Iowa

Rural and Urban Communities

Farming continues to be of critical importance in Iowa, where manufacturing operations began at around the same time as in much of the rest of the country but took decades to catch up to the importance of agriculture. The farm crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s hit Iowa harder than most states, resulting in the worst poverty and unemployment since the Great Depression and a population decline that lasted more than a decade as families relocated to seek work elsewhere. The farm crisis had a number of long-lasting effects that continue to have an effect on Iowa. For one, it tightened the existing bonds between farmers and farming families with deep roots, not least because of the perception that the crisis had been caused by outsiders—banks that had overextended credit to farms, in large part because of an inability to evaluate appropriate amounts and terms. The farm crisis, in Iowa as in the country at large, also favored large agribusiness farms over smaller, family-run or small-business farms, because larger farms benefit from greater subsidies, have greater operating capital, and are better able to afford business advantages like organic certification or vertical integration. This has had the effect of transforming many Iowans from independent farmers into employees, wreaking havoc on traditional farmers' social networks.

But it also encouraged the urbanization of Iowa, which is now one of the fastest-growing and most quickly urbanizing states, despite the fact that the state's largest city, Des Moines, has a population of only about 200,000. The next-largest cities are Cedar Rapids (130,000), Davenport (101,000), Sioux City (83,000), Iowa City (68,000), and Waterloo (67,000). About two-thirds of the state lives in urban areas, and rural populations continue to decline. While such “rural flight” has been common across the Midwest as large-scale agriculture reduces the number of workers needed for farming, Iowa is one of the few states to experience it in modern times during a period of overall population increase. Many towns that had once sprung up along the railways have been all but abandoned.

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