Agriculture: The Path to Economic Stabilazation

Agriculture: The Path to Economic Stabilazation

For the nearly the past three decades America has been struggling with economic issues, and now it is hitting us the worst. Today, two people can sit at a coffee table and argue on what America needs to do to help rebuild the economy for hours, this is where I come in. With plenty of research and hard thinking I believe that I can help touch base on this topic. My argument is simple; what is the best method in regaining our economic strength? Could it be enhancing the manufacturing business to produce goods and sell? Or does America need to focus more on the agricultural aspect and rely on farming and produce? I personally feel that between the two main sources of capital in America, agriculture is the way to go, for many reasons.

In an article from the Journal Record Legislative Report by Brian Brus, the United States Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said that "America's agricultural core is in the midst of a massive economic and environmental change, producing equally large opportunities for venture capital investment." (Brus). In other words the lagging agriculture industry has a brilliant opportunity in that if America can find a way to help improve the climate and the economy it can bring in a massive sum of capital. This is only one of the many opportunities that agriculture brings to the table. Also included in the same articles was reference to invest into more resources to help bring technologies that can enhance the possibility of ending the climate crisis (Brus). Some may argue that new innovations in agriculture may be too costly and could contribute to the loss of income and business to rural area farmers, but Brus negates that in his article stating, "Vilsack said their sale of offsets, savings for federally recognized green practices, are projected to bring as much as $20 billion into the rural economies across America. Ag producers are already on the edge: Nearly 90 percent of all farm income is derived from off-farm operations now, Vilsack said. So the USDA faces a challenge of keeping agriculture producers of all sizes in operation."(Brus). This article is basically saying that investing new technologies into agriculture could gross as much as 20 billion dollars which means that rural area farmers do not need to worry about losing business. The Manufacturing industry in America on the other hand has an entirely different story behind it.

I am not even sure where I should start when talking about the problems with America's manufacturing progress within the past few years. There are a select few major corporations that have exceeded expectations for producing capital, but it is a group effort when trying to rebuild an entire nation's economy and that is not happening. One of the major impacts that the manufacturing industry has faced is work stoppages. Every day I see a new headline in the news stating that so and so industries are cutting 1,500 jobs. In an article entitled "All Quiet on the Picket line in Downturn" written by Stephen Dinan the first line basically sums up the labor problems in America, "Labor peace has broken out across the country, and all it took was the nastiest recession since the end of World War II to spawn it."(Dinan). This quote shows the vast impact the declining economy has had on America's manufacturing industry. The article also states that manufacturer's were optimistic when Barack Obama became president, however the "hope" that president Obama had provided them hasn't yet followed through (Dinan). This month the unemployment rate in America raised up to 10%, the highest it has been in decades. Also the constant attempts at trying to bailout all of these big manufacturers has been hurting America's rural economies.

In a journal from Salt lake city called The Enterprise, there is an article entitled "The Nation Needs a Rural approach to Economic Development", by Elton Ringsack. In Ringsack's article it talks about how the constant commotion cause by these big metropolitan and big city corporations have cause people to overlook America's rural areas and overlook the benefits that they bring (Ringsack). Statistics included in that article explain that six out of every ten rural areas there is a lack of economic growth, and even the little growth that rural areas provide is contributed 90% by small businesses located in the rural communities and have less than twenty employess (Ringsack). An excerpt from this article shows this saying that "A study released by the SBA's Office of Advocacy entitled, "An Empirical Approach to Characterize Rural Small Business Growth and Profitahility" states that rural America is undergoing several notable demographic shifts, with certain rural areas experiencing a decline