It’s a snowy day in rural Japan. Inside the classroom, many kids are still wearing their coats and hats against the chill. They sit with rapt attention, gazing forward with books open before them.

Not one twitches. There are no wiggles or coughs. No one turns a page. The only moving person is a retirement-aged woman sitting in the centre of the room.

That’s because, except for Tsukimi Ayano, everyone there is a doll-like scarecrow.

“In this classroom, I recreated a parent visiting day, like how it used to be when there were people and action.” Tsukimi says to the camera.

Her words are translated into English at the bottom of the video, later published by the South China Morning Post in 2019. The school closed in 2012, the video says.

At the time of filming, there were more scarecrows than people in the mountain village. The youngest of the 27 remaining residents was 55 years old. There were 270 scarecrows. Tsukimi made the figures to repopulate the town and to draw tourists to the area.

Japan’s population is shrinking. Immigration is minimal and the birth rate is catastrophically low — so low that some worry the number of women of child-bearing age will dip to the point that the decline will be irreversible, CNN said in a March 2023 article. But it’s the rural areas bearing the brunt as young people leave for education or work, the Economist wrote in 2019. At the time, half of the country’s municipalities were projected to disappear by 2040.

While there are fewer local scarecrows, a drive down the rural roads of Manitoba will unearth plenty of lonely signs and cairns where communities once stood, complete with stores and schools. Today, a gathering of houses might be all that is left.

Why it matters: The past four articles in this series (find links at top) have explored the how and why of depopulation in rural Manitoba. But rural decline is a reality in much of the world. Can it really be rolled back?

Manitoba’s concern with the drain of rural young people towards cities stretches back for decades, beginning in earnest after the Second World War, with accelerated farm mechanization, changing agriculture needs and changing lifestyles of residents. Farms rapidly evolved from small family operations to highly mechanized, sophisticated, export-oriented businesses. Those who didn’t get big, got out. Improvements to rural infrastructure, which expanded road systems and strung electrical and telephone lines into far-flung farming communities, made rural life easier and more convenient, but it also made it easier to move away.

By the late ’60s, the provincial government had noted the rural exodus, and became concerned about its economic impacts. The Scheyer government introduced the Stay Option policy, which pumped investment into agriculture and rural communities, in an effort to entice youth to stay.

A quick look at census data reveals little measurable benefit from the policy, which was quickly followed by the drought and economic crisis of the 1980s. The financial realities made farming a hard sell for kids coming out of high school.

In the modern day, despite programs trying to stem the tide, census data show that Manitoba had less than half the farms in 2021 as it did in 1976. Rural population between 2016 and 2021 shrunk by 1.7 per cent, although the drain of young people between the ages of 20-24 to cities has slowed in recent decades. Including a drop during the pandemic, the rate of people 25-29 moving the other way from the city to the countryside, has actually been on the rise since 2011.

Rural decline: a policy choice?

A 2019 paper in the Journal of Rural Studies opens with the line: “Rural decline is an inevitable process as human society transforms from the agrarian to the urban-industrial economy, and further on to the knowledge economy.”

That seems to match with the many sea changes, and their impacts, noted in Manitoba’s agricultural sector in the years following World War Two.

However, researcher Sean Markey suggests that policy choice, or lack thereof, can also be blamed for rural depopulation. Governments didn’t have to adopt a shrug-off attitude of “mechanization, oh well … that’s the way of the future,” he said.

Markey, a professor with the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University, argued that governments could have supported small farmers and diversified rural economies through things like investment in value-added production. They also could also have done more in terms of coherent rural development policy and infrastructure investment.

In the post-war period, governments were “very interventionist” in supporting rural growth, Markey said. This included the previously mentioned road and hydro improvements, along with community-building work.

“From a rural industrial perspective … they wanted stable communities that would then support a stable industrial workforce in these rural regions,” Markey said, adding that this trend began to reverse in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Austerity and the end of the Stay Option

Succeeding Schreyer and his Stay Option’ policy, Sterling Lyon was elected Manitoba’s premier in 1977. He roundly criticized the former government’s spending habits and, in the face of a struggling economy, went on a run of austerity measures. A May 1978 article in the Winnipeg Tribune described the administration as “in the running for toughest government in Canada.”

