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DENNIS HAMILTON: A conference on rural America was held on the University of Minnesota Crookston campus July 15 through the 17th. The purpose of the conference was to isolate rural concerns, discuss possible scenarios for the future of rural America, and make an attempt to find tools by which rural America can influence legislation and policy determination.

In essence, the conference was designed to analyze the countryside as we know it today and to speculate about its future role in our growing world. This program will be a summary of the speakers and participants who attended the three-day event.

Where does one begin to talk about rural America? One place is with a discussion of the myths that form our images of the countryside. The farmer is a hick, a rube, where his coveralls and constantly chews on straw.

That's what Dr. Clark Chambers, Chairman of the University of Minnesota history department, told the rural America conference participants. He was joking, of course, but he wanted to make a point that being urban folks do have a distorted view of people who populate rural areas.

After describing and discounting many myths, both historical and contemporary that pertain to rural lifestyles, Dr. Chambers talked about a rural American ideal, , countryside traditions which hold the key to a future healthy rural America.

CLARK CHAMBERS: The first place, it seems to me, that the traditional Jeffersonian dedication to the diffusion of property, the best representation of which may still be the family farm, is one indication of an historical tradition, not a myth, that has meaning for contemporary America.

I think, in the family enterprise, however large or modest, and we know that the family enterprise used to be a quarter section now in prosperous areas and certainly here in the Red River Valley of the North, it's much larger than that.

But the family farm is a social and economic unit. It is still possible to maintain some of those values and some of those perceptions that the older tradition suggested. I think that a society that is solid and successful is to some degree decentralized, and I think that's what we're talking about here.

So much of the concern in the last-- well, now in our bicentennial is about the centralization and concentration. I think that here in rural America, there is still that strength of decentralization of the grassroots of America. Well, that for one.

Secondly, I believe there is strength still in the dedication of rural America to the Earth and to the land. Now, it was not always so and is not so in many quarters, for there has been a heedless exploitation of natural resources in all aspects of American life.

Americans frequently acted as though there were no future, or that the future would somehow take care of itself. We chopped down the forests. We were profligate in the exhaustion of energy resources. Thousands of farmers tilled the soil with little regard for its preservation.

But rural America also respected the land. And I think it's that tradition that I'm talking about. Knew how precious and how irreplaceable were its resources. And I think it's that tradition of care and concern and love which now needs enforcement if we are to survive in a physical sense or to survive in a social and cultural sense.

Three, I think there is a historical tradition of rural America which remains alive and essential in the practice of neighborly cooperation. It marks much of pioneer experience. I think it was transformed in the 20th century into various forms of social and economic cooperation.

Under modern circumstances, it had to take different forms. But I think that outreach of community, the sense of concern, of neighborliness, is alive and well in America and is part of the strength of a tradition and historical tradition upon which we can draw.

The fourth place and lastly, there was and is a tradition in rural America, which relates to education, to lifelong learning. And I do not mean formal school training. I think rural America perhaps was more imaginative in working out informal arrangements for education, for learning, and teaching than urban America was.

One sees in the agricultural colleges, which were formal, and the extension service and the agricultural journals and press through all the voluntary agricultural organizations, the Grange, the Farmers Union, Farm Bureau, the 4-H.

Farmers joining together to learn, to teach, and then to apply, because there's no book learning. Don't butter, no bread. And unless the learning and teaching is made real and applied, whether in ecology or conservation or marketing or in social and community life, it is sterile and abstract and better stays within the books.

And openness then to new ways, which I think is just not mythic. And yet it almost becomes that. It is a body of ideas that informs and moves all of us as individuals and in public policy.

SPEAKER: Chairman of the University of Minnesota History Department, Dr. Clark Chambers. Author and historian Hiram Truckey was also a participant at the rule America conference. Little more in terms of introduction is needed, except to say that Truckey is definitely enthusiastic about the countryside.

HIRAM TRUCKEY: I am a family-oriented farmer and I do not believe that there is a single thing in this country outside of legislation that can destroy the hold that the family-oriented farm has on rural America.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Hiram Truckey said he would deliver the most unpopular talk at the Crookston Rural America conference. But his previous statement wouldn't really make him unpopular. In fact, saving the family farm seems to be a major goal of both rural America and state legislators. But Truckey doesn't stop at his advocacy of family farms.

HIRAM TRUCKEY: Barring some major change in the free enterprise system, we will continue to have larger family-oriented farms in America. Always remember how I'm saying this. I'm not talking about mythical corporate giants. So much hogwash.

DENNIS HAMILTON: The key word in that statement is larger. How large? Well, Truckey cited a 1973 US Department of Agriculture study which stated the theorized optimum size of a one man family row crop farm was 800 acres, yet the actual average size is only 263 acres. Also, the study said the optimum size for one man family wheat farm was 1950 acres, while the actual average size was only 694 acres. What was his point?

