By DOUG SCHMITZ
Iowa Correspondent AMES, Iowa — A 10-year study conducted by Iowa State University rural sociologists found that Iowa’s small towns that have large-scale farms located nearby may have both economical and social benefits for these respective rural communities.
“Our findings suggest there is a modest favorable effect of large-scale agriculture on quality of life in the 99 Iowa communities we studied,” said Steve Sapp, ISU professor of sociology. “It’s not especially surprising, given the close relationship between Iowa’s rural communities and agriculture.”
Sapp conducted the study, released last month, with Daniel Sundblad, a former ISU doctoral student who’s now an assistant professor of sociology at Berry College in Mount Berry, Ga.
Funded by the USDA’s National Research Initiative, the study’s goal was to seek a better understanding of key factors regarding the effects of large-scale agriculture on the quality of life in the small, rural Iowa communities.
“Dr. Sundblad and I assumed correctly that because agriculture is so highly integrated within the economy and culture of Iowa that we would be more likely to observe favorable effects here,” he added. “Overall, these favorable effects were modest ones.”
Researchers selected one small town from each of Iowa’s 99 counties based on the following factors: if it was below 10,000 residents; was not adjacent to a large city; and relied mainly on agriculture for jobs and income.
Surveys were conducted of 150 randomly-selected households located in or near each community in each of the 99 counties, which resulted in final samples of about 10,000 in the survey years, 1994 and 2004.
“We provided room on the back of the questionnaire for comments, and as you might expect, many persons offered personal insights into their towns,” Sapp said. “As sociologists, we appreciate it when people offer personal comments because these help us better understand the quantitative findings.”
Titled Pork Production and the Quality of Neighboring in Rural Iowa: A Report to the Iowa Pork Producers Assoc., the study included such variables as trustworthiness, fairness, caring, citizenship, environmental trends, stewardship and expertise involving co-existing relationships between small town residents and large-scale pork producers.
“We wanted to know if the social fabric of our small towns and their rural areas – the bonds that hold people to one another – might be at risk resulting from ongoing controversies about the operation of large hog facilities,” the researchers said.
Sapp said rural sociologists from across the country have been studying these relationships between agricultural scale and community quality of life for several decades.
“The generally favorable association of larger agricultural scale and community quality of life has tended to occur mainly in the Midwest, and that was true with our studies,” he said. “Similar studies in other regions of the country have tended to associate larger agricultural scale with decreased measures of quality of life.”
Quality of life was defined from residents’ impressions of government services (i.e., police and fire protection, street and park maintenance and garbage collection) and community services (i.e., medical care, schools, shopping, recreation and entertainment options, child care, senior citizen programs and youth programs).
The study also included participation in local clubs and organizations and ratings of neighborliness. Quality of life also included socioeconomic data within each county, such as income, percentage of population living in poverty, crime rates, infant mortality rates, unemployment rates and gaps between rich and poor.
Utilizing county-level data and local surveys, researchers looked at changes occurring in the 99 small towns between 1994 and 2004.
”In that 10-year period, for the most part, incomes rose, poverty rates declined, crime rates declined, infant mortality declined, unemployment declined and gaps between rich and poor closed in association with increases in the scale of agriculture in their county,” Sapp said.
Although not all changes were consistent within a time period or across time, Sapp said the county-level data and local surveys, overall, supported the view that large-scale agriculture and hog production, in particular, have a modest but favorable effect on quality of life in Iowa’s rural towns.
The study also found that residents tended to rate their government services and community services higher with increases in the scale of agriculture in their county, Sapp added.
Scale of agriculture was defined as a composite of the average number of hogs per hog farm; the average number of cattle per cattle farm; total agricultural sales per farm; percent of sales in the county from large farms; total value of farmland in the county; and the percent of land in crops in the county.
But most of the changes were also evident when looking specifically at commercial hog operations: the greater the scale of hog production in the county, the higher quality of life ratings from the community, the researchers concluded.
The researchers used advanced statistical procedures to evaluate the effects of scale on a community’s quality of life while controlling for other key factors, such as a respondent’s age, sex, formal education and household income, along with measures of community racial diversity, retail activity and proximity to an urban area.
Sapp said he hopes to obtain funding to repeat the study in 2014 and continue to learn more about trends in the relationship between agriculture and rural communities’ quality of life.
To view the full report, e-mail your request for a copy to Steve Sapps at ssapp@iastate.edu |