Social perspectives were also changing. Neoliberalism, defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as an “ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition … often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth,” was on the rise, spurred by perceived failures of the more interventionist approaches popular in the post-war period. On the global stage, national leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were coming into power.

As this became the prevailing mindset, investment in — among other things — rural development and infrastructure waned, Markey said. Communities were increasingly left to do their own development.

“For the past 30 years, rural places have … struggled with the outcomes of those decisions,” he said.

Crumbling infrastructure

Around 2016, Canada’s federal government began to increase investment in infrastructure, which included things like broadband internet service, Markey said.

Kerry Black, Canada research chair for integrated knowledge, engineering and sustainable communities at the University of Calgary, puts that turnaround at approximately 2010. In a March 2023 article from the Conversation, Black said that year marks the point where federal investment in infrastructure began to rise from 1.5 per cent of GDP. Public investment had declined from around three per cent of GDP in the 1950s to 1.5 per cent in the late 2000s.

In early 2023, Canada’s infrastructure deficit totaled around $150 billion, Black wrote. Infrastructure spending increased out of necessity.

“Infrastructure was basically crumbling around rural communities, and there was a recognition that the market wasn’t going to solve all of our problems,” Markey said.

Crumbling infrastructure had led to a decline in productivity, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce wrote in a 2013 report. For instance, the nation’s manufacturing output lagged the U.S., where infrastructure spending was much higher.

The report further argued that deteriorating roads and ports were a danger to Canada’s import and export capacity, adding that a poor transportation network hurts both businesses and quality of life.

Though federal spending may have increased, Manitoba municipalities say they’ve struggled to maintain the bulk of infrastructure. In 2021, the Association of Manitoba Municipalities said one-third of core municipal infrastructure was in fair, poor or very poor condition. “Which is concerning, given that municipalities manage 60 per cent of Manitoba’s infrastructure despite collecting less than 10 cents of every tax dollar,” AMM said in a 2021 position paper.

Provincial funding to municipalities was also frozen from 2016 to 2022.

Investment is a good start, but more than money is needed, Markey said. The investment is “not particularly coherent or well-co-ordinated,” he said. “For instance, there is no vision for rural Canada at a federal level … we tend to sort of still react and not put together a comprehensive plan for what we see as the future of rural Canada.”

A 2022 overview of Canadian rural development policy, which Markey co-authored, found that targeted approaches for rural development are rare. Most development programs and strategies target overarching provincial and regional needs and are specific to a single sector, such as agriculture.

Does it matter?

Markey refuses to take a doom-and-gloom outlook on rural communities. He pointed to one Globe and Mail opinion piece, which predicted Canada would become a collection of cities with empty land in between.

“Such a ridiculous comment,” he said. “Rural Canada is growing. It’s just growing less quickly than urban places.”

While census data show a decrease in rural populations, Statistics Canada’s annual demographic estimates bear out Markey’s argument. From 2020 to 2022, the estimates suggest that rural Manitoba’s population grew from 388,578 to 393,892, an addition of 5,314 people. In the same window though, the province’s urban centres added 24,021 people.

Communities that maintain an investment mentality, understand they can support their businesses and industry and offer high quality of life will likely be successful, Markey said.

“People love living there, right?” he said. “They want to live there.”

Indigenous communities, many of which are growing, are also predominantly rural.

“There’s tremendous amounts of economic opportunity,” Markey said. “Rural communities play incredibly important roles in our resource economy.”

He further argued that the province needs a shift back to that investment mentality, as well as a better understanding of how much potential rural places have, “not just viewing them as sort of resource hinterlands that are inevitably in a state of decline.”

The post Can we escape rural decline? appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Rural STEP program that employed Margie Brincheski as a teenager helped get her into farming. Love kept her there.