HIRAM TRUCKEY: The average size farm today is 1/3 the size of what the USDA says the average well mechanized one man can do. Larger farms, according to Truckey, are more efficient in land, labor, and capital, and can often command larger profits per acre than a smaller farm since they can deal directly with exporters, millers, and elevators. Today, we have 109,000 farms that produce more than $100,000 in gross income, 4% of all farms in America that produce 46.5% of all our produce.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Truckey says those large farmers are well-educated managers, most holding master's degrees, and many owning some other business outside the farm. He added that most large farmers see no upper limit to farm size, and that we need not be concerned about corporation farming killing off the family farm.

HIRAM TRUCKEY: Don't be so worried about that boogeyman. There is nobody that's going to drive the family-oriented farm off the map. Nobody is going to drive a husband and wife team off the map. I know--

DENNIS HAMILTON: Truckey also made the point that nobody seems to the large family farmer. The reason for that is that they represent change and few people in rural America like that. But he added that everybody needs farmers three times a day, not small hobby farms or farms that can't produce efficiently, but large family farms, which can make food and fiber available at low cost.

HIRAM TRUCKEY: There is no other industry in the United States that is the competitive worldwide, as the free, enterprising, family-oriented farm is to the rest of the farmers of the world. Why we cannot produce Africa and Asiatic farmers 75 to 1. There wasn't a farmer that I was interviewed who was afraid of going on the free market. They were just hoping for the chance.

DENNIS HAMILTON: But what about the upper limit? Is there no limit to the size farms can get, making it possible for a farmer to monopolize a market? Truckey says that presidents have the antitrust power, and would most surely use it if food supplies were put in jeopardy by a large farmer. What about the actual number of farms anticipated in the future? in an interview following his presentation, I put that question to Truckey.

HIRAM TRUCKEY: Today, we have about 580,000 farms that are producing about 88% of our food and fiber. OK, we can still reduce that number greatly. In fact, it's real easy for me to say that the commercial farms of this country in a very foreseeable future and let's say I'm saying the year 2000 could number a quarter of a million.

And these people can feed and clothe America. And these are not horrendously large farms. Do you realize to get to that point, the average cropland-- the average cropland of all those farms would only have to be about 1,400 acres.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Hiram Truckey, farm historian, author as he says, outspoken advocate of rural America.

SPEAKER: The audience at Crookston's Conference on rural America was particularly smitten with Speaker Robert Theobald, British economist and now consultant for the Northwest Regional Commission in Washington State.

Theobald speech was titled, "The Role of Rural America in Creating America's Third Century." It focused on alternative perspectives, and he began with models we're familiar with-- the optimist, the pessimist, and the romanticist. I asked Theobald if the leadership model he proposes isn't really a combination of all three.

ROBERT THEOBALD: You have to have optimism, because if you don't, you won't move at all. I mean, somebody who really has given up isn't about to make any decisions. We need to recognize the validity of the pessimists and the things that are going wrong. We need the people who do talk about values, who are the romantics. So it is that combination.

The leadership model is one which says that each one of us has a role to play. But there's a funny kicker in this because in my opinion, one of the things we need to do is to set terms for leadership and to say that basically people shouldn't do something for more than three or four or five years, because if you don't do that, the person is very unwilling to give up his power, his structure, and therefore, people try to keep people and know them down.

Whereas if you know you're going to leave in three or four or five years, you very well want to bring somebody up so that when you leave, somebody is competent to take your place. I think there is a certain pathology in a senator saying I need to serve my country for 30 years. And I think it does some very funny things to their heads, to the places they're at. And I'd like to see one six-year term for senators, perhaps one four-year term for representatives, and certainly no more than one term for a president.

SPEAKER: OK. Now one thing that we're also talking about when we talk about leadership is our source of authority or our sense of where authority lies. What is the leadership model that you propose going to do to our ideas about where authority really does lie?

ROBERT THEOBALD: Well, it's arguing that authority can only lie with competence, knowledge, understanding. And it's a word you can't use very much. But we'll try it and probably get root cause. It's really anarchy theory.

And the trouble is in this country, people think anarchy theory is chaos, but it really says people do the things they're good at. If you go to a shoemaker for shoemaking and a horseshoer for horseshoeing and not vice versa.

And I'm really saying that that's true also in the intellectual area, that you go to the people who are competent. The world is not forgiving. In other words, democracy is not simply the allowing of ignorance to make decisions if those decisions are wrong. I mean, it takes a great deal of faith to believe in democracy anyway, to believe in democracy being run by ignorant people is impossible.

SPEAKER: You've said there is no objective truth anymore, that it's subjective, it's personal, it's experiential. But still isn't there a possibility for a sort of collective truth? Oh, that's the only reason I have any hope at all that what I was talking about essentially is the myth that the community and I like that word myth, accepts as the set of lenses through which it will perceive reality.

