Why an agricultural boom does not help rural America

FOR A PICTURE of the evolution of modern agriculture, you could do worse than visit the barn on Philip Volk’s farm, near the city of Rugby in North Dakota. Inside the ageing building is hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of equipment. A huge red combine harvester sits next to the green “air seeder”, which looks a little like a bread slicer, and a tractor larger than a tank. Pulled by the tractor, which follows a GPS-guided map automatically, the air seeder cuts through the soil and, in just a week or so, sows the entire crop, which on Mr Volk’s farm is mostly spring wheat. Five to six months later, the combine harvester picks it all up almost as quickly, and then trucks take it down the road to a grain elevator, where it is graded and loaded onto trains that carry it out to the west coast, mostly to be shipped to Japan.