Brincheski, the daughter of Scottish immigrants, grew up in the hydro town of Point du Bois, northeast of Winnipeg in Manitoba’s lake country. Summer job options for local teens were limited to Manitoba Hydro, the company store or the post office.

Then came the Rural STEP program, a provincially run temporary employment program geared toward rural teens. It was introduced as part of wider efforts to slow rural depopulation and had the ultimate goal of keeping more young people in their communities.

Through the program, work crews of local youth did construction and other grunt work in their home areas and local farms, overseen by post-secondary students.

It was Brincheski’s first job.

Her crew was put to work painting barns on dairy, chicken and beef farms in the Lac du Bonnet area. And during the experience, she recalls, she thought, “I would love to live on a farm.”

Why it matters: Rural communities have been looking to bolster their populations and vibrancy for decades, but what programs have made a dent in the problem?

The thought would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As well as her first work experience, her Rural STEP summer was also her first time away from home and, without a car, Brincheski boarded in Lac du Bonnet. There, she met and had a brief romance with a farmer’s son.

The two reconnected years later, both having moved to Winnipeg, and he eventually became her husband. He had already returned to the family farm in the early 1980s, Brincheski recalled. Once they were married, she joined him.

Today, her husband and youngest son farm together. Her daughter and two older sons have moved away.

“We’re great at exporting our youth,” she said.

The Rural STEP program gave Brincheski what she describes as a good summer job and a positive experience. But in a common refrain heard from many former STEP students, it was just a job. Despite the program’s mandate and goals, most participants finished their employment and later moved away for school or to find work elsewhere.

Stemming the flow

The STEP program was part of the Schreyer government’s Stay Option, in which the province pumped investment into rural communities in hopes that migration from farm to city would slow.

The concern was financial. Manitoba was a highly agricultural province, but previously vibrant agricultural communities were losing people in the years and decades leading up to the 1970s.

The programs, and efforts like them, came up against strong economic and social forces.

As of the 2021 census, the number of Manitoba farms had dropped by more than half compared to 1968, while the remaining farms were much bigger. Today, a smaller proportion of Manitobans live in rural areas, despite gross population growth in some rural regions.

Are people actually leaving?

The latest census data shows that, between 2016 and 2021, the rural population of Manitoba shrunk by 1.7 per cent. It also shrunk between the 2011 and 2016 censuses.

The annual demographic estimates from Statistics Canada, however, are sunnier in outlook. Estimates for 2021-22, the most recent information available, suggests the province’s rural population grew by nearly 2,300 people.

Looking deeper at those estimates, StatCan suggests that growth had a lot to do with immigration. Natural increases sat at 1,375 people, while international immigration brought a net 2,112 people to rural areas, and an estimated 237 people moved to rural Manitoba from somewhere else in the province.

On the other side, rural Manitoba lost 1,439 people who left for another province.

Since 2001, a substantial number of people between ages 20 and 24 have left rural Manitoba. Of those, a steady stream are bound for other provinces, although the majority move internally, to a city.

That trend has slowed over time. In 2010, a net 716 young adults moved from the country to urban Manitoba. In 2019, only 394 left for urban life, and even fewer moved during the pandemic.

In the 25-29 age group, it’s going the other way. The number of people moving from urban to rural areas with the province has been trending upward since 2011.

Seeding knowledge (and a work force)

The agriculture industry has struggled for years with a dwindling labour pool. In 2017, 1,447 agricultural jobs went unfilled in Manitoba, according to the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council. In 2020, the council predicted that, by 2029, the province would be short 5,330 agricultural workers.

The bids to address that gap range from investment into post-secondary programs, such as new options and industry investment at Brandon’s Assiniboine Community College, to programs centred on a much younger demographic.

Several producer groups have put their support behind Agriculture in the Classroom, an organization that provides resources to schools to teach students about agriculture and food.

The mandated Manitoba education curriculum has little focus on agriculture or food sources, said Katharine Cherewyk, executive director of Agriculture in the Classroom Manitoba (AITC-M).

