Revved up for RVs PBS Newshour reports on the rebounding RV industry in Indiana. The town of Elkhart was struggling just a few years ago because of a downturn in RV sales. Elkhart turned to electric vehicle maker Think to help boost jobs. Now, Think is in bankruptcy, and the RV companies are hiring again.

Now, on to the budget Detroit mayor Dave Bing will present his budget plan to city council this morning. It will be the last budget proposal from the mayor before a new financial advisory team takes over the city’s finances.

In full bloom A report from Michigan State University says the state’s agricultural sector grew dramatically during the recession. Partner station Michigan Radio has the details of the report, which claims agriculture now contributes $91.4 billion to the state economy.

Foreclosures New foreclosure numbers are out from RealtyTrac. The Midwest still has 7 states in the top 20 for highest foreclosure rate.

Part-time farmer Howard Haselhuhn at his West Michigan hops farm. Credit: Lindsey Smith

This month, we’re looking into some of the hidden assets of the Midwest – the parts of our economy that don’t often get noticed when we talk about our strengths (the first part of the series is here). Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of local economies in the Midwest – it accounts for billions of dollars worth of exports and thousands of jobs. There’s been a lot of concern about whether enough young people are going into farming these days. But the ag industry goes well beyond being just farming – and plenty of young people are interested in that.

At Navy Pier, a special meeting of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences’s FFA chapter is being called to order. Ringed around the room, one by one, chapter officers check in during the traditional opening ceremony. It ends when President and Senior Jennifer Nelson asks her fellow FFA members: “Why are we here?”

The students stand and chant in unison: “To practice brotherhood, honor agriculture opportunities and responsibilities, and develop those qualities of leadership that an FFA member should possess.”

These students are part of the 17,000 FFA members in Illinois alone. Membership in the organization overall has increased 20 percent since 2000, to more than half a million members across the country. But there’s a reason why FFA no longer calls itself Future Farmers of America.

Actual farmers make up just about two to four percent of the American work force. But people who work in related industries that depend on what farmers do account for at least a quarter of the entire work force. That includes everyone from people in food services jobs to Kraft executives to commodities traders.

These students were at the Chicago Flower and Garden Show to exhibit a garden they designed and built, and to sell food produced in the school’s kitchens.

Applications to the public school – located on the far south side of the city – have almost doubled in the past year.

Chicago High School for Ag Sciences senior Justice Plummer. Credit: Niala Boodhoo

But student Justice Plummer wasn’t so sure about agriculture when she first found out she got in. Her mom convinced her to go, and she’s never looked back – even though she’s the first in her family to go into the industry.

At the moment, Plummer is nine for 13 on being accepted into colleges she applied for – all to study agricultural business. She wants to major in agriculture business in college, and eventually get her Master’s degree and work in the Peace Corps, all in relation to agriculture business or finance.

“Everybody looks at me, like, ‘Agriculture?’” she says, laughing. “They just think of farming. But it’s all about food, clothing and shelter, and people are always going to need those kind of jobs.”

Instructor Corey Flournoy agrees.

“Just here in Chicago – some of the largest food companies are based here, from Quaker Oats to Kraft Foods,” says Flournoy, who is in charge of the new Center for Urban Agricultural Education, a partnership with the University of Illinois. “The opportunities to work in agriculture – because those are agricultural companies – are plentiful. We need more people to go into those fields.”

Educators like to use the acronym STEM to describe this need for people who know science, technology, engineering and math.

“I say that agriculture puts the STEAM into STEM,” said Laurie Kramer, an associate dean at the U of I’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.  When I asked her how much farming was a part of the college’s curriculum, she laughed and said you would think it was “big.” That’s what it was like 50 years ago.

“Nowadays, things are very, very different,” says Kramer. Seventy percent of the college’s students come from urban environments. The few students who focus on farming are likely to come from farming families, she said,  adding that today, the number of farms – especially those operated by families – is very small.

“It’s very expensive to run those operations, it’s very tricky,” she says.

