You might not think that Maine has a high profile in the Washington D.C. headquarters of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but that would be because you probably think that the U.S.D.A. only concerns itself with agriculture. During a recent visit to Maine by some of their top brass, however, the broad role U.S.D.A. plays in sustaining rural communities came into sharp focus—supporting alternative energy initiatives among rural electric cooperatives, piloting distance learning programs in one-room island schoolhouses and investing in telemedicine technology mounted on the Maine Seacoast Mission’s flagship the Sunbeam.
Dallas Tonsager, the Under Secretary of Agriculture for Rural Development in the current administration led the visit to Maine and he brought with him nine U.S.D.A. state directors from the eastern region, including Maine’s director, Virginia Manuel, to review some of their investments in this state and to discuss strategies for fine tuning their current programs.
Tonsager is a practical Norwegian-American farmer from the prairies of the upper Midwest who grew up on a dairy, corn and soybean farm in Oldham, South Dakota. Before he got into rural development, Tonsager was organizing rural cooperatives throughout the Midwest after farm prices crashed from over production, especially during the years between 1987-1992. Before Tonsager got into rural cooperatives, he thought he wanted to become a diesel mechanic. A practical guy, in other words. But one with a vision for encouraging rural Americans to invest in their communities, rather than fleeing toward the shimmering lights on the far horizon. Fifteen years ago, Tonsager was one of a small group of rural leaders who helped convince U.S.D.A. to reorganize their various rural investment strategies into a single agency called Rural Development, a large agency within U.S.D.A. that he now heads.
Tonsager and the practical-minded islanders that he met this week on visits to Vinalhaven and Isle au Haut (via broadband video conference link) seemed to get along well. A shared instinct for solving practical problems is perhaps why islander-originated projects have scored well recently in the distant headquarters of the country’s agricultural administration.
Electricity prices fluctuating wildly in a community surrounded by wind? Why not try to finance the construction of a wind farm with a loan from the Rural Utilities Service, part of the agency Tonsager heads? Small enrollments in isolated schools with a teacher you’ve had your whole life? Why not apply for a distance-learning videoconferencing technology that links you with five other island classrooms with the same issue from Tonsager’s Rural Development agency in Washington? Medical questions that need answers from specialists that require days of travel? Why not put a unit on boat that travels to isolated parts of the coast to deliver answers. Go to”¦yes, Rural Development.
Most of us have forgotten that America’s farms were first electrified by an agency Franklin Roosevelt set up during the Depression, the Rural Electrification Administration or REA. The reason farms and virtually all of rural America lacked electricity 50 years after Edison made the first practical light bulb was that there were not enough people in small communities to justify running the electric wires all over the countryside to isolated groups of people. But Roosevelt needed to put people to work and believed that the common good would be served if the government helped bring electric power to all Americans. Hence the REA came into being, which still serves over 900 electric cooperatives across rural America, including those that serve the island communities of Frenchboro, Swan’s Island, Vinalhaven, North Haven and Vinalhaven, and can also lend support to the power districts on Matinicus and Monhegan.
Lest you wonder whether this kind of national concern for the common good is still needed, consider that islanders on Monhegan have recently been paying over 70 cents per kilowatt hour, while people on the mainland pay 16 cents per kilowatt hour, a figure the governor has suggested puts Maine at a disadvantage in comparison with other states in New England.
It is fashionable these days in many parts of Maine and America to complain that government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem. Islanders have had plenty of problems ourselves with overzealous “gummint” officials rigidly adhering to policies that were designed for much large communities across the sate of union. But it is good to know that there is one agency of practical minded men and women who support the notion of rural Americans pulling together to create a common good, which we cannot create through individual initiative alone.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.