In Grade 10, she noted, there’s a short unit called “food from the land,” but if teachers have little knowledge of agriculture themselves, they may show a Netflix documentary like “Food Inc.” to fill the requirement.

That documentary is “an unflattering look inside America’s corporate controlled food industry,” according its listing on the Internet Movie Database, a film website.

AITC-M’s goal is to tell a more nuanced, local story of agriculture and food. For younger students, it’s resources teach the fundamentals of how food is grown, that it grows all around us, and “here are some people in your community that help grow it, drive it around, process it,” Cherewyk said.

Middle years students might look at food issues like nutrition and may talk about career interests. High school resources connect students with careers in agriculture, which might span anything from accounting to agribusiness, and looks past the role of primary producer.

If kids still aren’t interested, Cherewyk said, at least they will know enough about where their food comes from and how it affects their communities to make informed choices at the voting booth or to advocate for people who work in agriculture.

AITC-M doesn’t have statistics on how many students within its reach enter agricultural jobs, but Cherewyk said assessments show greater agricultural interest among students after they’ve gone through AITC-M materials.

Rural coding clubs

While communities like the Point du Bois of Brincheski’s youth lacked industry, many rural communities today also lack connectivity.

“Research has demonstrated that rural communities acutely experience the digital divide,” wrote social researchers Wayne Kelly, Brian McGrath and Danielle Hubbard in a 2022 paper.

Services are “typically slower and inferior in quality, and costing substantially more compared with urban centres,” they wrote. That is compounded by the need for rural citizens, governments and industry “to develop skills and motivations to use technologies, not merely possess them.”

Kelly, the director of Brandon University’s Rural Development Institute, said the connectivity issue was apparent when he conducted focus groups and interviews.

Initially, he was concerned with the challenges of engaging youth in community decision making. As he spoke with young people, he discovered they were proficient with technology use for school, entertainment, socializing and gaming, but had less capacity in the deeper digital skills needed for community digital projects.

Kelly shifted his focus to building digital skills and awareness of digital tech among youth.

This led to establishment of coding clubs, first in Brandon, then in other western Manitoba communities of Glenboro and Neepawa. The initiative lasted 14 months before COVID-19 threw the brakes.

While in operation, the clubs were held at community libraries, which required organizers to secure enough laptops to accommodate the number of participants. A local government institution donated unused laptops and a local non-profit helped update them.

Kelly, who has some coding background, often led the activities, alongside librarians who had little to no coding experience. They used the “CoderDojo” model, a template for volunteer-led computer clubs for kids. Students can learn to code, build a website or create an app or game.

“Dojos are a space for kids and teens to explore technology in an informal, creative, safe and social environment,” CoderDojo’s website says.

Club leaders would give kids challenges, such as making a Halloween-themed game, and students would work at their own pace. Participants also learned about sensor technology, and one of the clubs partnered with a technology company to see how these tools could be applied in the real world, including a farm setting.

The clubs were social by design, flouting what Kelly called a stigma of the coder being a loner. The CoderDojo model has an unofficial rule that users should ask peers for help before asking a club leader. As a result, some kids later reported the club was their main social and skill-building extracurricular activity.

In total, 53 students participated across the three locations.

The researchers concluded that rural libraries can successfully deliver digital skill-building opportunities for local youth, and Kelly reported that participating libraries had begun new coding classes once pandemic restrictions allowed.

Rural Change Makers

Another factor affecting retention of young people is a sense of belonging, engagement and connection, according to the Rural Ontario Institute. These advantages are tough for young, passionate people to develop on their own, said executive director Ellen Sinclair, so the Rural Change Makers program was created.

The 12-month program helps young people develop skills needed for community development and put them into action with the guidance of coaches and mentors.

When the Co-operator spoke with Sinclair in late summer 2023, a new program cohort had just begun. Participants were slated to start with personal development and skills training covering fundraising, financial literacy, project management, cross-cultural understanding and Indigenous governance.

Each student was then expected to develop their own community development path, including consultation to discern local priorities. They could create their own project or work with a local partner.

