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Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto
Broken Heartland The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto Author:Osha Gray Davidson Between 1940 and the mid 1980s, farm production expenses in America's Heartland tripled, capital purchases quadrupled, interest payments jumped tenfold, profits fell 10 percent, the number of farmers decreased by two-thirds, and nearly every farming community lost population, businesses, and economic stability. Growth for these desperate com... more »munities has come to mean low-paying part-time jobs, expensive tax concessions, waste dumps, and industrial hog farming, all of which come with environmental and psychological price tags.
In Broken Heartland, Osha Gray Davidson chronicles the decline of the Heartland and its transformation into a bitterly divided and isolated regional ghetto. Through interviews with more than two hundred farmers, social workers, government officials, and scholars, he puts a human face on the farm crisis of the 1980s.« less