Dear Dartmouth,

In the American canon, agriculture, fertility, and harvest loom large. Critics have long lauded The Grapes of Wrath, a story deeply entrenched in the sacrifices Americans made for one good harvest, since its publication. The film Minari’s recent release embodied this nation’s great intrigue with cultivation and with bucolic farm life—transcending racial, socioeconomic, and historical boundaries. The nation’s Thanksgiving is rooted in motifs of harvest and cooperation. And why shouldn’t these life-sustaining events and values be overlooked? Since the Jeffersonian dreams for an agrarian republic—never mind the erasure of Native cultures’ harmonious and loving relationship with this stolen, now-American land—the United States has attempted to tell a story of immense fertility, dominance of the land, and a certain reverence to immense bounties and mechanical efficiency. The imagery of American agriculture is rosy—intricate corn mazes, pristine apple orchards, crisp summer mornings and electric autumn nights. But the reality, in countless venues and seasons, is anything but this orange-tinted mosaic of cornucopias and rolling green hills. The agrarian landscape of America is more industrialized than ever before, relies on the hard, underpaid labor of undocumented immigrants, pollutes the surrounding environments to abysmal degrees, and rapidly falls into the quelling hands of Big Ag such as Monsanto and Cargill. Mid-sized farms have all but vanished across the central United States. Corporate forces and harsh economic realities annihilated vast sectors of the agricultural environment in this nation and, in doing so, have sent the farms and pastures of this storied history into oneness and a crippling drive for profit over everything, community included. 

 Stunningly, the county economy has roared forward in the past decade. From a minimum GDP of $5.6 billion in 2009 and an unemployment rate of 14%, GDP now measures at $8 billion and an unemployment rate of only 5.6% in June 2020, snapping into near full-employment just months into the COVID-19 crisis. It is a staggering recovery and profoundly unlike what most of rural America has witnessed. Programs compelling Chicago residents to move to the county in exchange for a $15,000 incentive are astonishingly successful—a 2020 program closed in just two weeks as it had already reached its target. And the region’s new identity as an agritourism hotbed is one of the primary drivers in this revitalization. The county boasts more than 40 craft breweries and wineries—all small-scale, locally-owned institutions supported by the county’s ambitious Maker’s Trail promotion and successful integration into the tourism bureau’s platform. The county also possesses numerous emergent organic farms and community-supported agriculture programs—subscription packages that allow local residents to receive a box of fresh, typically organic produce each week during harvest months, and for reasonable prices, too. This in itself contributed toward Berrien County being the city of Chicago’s most visited destination over the 4th of July in 2020. With the altered landscape of post-COVID-19, Berrien County’s rural traits have become marketable positives, as rural living is suddenly idealized, and thousands of once-Chicagoans have moved to the county in just one year.  

Related Articles