If Moorhead becomes different to Fargo, unless we keep a profound sense of each other's humanity, we could say, hey, we don't like you anymore. We don't care about you. So we're going to have to have an overarching myth of why the world needs to care about each other.

And I think there are two things that are coming. One is this computer information network, which will make us aware of world realities, and which I see coming much more rapidly than we're ready for. And the second one is that we are beginning to understand the extraordinary pattern and the pathology we got into in the 60s where we said that the way to learn how to be human is to care about the Vietnamese or the Indians or whatever.

So that if we had an Indian problem up here, we would then invite a Black in to talk about the minority problem or vice versa. And we're beginning to realize that the way to realize the human dilemma is to live it in your own community and to cope with the immediacy of it. However grown up-- to use the rhetoric I've been using today, we become, there will still be moments when it doesn't work.

SPEAKER: Robert Theobald, economist, futurist, author, and consultant to the Northwest Regional Commission in Spokane, Washington.

DENNIS HAMILTON: The last two speakers you heard, Truckey and Theobald, really got the blood rushing, so to speak. There was an aura of excitement as participants headed to their roundtable discussions, which followed most major presentations.

They had just heard two very different types of thought. Truckey's pragmatic, bigger can be better philosophy, and Theobald's desire to create new models rather than extrapolate from today's knowns. We listened in on a few of those roundtable sessions, and this is part of what we heard.

SPEAKER: What position is the modern large farmer in regard to his children? Does he try and keep the children on the farm? Does he say if the corporate farm act passes, does he try and draw his son or sons into a corporate venture on the farm?

Or does he encourage them to look for another source of employment? Because when he dies, taxes are going to force the family out of the farm? I don't know the answer to that, and I think that question needs to be answered.

SPEAKER: Before, when you said, does everybody agree who thinks that farms are going to get larger? I think everybody said they will. But I think there's a whole lot of difference between larger and the kind of thing that can be detrimental to the general population of the country.

I think there's all kinds of possibilities, and we want to prepare ourselves for a larger farm unit. The size of that farm unit is going to make a lot of difference in what we prepare ourselves for. And if it's going to be-- if you foresee something that's going to be really large to where he's going to buy out counties, then we can say perhaps this is going to be detrimental to the nation as a whole.

And I'd say there's another option. Rather than preparing ourselves through the legislative process, we can change the situation. What's best for the general population, for the common good.

SPEAKER: I guess I would like to add that it's not just his family, but that we can talk about a process of socialization and that the culture itself has some basic models which define the limits within which we can think about what we are, what success is, what our models are, and that we have a difficult time imagining because of all of the information around us being built with certain kinds of structures in mind.

I think that's why Bob Theobald has got some hope in the upper Midwest. I think one of the theories I've heard him talk about is that one of the places for hopeful change is in the parts of the country or the world have not participated fully in the last model that has had, quote unquote, "success." I think he sees some hope in the upper Midwest because we have not been caught up in the industrial era kinds of models, the extent the rest of the country has--

SPEAKER: I've never seen expenditures in my limited experience the way you people up here. You just spend. It's my God, I've never seen it. So if Bob Theobald ball thinks that your models are freer than Chicago, God help the country, really.

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER: I'm not sure that's exactly what I was saying.

SPEAKER: I just came out of the depths of my gut.

SPEAKER: Because I think what he's trying to say is that some of these strictures you're seeing, he would see a relatively recent advent for this part of the country. Some of the mechanization and things you were talking about, they're relatively recent, and there's still a core of people out here who can still make up their minds whether or not they're going to opt into that or not, that there is another way of thinking about ourselves that he believes still is out here.

That might be questionable, but I think Bob believes that. And that therefore, we've got some opportunities to think in our level about some other styles of understanding ourselves and what is seen as technological man or industrial man or whatever.

And I think he's really asking ourselves to ask a really basic question of what level of change, where is that change needed? I think it's our personal perception of who we are and what our role in life is. That's the level he's asking us to reach to.

That's why you redefine success. That's why you look at others. And that question of priorities, in a sense, came to mind when he talked about how we politicize everything. What are we here at the conference for?

Are we here to say partly that something's wrong? Are we here to admit, as he said, they tell everybody it's as bad as it is if that's the way we feel. I don't know if we all feel that way. But he raised that question. Or do we all feel it's good? Or what are we attempting to do? Influence legislation. And do we have to politicize everything? I think those are some really basic questions.

SPEAKER: That quality of life that Theobald was talking about, if you take jockeys, I don't know that he really implied this, but you've got the man with the management ability. He can run any factory if you just send him there. But this is the person that's really getting the production out of the farm.