Part-time farmer Howard Haselhuhn would agree. He’s an electrical engineer for Texas Instruments. But his West Michigan farm has been in his wife Amy’s family for several generations. She’s a CPA. When they were first married, Amy says they thought about farming full-time, but:

“We just didn’t see how we could possibly make a living off of a farm that was this size and growing commodity crops and also make payments off the land,” she says.

Together, the couple saved for 25 years to buy the 420-acre land from the rest of her family. Most of it is rented out to full time farmers. But on the weekends, they make the three and a hour trek west from their house near Ann Arbor to check on their hops crop.

Michigan’s farmers exported $1.75 billion worth of food – mostly to Canada – in 2010. Forecasts are that number will top $2 billion this year. The state’s goal is to double Michigan’s exports in the next five years.

More than half the farms in the Michigan area are what the USDA considers residential or lifestyle farms – meaning that the owners have other full-time incomes. Another 20 percent are retirement farms – what the Hasselhuhns hope this will be.

The farm was started in the 1930s by Amy’s great-grandfather. She says growing up on the farm gave her strong attachment to the land that Howard now shares. And even though they didn’t grow up there, her children have it, too – that weekend, her eldest son and his wife were also up at the farm, helping out. Her hope that is future generations of Haselhuhns will be at this farm, maintaining that attachment to the land.

This story was informed by the Public Insight Network. If you want to learn how to be a part of our network, click here.

There’s a lot more to talk about for the future of agriculture. Be sure to check back here tomorrow to catch Niala’s story, and find out why FFA is growing in popularity, even in cities like Chicago.

But, this morning, we found ourselves thinking about what life could be like in the Midwest 100,000 years from now. The inspiration came from the animation created above by New Scientist.

We’re not scientists around here, but it seems there are some good reasons to be bullish about how the Midwest could fare over the long, long term. We’ve got all this water around us. We do pretty well at growing our own food. And, even though our manufacturing economy has taken a beating in the last few decades, our culture of making things has to be worth something in the grander scheme.

Just for a moment, forget what the next 10 years will look like in the Midwest. Forget about what will happen in your lifetime. Tell us what you think the Midwest will look like a thousand years from now. Then 10,000 years. Then 100,000.

Then, think about what things we can do now to make a difference.

United States Library of Congress

The Midwest’s persistently high unemployment rate isn’t expected to fall anytime soon.

But as our Kate Davidson reported, temporary employment agencies across the Midwest can’t seem to find enough people to fill all the open factory jobs they have waiting. These agencies are busier than they’ve been in years, because manufacturing has more open jobs than candidates willing or able to fill them.

Now, another industry finds itself in a similar position: agriculture. It’s a big business all across the Midwest. In Michigan, agriculture is said to be the state’s second largest industry and is still growing.

But, Jim Byrum of the Michigan Agri-Business Association says agriculture producers can’t find enough people to fill jobs now, and he’s even more worried about the future.

“The industry demand is pretty solid, and it’s an increasingly severe problem,” Bryum says.

A large group within the agriculture industry — white collar workers at agri-business companies — is getting ready to retire soon. His concern is that a new generation of workers is not ready to replace those workers getting ready to leave.

The jobs being overlooked, says Bryum, are on the business side of agriculture, such as accounting, finance, logistics, marketing, and sales. For these jobs, workers don’t need a background in agriculture or experience in the industry.

Larry Zink thinks an image problem is partly to blame for agriculture’s inability to recruit younger workers. Zink works to match students with major agriculture corporations at Michigan State University.

“Young people in general don’t have a lot of knowledge about what agriculture jobs are. They only see the fields,” he said. “They don’t see the business side or the science side. I’d say with 97 percent of the jobs, you’re not getting your hands dirty.”

Several things might be contributing to this lack of knowledge and the aforementioned image problem. Zink said that young people might not want to move to, or work in, rural areas. It’s uncertain how this is going to change, there are no large-scale recognizable efforts to change agriculture’s image among prospective workers.

