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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Yeah, same here. Only about 2% of the population have anything at all to do with agriculture, and yet most communities (by number, not by population) are rural villages.

Why not suburban, then? Where do all these people work?

In America the answers for rural employment are often

  1. Infrastructure maintenance or working in some other necessary function that’s located way out of the way for entirely legible reasons- railroads, long distance power lines, water reservoirs, etc are typically the best paid jobs in rural areas without extractive industry.
  2. Long haul freight or immediate dependence on it- truckers are going to drive anyways, it doesn’t really matter if they live in lower cost of living rural areas. Truck stops are also very economically important in these areas.
  3. Prisons and other government facilities people want built far away from themselves.
  4. Extractive industry. The single largest employer in rural Texas is usually natural gas- and most educated people in rural Texas are either teachers or working in the white collar side of gas extraction(there’s a lot of clerical work involved in land rights, accounting, sales, etc).
  5. Meeting the immediate needs of the above or tourism. The USA is a very wealthy society and people can go on vacation a lot, the gleanings are more than enough to subsidize a few rural towns. One overlooked source is hunters- most cattle ranchers bring in hunters during parts of the year, and hunters stop for fast food, hotels, etc, even in areas without beautiful scenery or good weather. Another major source is people just road-tripping through on their way to more desirable locations(Buc-ee’s notoriously makes a fortune off this).
  6. And of course there’s always remote work.

Only about 2% of the population have anything at all to do with agriculture

I don't know about that, the Netherlands has that same statistic but that only counts owner-operator farmers and contract labour (modern farmhands, essentially). It doesn't count the tractor mechanics, feed suppliers, veterinarians, etc, all of whom would be unemployed if we were to stop farming. A tractor mechanic is in the tertiary sector (services). Those people may not be farmers but they sure have something to do with agriculture.

Fair point, but that still won't push the numbers out of the single digits, never mind over 50%.

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