I could almost hear him saying, the way I don't think he really said it explicitly. And that is, therefore, the man with the management let him run as big a unit as he wants to run, because he'll make us competitive on the world market, et cetera and so forth.

But then when you bring in the quality of life thing where a person would like to be involved himself or would like to have his own outlet for his initiative to develop his own abilities, how high are we going to set that? So that the man who has really got the ability to run it can really take over all the resources to run.

Or can we set a limit or can we set up a situation in which people with lower abilities-- management abilities, can also use their own motivation and initiative to run something that gives the quality of life to them, other than they would have if they were working for somebody else and just had no interest in it. And their life was really after 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening.

Can they be a real part of the productive process? And I think that's why Theobald was so good to have after Truckey. He says there's more to it than just production of goods. How about the life, the quality of life in this?

SPEAKER: Rural America Conference participants engaged in a roundtable discussion-- discussions which they hoped would terminate in action proposals designed to protect and strengthen the countryside they were studying.

Folks in the roundtable discussions were trying to make decisions. They had to weigh what they knew and were learning about the countryside and build possible future models. What about that decision making process? How will people in their governments carry out that process? Dr. George Donahue, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota in a talk titled, "Futuer Organization for Rural America," addressed that question.

GEORGE DONAHUE: And what I'm saying is that in rural areas in the years ahead, this whole question of public decision making will go from what we might consider local grassroots operations to regional operations.

Now I'm not objecting to regionalism. I'm simply saying that regionalism is in place, it's a fact in modern life? I would like to regard it as an experimental form of social organization, not as a form of social organization cast in stone.

And that it should undergo many modifications, and that it shouldn't be a control mechanism as an end in itself, but should be a control mechanism with certain ends towards which it is moving certain goals for the system as a whole.

And here is where the crux of the issue is for rural life. The criteria for decision making are often very vague. As a matter of fact, when we set into place regionalization and other forms of DNR and EQC and other types of regulatory agencies, we did not really specify clearly what the goals of these organizations would be and we did not specify at all often what the criteria of decision making would be.

For instance, what risk levels should be assumed? What information do we have on these risk levels? We've entered a model where we have said that in the past, it was the local individual versus the community.

If you considered the good to the community or the general welfare versus the good or the damage to any individual, there was no contest. It always came out in terms of what? The general welfare at that time.

Now we've gone from community units or group units in a pluralistic society versus other group units. And what we've done in Silver Bay and what we're doing in Stearns County and what we're doing all over is assuming that a model pits the good or the benefit to any particular group against the combined benefit or detriment to all other groups in the social system.

Now, in that particular model of decision making, there is a no win proposition for the local group. What I'm saying is that the model is weighted at the present time, not only in terms of criteria which are not available to the local community.

But the model is such that it's virtually impossible for any local community or any individual group in the system to prevail over other groups, unless it happens to be on a social power basis that, that group exercises considerable power beyond the local area and can influence the decision making of professionals through legislation which will then control the professionals in the system.

What I'm saying is we have a considerable amount of work to do, and the rural areas may be the best experimental area for working with systems of social control, so that we somehow maintain a degree of option for both the individual and the community that does not seem to be as apparent in the modern means of social control as the values of our system would like it to be.

I'm saying that in large part, the rural areas will have provided models in the past they may provide because of the ability to work with smaller units in those areas, solutions to problems of social control, which are very perplexing in our more metropolitan areas.

How does an individual and how does a group develop social technology for dealing with complexity? Does complexity necessarily mean more centralized control with fewer options? Or can we develop social models which will give us centralization and the benefits of it with considerable freedom and exercise of additional options? Thank you for your attention.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: University of Minnesota Sociology professor Dr. George Donahue.

DENNIS HAMILTON: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference located in Des Moines, Iowa, has been studying and speculating about rural America for some time. That conference has isolated several issues which they feel needs study and action. Those suggestions were shared in Crookston by the Director of the Rural Life Conference Father John McRaith.

JOHN MCRAITH: I'm not saying that we don't need profit and God knows we do-- a reasonable profit, but that should not be our overriding concern when we talk about the necessities of life. So in light of that, let me just make a few quick suggestions.

Number 1, we need a massive educational program. Telling people not on the basis of what we think might happen, but information from the standpoint of saying, what do you think would be the best?

And here are the alternatives. If you want land in the hands of a few people with a lot of absentee ownership, then this is what is likely to happen. Now, if you don't like that, this is the other alternative. And these are the values that are there, that kind of education.

Secondly, let's find out exactly who owns the land, the minerals, the right water rights. There's a whole research department of the United States agricultural department. And I heard a man talk from there this last week in Morgantown, West Virginia. And he stood up in front of a group of people. And he said, we don't know who owns the land in this country.