Byrum, of the agriculture association, also thinks farms and agriculture companies, particularly smaller ones, are making recruitment hard on themselves. He said many could benefit from modernizing their recruitment processes.

Mark Kaltz owns a farm in Columbus, Michigan where he has 35 acres of vegetables and 24 greenhouses for houseplants. Kaltz employs 10 people, five seasonally and five year-round. All of his full-time employees live within a few miles of the farm.

When Kaltz needs to hire a new employee, he doesn’t use an agency or advertise on Craigslist, since his farm doesn’t have an internet connection. Instead, he advertises in the local paper.

Kaltz hasn’t had difficulty finding enough people to hire, but he has heard about others having trouble. Although he has no proof, he speculates other farmers may be converting labor intensive farms like his to cash crops like corn and soybeans, because these are easier crops to harvest with fewer people and more machines.

 *This story was informed by the Public Insight Network. Share your story here to inform our coverage.

1. Agriculture potential expands in Michigan. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow met in Western Michigan on Monday to discuss ways to grow Michigan’s agriculture industry. Vilsack anticipated this will be the best year for farm income in U.S. history, and Stabenow said Michigan can grow its second-largest industry into biotechnology, reports our partner station Michigan Radio. As a farmer told them at their meeting, “agriculture is doing things,” in Michigan, he said. “Industry is not.”

2. President plans Detroit visit. In what will be his eighth visit to Michigan since becoming president, Barack Obama will join union members during Labor Day festivities in Detroit next week. Organizers do not believe the President will walk in the city’s annual parade, but expect he will make a speech at a to-be-determined site afterward, according to the Detroit Free Press. Obama may use the visit as an opportunity to highlight the government’s intervention in the auto industry in 2009.

3. Rock Hall shows some Respect. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will honor Aretha Franklin this November, during the venue’s 16^th annual American Music Masters this November. Franklin was the first woman inducted into the Hall in 1987, and wrote in a statement that she is “thrilled and delighted to be honored.” The exhibit, “Lady Soul: The Life and Music of Aretha Franklin” will be a week-long celebration and work in conjunction with the museum’s ongoing “Women Who Rock” series.

Depending on the vantage point, that has different meanings.

In Iowa, the unemployment rate hovered at 6.0 percent in June,” a rate that “is much higher than Iowans are comfortable with,” said David Swenson, who teaches economics at Iowa State University, during a roundtable discussion Wednesday on PBS News Hour.

In Michigan, such a figure would be cause for relief. The state holds the Midwest’s highest current unemployment rate at 10.5 percent. It also endured the region’s highest peak unemployment rate, reaching 14.1 percent in September 2009.

The loss of manufacturing jobs has been a significant theme in Michigan and Ohio, where the unemployment rate hovered at 8.8 percent in June. Agriculture has protected the economies of the western Midwest state to some extent. But now, manufacturing losses have spread to places like Minnesota and Iowa, two of the three states Obama visited.

“Manufacturing is a big component of the Iowa economy,” Swenson said. “We know that manufacturing has taken an extra-special hit.”

Though unemployment rates differ by as much as 4.5 percentage points throughout Midwestern states, one common thread is that all are leery of a recent uptick in their rates following declines over the past year-and-a-half. Minnesota’s rate crept upward to 6.7 percent in June after reaching a low of 6.5 percent two months earlier. Illinois’ rate stood at 9.2 in June after falling to 8.8 percent in March.

“People say that manufacturing is coming back, and it is coming back to a certain extent, but there are still jobs being lost,” Micki Maynard, senior editor of Changing Gears, said on the NewsHour segment.

“You need a bulk of jobs to come back and replace the jobs that were lost,” she said. “There was something like 500,000 jobs lost in Michigan alone during this recession, and there really aren’t the magic bullets that are going to create those thousands of jobs that can come back, so those people can go back to work.”

DECATUR – Driving south from Chicago, it only takes about 25 miles to hit the corn fields. For the next 150 miles to Decatur, it’s a sea of yellow corn tassels, a head tall.

