Election showed we're more divided than ever. Fix can be found in farm fields. | Opinion

Looking back now, I can recognize it as our country’s deepest divisions brewing — there in the hills of southern Wisconsin, as my dad drove his pickup past the farms disappearing around us.

Some independent family farms like ours were going under, or simply falling idle, their once proud barns fading with nobody to keep them up. Others were selling to bigger operations. Some were bought by hobbyists from Chicago escaping urban life to bird-watch as much as grow food.

These were the “hippie farms,” which when I was a kid looked more like an art fair than a farm to a third-generation farmer like my dad. “I don’t know what they’re doin’ over there,” he’d say.

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It was mainly a good-natured gap between those with rural roots and urban sensibilities then, but it predated a more bitter divide between rural and urban voters we see today. That divide is deeper than ever as we head toward Thanksgiving this year, and such a fundamental barrier to our country’s progress that reversing it could solve some of our biggest problems — like the cost, health, and security of our food — and failing could send us into an even deeper spiral.

2024 election results showed largest rural and urban divide yet

The 2024 election results showed the sharpest divide yet between rural and urban. Support for President-elect Donald Trump was higher in rural areas than ever, and support for Vice President Kamala Harris was more concentrated in urban and suburban areas than ever. Whatever your politics, it’s a divide that’s keeping us from solving some of our biggest problems because — like race — it’s a disagreement not based on ideas but based on who we are as people. Those kinds of divides keep us from understanding each other.

Our country’s food crisis is a good example.

The cost of food has risen far faster than the rate of inflation, economists of all stripes I’ve spoken to say, in part because our supply chain is so highly integrated that it’s easily disrupted when large facilities are knocked out of commission (be it by COVID-19, catastrophic weather, or other disasters). Meantime, more than 70 percent of Americans want healthier food.

The answer is to connect more farms with more consumers. Rather than wiping out our farms — 70 percent of them in the past century — we could be letting them pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities with crops that can provide healthy options to consumers through local and specialty food markets. Instead, so many of our country’s family farms are stuck raising commodity crops (such as standard field corn) because they don’t have anywhere to sell new products. And consumers are left buying food that’s no longer affordable, from a system pumping out overly processed products.

Enter getting the farmers and the hippies together. More farms experimenting with different crops (say vegetables they can sell locally, or rare herbs that fuel specialty food markets) is part of the equation. The other is more consumers demanding local options — that hippie mindset entering the broader public. This would not only mean patronizing more farmers markets and other farm-to-consumer options, but spurring a whole new infrastructure of food buyers, processors, distributors, and retailers focused on connecting more small farms with more health-conscious consumers to fuel local and niche food markets.

What all this requires is for us to set aside our differences. Farmers will have to understand an unfamiliar customer base, and some of our most health-conscious consumers have to stop attacking farms, recognizing most are small family businesses with precious little cash as they make costly transitions. And we’ll need policy changes to unleash new innovation in agriculture and ensure fair competition domestically and internationally.

Bridging rural-urban divide could help solve host of issues

This is just one of many problems we can solve by bridging the rural-urban divide. We need economic growth that drives higher wages for rural and urban areas alike. Both rural and urban areas face drug and mental health crises that could change with collaboration.

The list goes on, and coming together works.

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Over time, more farms have begun fueling a more robust local food movement in many parts of America — from those we once called “hippie” farms getting serious about their business, to traditional farms transitioning to a new model. And as farms continued to disappear, our family began to appreciate driving past anyone in the neighboring countryside who wanted to grow something out of the ground.

Maybe if we focus on the bigger challenges we’re facing — the security of our food supply is a good place to start — we can close our broader rural-urban divide. There’s plenty riding on it.

Brian Reisinger is a writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County. He contributes columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Journal Sentinel, and is the author of “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.” Reisinger works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He splits his time between northern California near his wife’s family, and his family’s farm here in Wisconsin. You can find him on X at @BrianJReisinger

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Healing massive rural-urban split would help mend America | Opinion