Well, now that's a sad state of affairs. I've seen booklets come out from the USDA that can tell you where every pond is in the United States. So don't tell me we don't know that we can know. We don't want to know. I've always been amazed. There's a great law in the state of Minnesota. And incidentally, Minnesota leads the nation as usual and everything, leads the nation in this whole area.

You have two pieces of legislation that have been landmark legislation. It needs to be beefed up in my estimation, but certainly a marvelous start. One is the family farm act that you have that limits outside corporations and so on. And the other is the new legislation that should give some aid to young people getting started in agriculture.

But it's not impossible for us to know. So to find out, we need to know. I want to know because it's going to determine whether or not we're going to have the land in the hands of a few people or not. We keep hearing from the Secretary of Agriculture now that we have nothing to worry about. Well, then let me find out.

I don't want to just know that Dr. Butts says, I have nothing to worry about. I want to know whether I got anything to worry about. Because if the land is in the hands of a few people, I want to know that because that's going to determine then what kind of legislation that I would suggest that we have.

Number 3, a national law that would absolutely prevent certain classes of agricultural land from being developed. We're in a world with four billion people today on its way to 7 billion by the turn of the century or by the year 2014, give or take. I got to be a little bit careful of statistics. It was once said that if all statisticians were laid end to end, it would be a very good thing.

And so you have to be-- so I don't want to be hung for this statistic. But generally, the ballpark figures that we have a population of four billion going to 6 to 8 billion people. Well, now land that can produce food and fiber. And people say oh, they'll think of something.

Well, something will be developed. A bird in the hand is still worth two in the bush. And to be sure that land that will produce food and fiber is going to become far and far or more and more precious as time goes on.

Number 4, we need a National Family farm Act, something like you have in the state of Minnesota. Five, we need a graduated land tax because if it's true that it's bad to have corporations involved in agriculture, then as far as I'm concerned, it's just as bad if you have a family corporation that buys up a county.

I can't see any great difference. And we have individuals who have far more land than they need or even that's efficient for them to have. And would have the opportunity for many others if the free enterprise system is good. And I think it has many things to recommend it, then I think it would be good if we had as many people involved in the free enterprise system owning as possibly can.

A graduated land tax would simply say that after a certain amount of land, that the taxes would go up to the point where it would diminish your value in keeping it. We need a tough anti-strip mining bill in this country.

The stories that you hear as you go through Appalachia from the people are things that would anger you so much to know the powerlessness of people in the hands of those kinds of corporate structures.

We need an unearned increment tax. We've got to begin to do something about the speculators, particularly in the area of land. Now, I have a good friend who's in Guatemala, and I remember him saying that land in Guatemala was terribly important to the powerlessness of the people. And he was trying to purchase land so the people could have gardens so they wouldn't be absolutely beholden to the large landowners.

And he was saying that land sold for 4 and $5,000 an acre, this is 12 years ago. And I thought he was crazy. But we're almost there. What does that tell me as far as society is concerned? It tells me, number one, that the little folks won't own any land. Not even enough to build a house on, much less to grow anything or to have any say in it.

But even more importantly, it tells me that the price of food and other necessities of life will continue to go up. A farmer who has to go out and pay $4,000 an acre for land is going to have to have more money for that which he produces.

But if we could get an unearned increment tax, it would eliminate-- and a graduated land tax, it would eliminate some of the pressures that are pushing the land up, I think. Much land is being forced up because farmer is bidding against farmer.

And it's not the young farmer that can afford it. It's that one that's already established. If there was some limitation as the amount of land that someone could own, that land would then, I assume, become available to others.

I would hope that these things, these are not necessarily answers, but I think they're factors that should be built into any discussion. And that if indeed we're going to have decisions made by the people, then they must come from people like yourselves, and they must be based on information coming from many different areas, sifting through, talking about it, finding that which is most just for all of the people and not just for special self-interest groups.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Several suggestions for rural America offered by Father John McRaith, Director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. He was speaking to a conference on rural America held in mid-July in Crookston, Minnesota.

JOHN MCRAITH: Some people like to think the image of the future is the man going to the moon, Apollo. I think the real image, seriously and soberly today, is one that's used by-- I think it was [INAUDIBLE], who says the world is out of control.

And the best image, perhaps, that we can use is that of a super oil tanker. Who's in control of a super oil tanker, whether it's in the St Lawrence River or along the Coast of California. It's just a technical monstrosity looking for some place to have a disaster.

SPEAKER: Economist and director of the Center of Concern in Washington, DC, Reverend William Ryan. The concern he expressed to conference participants in his talk titled, "Toward a New International and Political Order," was that people realize we cannot view ourselves as isolated entities. The groups we form are part of a larger whole, and we are all cogs in the world machine.

WILLIAM RYAN: As we come down to the real fight that's going on in the world today, it comes under the ticket of a struggle for a new economic and political order. What the poor countries and those not so poor are asking for is they want a part of the pie.

