustainably—could help our farmers diversify, says Eric White, a master’s student in forestry. We have lots of farm woodlots with high-quality timber. But almost half of the logs harvested here go to other states for processing. What if more were processed here, or even used locally to make finished products? More capital and more profit would stay close to home. 

Why do so many logs go out of state? Southern Illinois mills have more-than-adequate capacity, White found. But neighboring states have a higher concentration of competing mills, including many right on the Illinois border. 

"It appears they want southern Illinois timber, but they don’t want to operate in Illinois," Roger Beck says. "The question is, Why not?"

Answering that could help farmers here. It’s also of interest to the Illinois Forestry Development Council, one of many cooperating agencies that RDO works with.

The RDO project itself is a value-added enterprise. At any given time it employs about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students from several academic programs, who learn economic development planning by working side by side with faculty. The research skills they gain with RDO—tools like GIS and economic modeling software—often aren't taught in their classes.

"We're training young people, building expertise," says Carver. "It's very exciting; students are coming to us, wanting to get involved." 

K. C. Jaehnig, Media & Communication Resources, contributed to this article.

Comments: Perspectives Webmaster
Copyright © 2001, Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University | Privacy Policy