Visit new housing developments in the western Minnesota city of Marshall, and you might well think you’re touring cul-de-sacs in Champlin or Maple Grove, with 3,000-square-foot homes sporting three-car garages. Crop prices hit near-record highs in 2007—thanks in large part to the (perhaps fading) ethanol boom, from which Marshall has benefited—so urbanites might believe that all of rural Minnesota is enjoying a post–farm crisis renaissance.
Paul DeBriyn can disabuse you of that notion. Much of rural Minnesota is, in fact, struggling.
“The issues are about quality of life,” says DeBriyn, CEO of Mankato-based AgStar Financial Services, one of the largest institutions in the 90-year-old federal Farm Credit System. “The infrastructure is old. Medical facilities are in need of repair, and investment and rural development is needed to create jobs.”
Rural Minnesota’s infrastructure needs are wide ranging. They include new wastewater treatment systems and apartment buildings for immigrant workers. Also at the top of the list are the types of facilities that an aging population requires: assisted living facilities, senior condos, funeral homes, and critical-access hospitals, federally defined in 1997 as facilities that assure Medicare beneficiaries access to health care services in rural areas.
Amenities like these are common in both the Twin Cities metro area and rural communities with populations of 15,000 or more (so-called regional centers). But they’re often sorely lacking in greater Minnesota, particularly in the 770 towns or 1,790 townships with fewer than 10,000 residents, such as Litchfield, International Falls, and Wadena.
“I would argue the southwest region of our state is probably the most challenged,” says John Monson, whom AgStar hired more than a year ago to direct its rural finance division. “In large part, that is because it does not have close proximity to the Twin Cities, and it does not have close proximity to regional centers, as opposed to the southeast part of the state, where you have Winona, Owatonna, La Crosse, Rochester, Austin, Red Wing, Faribault, and Northfield.”
AgStar has operated primarily as a lender helping farmers purchase land seed, equipment, and machinery. That’s still its chief business. But in recent years, as the rural economy has experienced significant change, AgStar has been gearing up to make “mission-related investments”—not lending to farmers, but investing in infrastructure projects and services in farm areas.
The rationale is simple: AgStar’s future is integrally tied to the health and well-being of both agriculture and the rural communities in its market area. And those communities are in danger of irremediable decline.