Not only a part of the pie. More important, and that's where we get mixed up at times, they want to be in on the decision making, just as the trade unions did in this country. And just as business wants to be in on it, they don't want somebody to decide for them what their life's about.

And I guess the struggle in the 1980s is going to be is whether we're going to organize, continue to organize the world in what we call the economic growth model, or whether somehow or other, the first priority in whatever model we organize-- and there can be many, is on basic human needs.

We all know that some part of us that that's what the economy should do. But in point of fact, we know very well and we have all the most glaring evidence that the way the world is organized right now, it isn't geared to basic economic, basic human rights, basic human needs.

So that's going to be the education process, to see whether we can be creative enough to switch that. One of the sad things for many Americans as they travel around the world today is to see that the United States is not looked on as the model anymore.

As people travel today, there are two countries that are tantalizing them. I use the word. They're not total approval. China and Cuba. Why? Because these people are feeding their poor and they're giving work that are unemployed and they're doing it with very little income.

We can ask lots of questions, but the point is that. So one of the things that makes us think about our country, how we run it economically, how we plan. It's an awful indictment on our world that with 5% of the arms budget of the whole world, we could satisfy the basic human needs of all the people in the world, with 5%.

See, it's that type of insanity that we've got to come to grips with. In fact, the emperor has no clothes on, and we've got to begin to go through the conversion to say so. Coming back again, I want to insist that think about that might help you to think about the world as a supertanker looking for a place to have a disaster.

Because you see, it isn't that we lack the skills, not even the resources they can go on. What we do lack is just the will to do something different. It just goes on. People don't question the priorities. So these monsters are allowed to be built and have disasters.

And we know that's the same question being asked about the nuclear development now is being asked on so many fronts. We all know it's stupid, but somehow we can't have the courage to make the next jump and say, we're going to change our priorities. For that, we need this type of discussion.

What's at stake is a whole new way of seeing things. It's really sort of giving up your roots to a degree, not disowning them. Not in any way blaming the past. That gets you nowhere. Guilt is no way to be creative, but to realize that for whatever grace it is, we are at this turning point in history in which we can either turn in and hate the world and say we're right and they're wrong, or else we can begin to say, gee, there must be a different way of doing things.

And begin to be creative. It's a conversion. It's a conversion on two fronts. It's a way, conversion that's intellectual and emotional. It's a conversion that can also be religious, in which we really say we want to be free. Free enough of the way we're living that we could do it something different if we had to.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Father William Ryan, economist and director of the Center for Concern in Washington, DC. Another interesting participant at the conference was Earl Joseph, a staff scientist for Sperry UNIVAC in Saint Paul.

He built Buck Rogers style scenarios for the future saying that technology will shrink our world. And he warned, we'd better be prepared for dramatic changes in lifestyle as technology reorients our priorities. Joseph also countered the idea put forth by most humanists that it's this country's duty to feed the world.

EARL JOSEPH: Now I ask you, is the problem of the world to produce the food? No, it's not to produce the food. We have all the technology, all of the resources. In fact, in India, if they would use some of the management know how that we have here in some of the farming technology, their yields of crops would be far higher than ours for much of India because they have better weather conditions and they can grow not one or two crops a year, they can grow a lot more crops than we can on the average.

And so the problem is not to grow that food and the problem is not this distribution. The problem is the social political things, which again comes right down to the value system, the value systems. But the rest of the world is recognizing that, it's beginning to recognize. You can hardly pick up any literature on the research in that area without its recognition.

Once the world fully recognizes that, and that's not too far away, can you imagine the impact on rural America when rural America equates itself with farming and when the rest of the world finds out that it doesn't need rural America?

DENNIS HAMILTON: Quite a dilemma posed by Earl Joseph, staff scientist and resident futurist for Sperry UNIVAC in Saint Paul.

SPEAKER: You've heard up to this point several of the ideas and themes raised at the Crookston Rural America Conference. What were those notions saying to participants? And what ideas would they be taking home to share with others? We talked with them toward the end of the conference to find out their impressions.

JOHN SCHONBERGER: John Schonberger of Saint Paul. The reason I'm here is I have been doing a study for the last five years, and a systematic approach to the anatomy of the structure and function of everyday life as it's lived.

This has been a system which has been tried and tested since 1950. I'm interested in seeing the viewpoints of the people here and in the cross-fertilization of ideas. Although I don't agree with all the speakers, I think there's been a broad overall spectrum of ideas and knowledge and quite a bit of good communication with the participants.

BOB HILLENBRAND: I'm Bob Hillenbrand. I'm a pastor from Deep River, Iowa. I came up here as a representative for the Presbytery of Des Moines. I think I'm a little bit more aware of some of the resistance a lot of us have about change, especially the need to change some of our values. And I think some of us find it threatening to put people before property.