For instance, Sinclair said, the Rural Ontario Institute developed a partnership with Opiikapawiin Services LP, a company made up of 24 First Nations in northern Ontario. The firm also administers projects and programs for First Nations-led utility company Watynikaneyap Power.

The power project came about because many First Nations communities relied on expensive diesel-powered generators for electricity, said Sinclair. Those generators were at maximum capacity, limiting the communities’ ability to build needed housing.

The partner First Nations came together to connect communities to the power grid. Most recently, Kasabonika Lake First Nation, about 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, was hooked up, according to an Oct. 14, 2023, news release.

Rural Change Makers connected with Opiikapawiin to find young people who wanted to eventually step into governance of the ongoing power project or address resource needs in the communities that now have reliable power.

Past program alumni addressed issues like rural homelessness, literacy and agriculture policy planning. They’ve led businesses and farms, become lawyers and researchers or run for local office, says the institute’s website.

They’re also more likely to stay close to home. In a 2022 stewardship report, the institute reported that 72 per cent of participants said they were likely to stay, work and live in their local community after completing the program. That was up from 45 per cent before the program.

Ninety-one per cent said they had a sense of belonging in their communities and believed they could make a difference.

This series will continue in the Jan. 18 edition of the Manitoba Co-operator.

The post Opportunity, skills, belonging: case studies in rural youth retention appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The black-and-white photo, circa 1943, shows Murray and Archie Dickson atop their family’s Nichols & Shepherd Red River Special.

The pull-type combine is hitched to a small, metal-wheeled tractor. There’s a long shaft with universal joints linking the tractor’s steering wheel to the one on the combine’s platform. A rope appears to work a lever mounted just behind the belt pulley, which probably works the clutch. Two ropes drop under the steering shaft, possibly to open and close the throttle and operate the kill switch.

The jury-rigged setup allowed both combine and tractor to be operated by one person and was the brainchild of the family’s patriarch, W.G. Dickson.

That one person would first start the tractor and combine engines, put the threshing body in motion, tie back one rope to engage the clutch, climb to the tractor and put it in gear, climb back to the combine and then let out the clutch rope. Only then could the outfit begin threshing.

Why it matters: Rural areas in Manitoba have spent decades trying to revitalize their communities, even as Manitoba’s population becomes more urban.

In a 2019 article, the Manitoba Agricultural Museum gave its best theory as to why the elder Dickson devised such a unit.

The Second World War was raging at the time the image was taken, and labour was short on the Prairies. The self-propelled combine was still in its infancy. Two of Dickson’s sons were in the air force. Archie appears in the photo because he was on leave at the time. The youngest was still in school.

Dickson had to find a way to bring in the crop alone.

In the two decades following the photo, mechanization would rapidly change the farming sector and, by extension, the Manitoban countryside.

The proportion of Manitobans living in rural areas began to decrease year over year starting after the Second World War.

Concern over the shrinking farm population eventually made its way to Manitoba’s legislature. The late-1960s and ‘70s government of Edward Schreyer became worried about the financial impacts to Manitoba’s highly agricultural economy. It led the government to implement the Stay Option, a policy of investment in agriculture and rural communities that purported to stem the tide of rural migration.

This included a youth summer work program in the mid-‘70s, dubbed the STEP program. It employed teams of rural high school students on local projects in their home communities under the supervision of post-secondary students. (For more on the STEP program, see the first story of our series, “How do you keep a kid on the farm?”)

Statistics over the following decades show little change in the rural population outflow.

As of the 2021 Census of Agriculture, the number of Manitoba farms had dropped just under 55 per cent compared to 1976, and rural Manitoba accounted for about a quarter of the province’s population.

Making it big

It is unlikely that today’s farmers would envy the way their parents or grandparents ran their operations.

Mechanization, along with the agrichemical advances and varietal development of the Green Revolution, saw production spike to unheard of levels as the 20th century wore on. Farmers today harvest more, harvest faster and use technological integration and know-how that previous generations would likely have described as science fiction.