At night, the central Illinois darkness is broken only by the lights of the corn and soy processing facilities at Archer Daniels Midland Company.

At dawn, the truck and rail traffic starts rolling into the yards of ADM, one of the largest food processing companies in the world.

Its global sales were $62 billion last year. Its headquarters are in Decatur, as well as some of its largest processing facilities.

Its operations are so large that to tour all their plants, I had to get in a car.

ADM doesn’t grow crops, like those surrounding its operations in Decatur. It buys and sells crops – wheat, corn, soy and cocoa, from all over the world. Some of those crops are brought to processing plants, where they’re turned into products like corn syrup, vegetable oil, animal feed, or ethanol.

“This is the center of agriculture, and I joke a little, it’s the center because we’re here,” said Mike Baroni, a vice-president with ADM. “But if you look around, when you drove from Chicago you saw some of the most fertile land in the world, and corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

The company started its first plant in Decatur in 1939. Thirty years later, it moved its headquarters to Decatur, too.

Baroni said the company thinks of Decatur as its home: “We’ve been here a long time,” he said, adding that as far as he knows, the company has no plans to leave Decatur.

ADM has almost 4,500 workers in Decatur. While many of them work in the processing plant, the company also runs one of the largest private trading floors in the country and does a lot of scientific research.

That varied workforce should dispel any misconceptions people have about Decatur, the City Manager Ryan McCrady told me.

“We have a rich history of industry, so I think a lot of folks think we’re a dusty, old, blue collar city,” McCrady said. “It’s quite the contrary.”

When you talk about employers in Decatur, three names loom large: ADM, Caterpillar and Tate & Lyle, the British food giant that bought Decatur’s homegrown Staley Company in 1988. (Interesting side note: today’s Chicago Bears were started as the Decatur Staleys in 1919, then moved to Chicago as the Chicago Staleys in 1920, where the NFL franchise was officially started.)

But Tate & Lyle is moving some research operations to the Chicago area.

And Caterpillar’s employment has been more cyclical. Over the past few years, it has laid off, and since rehired, hundreds of Decatur workers.

ADM’s been steady. Last fall, it bought a building in downtown Decatur to consolidate 300 IT, audit and accounting workers.

McCrady says that was a big deal.

“First of all, to have all that many more people in your central business district is going to be great for commerce,” he said. “But bigger than that was a sign of ADM’s commitment to Decatur by buying this building, especially in this age of downsizing.”

The unemployment rate in Decatur has dropped below 9 percent – better than Chicago’s jobless rate. McCrady says Decatur sales tax revenues are up 10 to 15 percent over the past year. That’s a faster rate of growth than Illinois as a whole.

With job prospects good in Decatur, welding classes are full at Richland Community College – even at midnight.

“Everybody seems to be in more of a hiring mode,” said Douglas Brauer, a vice-president with the college.

In the welding lab at Richland Community College (Niala Boodhoo)

For spring semester the school started offering welding classes at midnight, to accommodate students who were working full-time. The class was full, so they offered it again this summer.

Richland Community College is literally in ADM’s backyard. When it was built, ADM built a pipeline to the campus to send steam. That has powered the college’s heating and cooling systems for the past 20 years.

I stepped outside with Andy Perry, who also works at Richland. He explained that we were standing directly north of one of the production facilities for Archer Daniels Midland, as well as northeast of Tate & Lyle.

“So on a given day, when some of those production facilities are giving off you steam and other elements,  we can smell the products from here,” he said.

But Perry says nobody in Decatur minds.

“Really,” he said, “it’s the smell of money.”

The world’s population is expected to reach 7 to 10 billion people by 2050. That means the demand for agricultural products – everything ADM produces – is supposed to double. That can only mean good things for Decatur, which likes to call itself the heart of agribusiness.

Correction: an earlier version of this story contained an invalid figure for the world’s population. It is approximately 6.7 billion, according to the World Bank.