SPEAKER: I'm Ann Olson, a housewife from Crookston. I have enjoyed this tremendously. I have a rural background. I was born on a farm in Northern Minnesota near the Canadian border, and I decided that I would take this course for credit.

And someone was asking me, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to teach? And I said, if I'm still alive at the end, by the time I get my degree, yes, I'll go into teaching. However, I suppose in my day to day contact with people, I will be doing a great deal of teaching as just from day to day.

And I was a little surprised to begin with that there were so few people from Crookston. The first day, I was here, I felt a little bit like a stranger. However, that is not the case today. There are many more from Crookston here, and I was pleased to see that.

And one thing that impresses me so much is that we have people here not only from Northern Minnesota, we have them from Minnesota, we have Minneapolis, from Rochester, from Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota, and even from Pennsylvania.

RICH FRANK: I'm Rich Frank. I'm the Associate Director of the Institute for Ecological Studies at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. I enjoyed most the talk by Robert Theobald.

I think he is a man who sees the whole problem, who sees all of it. He doesn't suffer from tunnel vision, as some people do. Particularly what I learned is that there is a return movement to the land, but I think that has to be looked upon carefully because that doesn't make good for farmers leaving the farm.

After all, these people come with different ideas and different aims. They are not going to be farmers, and that doesn't make good for the fact that we have fewer and fewer farmers, and that the farms get too big. I still think that is a very bad feature.

MARY JEAN LAMB: I'm Mary Jean Lamb. And I'm here from Grand Forks as a consumer. I'm interested in rural health. I plan to use some of the material that I've used in my work in the community in Grand Forks when I go back.

STEPHEN SALTZMAN: Stephen Saltzman. I'm from Bemidji. I'm a retired Air Force officer. I am a writer. I came here to learn something about the kind of country I live in-- the rural part of the country. I haven't read any of the literature on rural America to speak of, except in a very general way. I came only two years ago to live in a part of the country that's the way I would describe as rural, and I want to learn something about living in it.

ROBERT MORGAN: Robert Morgan from Bemidji. And I'm living on a little farm up in that area-- 40 acres. And I have a little garden, and I'm up here because I'm interested in the Rural America Conference. Rural America, in general, because my dad was a dairy farmer, and I have a feeling for the land and the farms.

I'll bring back a lot of things that I think I can share with the local residents, especially in the township where I am living. The Township there, East of Bemidji, is concerned about the fact that a lot of people are moving out into the country there, and that this is creating problems that they didn't foresee and are going to cost the local people and everybody concerned a good deal.

And so some of the things I've learned here, we might be able to apply. There are some laws, there's some types of funding, and there's different resource people we can go to try to help iron out these situations or approach them in some way to make things more livable up there.

It's really hard to say what I've enjoyed most about the conference or the whole thing here. Just the idea of getting together with people that have concerns about rural America, whether it be the same concerns or different concerns because of the interdependence of all these things.

You tie things in together. So what these other people care about really, you do care about in the long run, and they're the type of people that you want to work with. And so the sharing of ideas has been really a good feeling for me.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Some of the more than 600 registered participants attending a conference on rural America held July 15th through the 17th in Crookston, Minnesota.

SPEAKER: Finally, now that you've heard many of the participants and ideas expressed at the conference, we thought you might like to hear some of their conclusions. The roundtable discussions were aimed at determining action proposals, a tough job with an almost endless supply of input to consider.

Bob Whalen was the director of those discussions, charged with collating the data and synthesizing the discussion into a usable package. We asked him about the theory behind the discussion groups and some of the conclusions they drew.

BOB WHALEN: One, to allow people an opportunity in small groups as opposed to large groups, to discuss information, to assimilate information presented by key persons at the conference, and then to possibly find alternatives for action, either on a legislative level or special interest group level, or even something that you and I can do when we go back home.

SPEAKER: Now, I know there was a lot of brainstorming in those sessions that lasted almost three days. Exactly what were the action proposals that the participants came up with?

BOB WHALEN: We found some recurring themes, partly based on the information that was presented. But also partly based on the fact that some of these people found similarities in terms of the problems.

And so separate groups were coming up with common kinds of problems. And I think they might fall into the area 1, very, very strong area of land use. What are appropriate uses of the land, both in terms of how much land is available for agricultural use, as well as what are some more specific kinds of uses of that land within the agricultural realm itself?

I think there were some recurring themes in regard to contact with the political system. Many people were saying that laws are legislated by legislators, and we don't always have contact with them, and we must find some way to maintain contact with those people so that we the people speak through the laws, not someone who makes decisions for us.

SPEAKER: Bob, did they have any specific suggestions as to how we should approach that problem?

