First, read this from the Nation, on rural strategies. It's important, and I wish I'd written it myself.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20031103&s=nichols2
I live on a small family farm in Illinois. It's been in our family since the 19th century, so I have some very real ties that bind me and mine to this land. I don't want to leave and go back to the city, where I spent much of my adult life. It's a far better place to raise my son, for one thing.
But the farm barely pays for itself. In a bad year the farm doesn't even pay for it's own property taxes. In a good year there is enough money left over to provide one person less than a minimum wage income. I take care of my son and my elderly mother on that land. So I write, and I do other things, and we get by. I make about 70% less per year income than I did when I was a corporate suit in the city. And that big farm subsidy bill? Well, the most this farm has ever gotten in a year from the government is $300. Whoo-hoo, we can really party now.
I'm hardly alone. The other farms around us have either sold off to agribusiness, turned their family farms into noxious factory hog farms, or work one or two other jobs to get by. There are more people by far (including my father and a dozen or so other ancestors) in the local cemetery than there are in the town. Oh, and one more thing: my neighbors are heavily Republican.
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