Two years before W.G. Dickson rigged his combine to operate solo, there was one tractor for every 2.5 Prairie farms and one combine for every 11 farms. By 1976, there were about two tractors and “nearly one” combine per farm, author Gerald Friesen wrote in his book The Canadian Prairies: a History.

A farmer from 1940 wouldn’t understand the technology, crops or inputs that underpinned farming 40 years later, Friesen said. Increased mechanization and crop technology allowed individual farmers to handle larger acreages than ever before — and if they could, they did.

Farms began to consolidate. Between 1940 and 1980, the number of farms on the Prairies reduced by half. Land values rose dramatically.

Farm operating expenses, meanwhile, rose by a factor of five between 1956 and 1976. Farms were also making more money. Farm income tripled in the same window.

“Because the modern farm was likely to have been expanded recently, the interest payments on the price of the additional quarter-section would have to be met,” Friesen wrote.

Thus, he added, “the farmer of the 1980s worked with financial calculations on a daily basis where his predecessor would rarely have bothered, except in spring and fall.”

Farming became a large, capital-intensive business that “operated on a line of credit and relied on Mother Nature to produce satisfactory earnings,” Friesen said.

Farmers also became greater consumers, shopping in similar stores and sending kids to similar schools as the urban population. The farm was no longer a “self-sufficient garrison” from which “the family could surmount the vagaries of world prices changes and even of the weather.”

The modern farmer was tied into world markets, big business savvy and had big machinery to match. At the same time, those big machines and big farms needed fewer people to operate.

Fast travel

Other factors affecting rural Manitoba’s population drain may have had nothing to do with agricultural practice.

Gordon Goldsborough, a Manitoba author, historian and head researcher for the Manitoba Historical Society, noted the start of the depopulation slide dovetails with the period in which travel became easier.

“If I was pressed, I would say [rural depopulation began] sometime in the late 1940s, early 1950s, because that’s when the provincial government began putting resources into road construction in rural Manitoba,” he said.

Rural electrification also began near that time, he noted, and telephone service was advancing.

As the rural road system improved, residents had more freedom to move around and were no longer at the mercy of the train. They could drive to the nearest big town for groceries or haul grain to a more distant elevator for a better price.

In the 1960s, Goldsborough recalled, his grandparents would regularly drive from Ferndale, southwest of Winnipeg, to a downtown grocery store.

“That would have been unthinkable even probably a decade earlier, because the highway that they would have to take to get there wouldn’t have been passable for much of the year.”

In other words, rural people started leaving the countryside because they could, and the farm was just a telephone call or a drive away.

A tectonic shift

In 1941, 60 per cent of the Prairie population was rural. By 1981, only 30 per cent was rural and only 11 per cent lived on farms, wrote Friesen.

“In contrast to the golden days of rural life, the countryside was empty. And without people to participate and observe, the schools, churches, ball teams and sports days ceased to exist,” he said.

By the ‘70s, the archetype of the kid leaving the farm to make their way in the big city was well established.

Kim McConnell, who joined a STEP crew as a teenager, wanted to stay on the farm.

“That was my ultimate desire,” he said.

His parents had a rule: He could come home to farm, but he had to get an education first.

After university and a stint employed at a company selling crop inputs, he spent a year farming rented land. Then he lost that land base, and it didn’t feel right to “weasel in” on his mom and dad’s farm, he said.

McConnell returned to agribusiness, moved to Calgary, and got into marketing and communications. In 1984, he and his wife set up a marketing communications firm in their basement. Today, that firm is AdFarm, one of the largest agricultural marketing and communications firms in North America.

Close to home

Not all former rural STEP kids left their homes and farms. Robert Schwaluk, a team supervisor in 1973, still farms about a mile east of Shoal Lake, where he was born and raised.

Likewise, Margie Brincheski grew up in Point du Bois and boarded at Lac du Bonnet while she worked in the program. She had a summer romance with a local boy who eventually became her husband. They still farm together today.

– This series will continue in the Jan. 11 edition of the Manitoba Co-operator.

The post Combining alone: Farming for the future with fewer farmers appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.