BOB WHALEN: Well, there were some specific things. Yes. People were suggesting task force groups. They were suggesting leadership seminars. They were suggesting people getting together on a county or a multi-county level to dig into this information further. They were suggesting that legislators have more personal contact with their constituents.

There were some other areas of agreement in terms of problems. People were saying there's a tremendous need for education. Some of the speakers were saying that our education systems have not really kept up with the change in our society. And some of the speakers were even saying education is different from schooling.

And so the kinds of education that might be suggested for the future may not necessitate a continuation of the same kind of education model that we've had. And people were feeling this. I think they're feeling the pace of change and they're feeling that there are parts of the system that aren't keeping up. But we don't know for sure what to do.

We don't know what specific things to suggest that will make up for the lag. There was a tremendous amount of emphasis placed on the rural lifestyle as opposed to an urban style. I think people like what they experience and the way they live in rural America in this part of the upper Midwest.

They're not always capable of saying this is exactly or specifically what characterizes my rural lifestyle, but somehow I've got a gut level feeling for what it is. And I don't want to lose it. There have been a number of issues come up in the presentations, as well as the discussions centering around the influx of urban people into the rural areas, as well as the urban value characteristics.

It's the way we were kids that's the value system that people want to try to continue in, in rural America. They're saying that kids got to have a car now. But there are very few kids who know how to tear down a bicycle and put it back together again.

And it's that kind of value system that relates to leisure time, that relates to work activity, that relates to innovativeness, that relates to how I relate to my peers, what I do with my time. All of those kinds of things fall into the realm of the rural lifestyle.

There were some things-- a number of things that related back to the environment, and people are becoming much more environmentally aware in terms of pollution, in terms of well, land use falls into the whole area of the environment and pollution also.

A number of comments came up in regard to pollution from feedlots. There were some comments about smog and how pretty the sunsets are, for example, is Earl Joseph said in the city, because of the distortion of the sunlight or moonlight through the smog.

Other people were saying, no, it's just the opposite. They're clear, beautiful sunsets out in the prairies. And there are those kinds of humorous comments that really have tremendous amount of meaning and significance to people in terms of the environment.

They're saying we have to be more conscious of the fact that maybe our environment is not so much a commodity to be used and traded off and bartered, but really should be looked at more as, as father McRaith was saying, a gift. And as such, a gift is something for us to share, not something for me to sell to you so I can make a profit.

But because of the diversity of people attending the conference, as well as the diversity of opinion of people in those roundtable discussions, it's kind of difficult to come up with a consensus statement about problems and solutions.

SPEAKER: On the other hand, we have a five-page report in front of both of us here on what took place in those roundtable discussions, which is a lot of material and a lot of concerned thought obviously went into those. What kind of follow-up do you see for this, if any?

BOB WHALEN: I would like to see as many copies of this made as possible, so that people can look at it and say, this fits me or this doesn't fit me. I know what some of those people are thinking because I can see it here and I agree with it. There's something in here for me to do. I would like to see individual action as well as a system change.

SPEAKER: Can they get the copies free?

BOB WHALEN: The copies of this material are free as far as I'm concerned. If somebody writes to the conference in rural America and wants the information, we'll make sure that they get it. The address where they can get information is just the conference on rural America.

And the best place to send it would be box 94, Crookston, Minnesota. And that the zip code for that is 56716. As part of the materials available for the participants, there was a blank so that people could request a summary proceedings of the whole conference. And there was going to be a $5 fee for a copy of that material.

SPEAKER: Can they get that at the same address?

BOB WHALEN: At the same address? Yes. There's also a telephone number in case people want to call and get it in. The area code is 218 and the number is 2813663. And somebody should be available to answer the phone and can give them information there also.

SPEAKER: Thank you. Bob Whalen, Director of the Roundtable Discussions that have been a large part of this Conference on Rural America.

DENNIS HAMILTON: You've been listening to a synopsis of a Conference on Rural America. The conference was the culmination of a year long series of mini conferences dealing with the issues facing rural Americans.

As the future moves toward us, we engage in the inevitable change battles. We become more aware of the need to listen, discuss, and act in ways that will help us discover and build a future compatible with our needs and desires.

Fears of the future can be lessened through conferences such as the one held recently in Crookston. And it's with those types of discussions that we can better anticipate and protect tomorrow.

SPEAKER: Mention should be made of the two people who planted the seed for the conference and nurtured it until it bloomed in July. They were co-chairpersons Audrey [? Eikoff ?] and Jackie Burgin.

DENNIS HAMILTON: Funding for The conference came in part from the Minnesota Rural Development Council, the Minnesota Humanities Commission, Bremer Foundation, the Minnesota, and Crookston Bicentennial Commissions, and several others. Funding for this program was provided in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. For Stephanie Johnson, this is Dennis Hamilton.