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b'In this week\\u2019s Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn interviews Corie Brown, the co-founder of Zester Media. Brown writes about food and the food system, and is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times,\\xa0Newsweek,\\xa0Premiere Magazine, and\\xa0BusinessWeek.\\nEarlier this year, Brown wrote a story for The New Food Economy entitled \\u201cRural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why.\\u201d Brown is from Kansas originally, and was aware of the state\\u2019s long, steady depopulation, but was struck by a report that rural Kansas had become a food desert: an area in which residents do not have adequate access to affordable and healthy food.\\xa0\\n\\u201cHow can this breadbasket be a food desert?\\u201d she asks: Kansas, after all, is a state that devotes an overwhelming percentage of its land to agriculture. And yet much of the state is dotted with towns that have lost one-third, half, or more of their population in the last generation. It\\u2019s to the point that basic amenities like fresh groceries can be hard to come by. \\u201cThere are no people here. Not enough to justify a delivery truck.\\u201d\\xa0\\nThe apparent paradox, Brown says, reflects the fact that Kansas has always had a commodity-based agricultural economy, not a subsistence one. The origins of Kansas\\u2019s settlement are not in family farms serving an immediate household and community, but in export agriculture, originally promoted by the federal government through grants of free land under the 19th century Homestead Acts. The carving up of the semi-arid Great Plains for intensive agriculture led to a slow-rolling environmental disaster that culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.\\nThe problem with commodity agriculture is that small farmers cannot compete with industrial-scale operations by making a higher-quality product. Says Brown, \\u201cA thousand-acre farmer in Ellis County, Kansas, is very specifically, directly competing with the government of China. Or the government of Brazil.\\u201d And the price that farmer can sell their wheat for is the price that the global commodity wheat market will bear. The result has been a relentless pressure to mechanize agriculture and improve efficiency, using less and less labor over time. Modern technology allows one farmer to manage a vast number of acres. The cost, however, is depopulation: fewer classmates for your children at school, and less access to culture and amenities.\\nThirty years ago, Brown, reflects, she was at a wedding in Downs, and it was a \\u201cquintessential small Kansas town\\u201d\\u2014there were people on the street, stocked shelves in the stores, a local newspaper. It was small, but active. \\u201cWhen I came back, it had lost a third of its population in 30 years. A lot of the store windows were blank.\\u201d Those business owners who were still around had moved their businesses out of store fronts and into their homes.\\nCompounding rural Kansas\\u2019s suffering, says Brown, is that the state has a culture of bootstrapping\\u2014Kansas attracted people with nothing to lose. In a great game of musical chairs, \\u201cthey all believe they won\\u2019t be the one left without a chair,\\u201d and pride can prevent people from acknowledging that they need help. Resistance is still strong in Kansas\\u2019s shrinking towns to the idea of dependence on government subsidies and assistance, or to the notion that the $1 billion a year that Kansas farmers already receive in federal farm aid even constitutes a subsidy. People work long, hard hours\\u2014\\u201cThey\\u2019ve never worked harder\\u201d\\u2014and farmers who help feed the world don\\u2019t even grow vegetable gardens at home anymore, because they don\\u2019t have time.\\nMarohn muses on the commonalities between this situation and inner city poverty: the food desert aspect, the long work for little income just to stay afloat, the isolation and lack of opportunity, and often the inability to leave if you wanted to\\u2014how can you sell your house in a place in the process of being abandoned? Who would buy it? And yet, most rural Kansans, both Marohn and Brown agree, would not see themselves as having anythi'