Local Couple Featured In Grow Magazine

MADISON, WI - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - Lily Palmer and Tom Bergman, along with the Gogebic Range Next Generation Initiative were recently featured in Grow Magazine. They are featured in an article entitled, "Gaining on the Drain: Demographers see a trend in rural Wisconsin that could begin to reverse decades of population decline. But will jobs follow?"

Grow is a magazine devoted to the life sciences, published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. They report on the most intriguing aspects of CALS research, teaching and outreach in the areas of food and agriculture, health, energy, the environment and community development.

It’s no surprise to Lily Palmer BS’02 and Tom Bergman that they landed in Iron County, near the northern tip of Wisconsin. Stretching along the border of the Upper Peninsula and dotted by the hills of the Gogebic Range, the county’s natural amenities—including waterfalls, trout streams, more than 400 inland lakes and miles of trails for hiking and biking—offered plenty of enticement for the couple. And the 200 inches of annual snowfall? Not a problem for the self-proclaimed “snow people,” who met at a ski resort in Washington state.

About the only thing Iron County didn’t seem to offer was a promising career path. With just 7,000 year-round residents and a per capita income less than 70 percent of the national average, the county ranks among the poorest in Wisconsin. Despite a colorful history tied to the iron-mining boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when cities such as Hurley and Ironwood, Michigan, developed almost overnight, the region today is marked by high unemployment, declining manufacturing and a rapidly winnowing population. It’s the kind of place that young, college-educated professionals tend to leave, not seek out.

Except that’s exactly what Bergman and Palmer did. After spending a winter working on a vacation home near Hurley for Palmer’s parents, the couple decided to relocate to Hurley in 2005. They bought a home and put down roots. Bergman, a geologist by training, took a job at a ski shop, but eventually both found professional jobs. Bergman became Iron County’s zoning administrator, and Palmer works as a soil scientist with Coleman Engineering, just across the border in Michigan.

Young, educated and actively engaged in their community, the couple fits the profile of the kind of people rural communities across the Upper Midwest have spent decades trying to attract, often without success. Between 1990 and 2000, more than half of the rural counties in Midwestern states lost population, continuing a generations-long exodus of young people to other parts of the country. The phenomenon, known as “brain drain,” is a much-belabored issue for states such as Wisconsin, which invests significant resources toward educating its citizens only to see many of them move elsewhere. According to one study by the publication Postsecondary Education Opportunity, Wisconsin colleges and universities handed out 505,767 bachelor’s degrees between 1989 and 2007, but the number of college-educated people living in the state increased by only 377,275 during that time. The net loss of more than 125,000 college graduates ranked Wisconsin among the bottom 10 states in terms of retaining college graduates.

In places such as Iron County—which lost 35 percent of its residents aged 20 to 24 during the 1990s—those data feed fears about sustaining rural economic vitality and quality of life. The county is one of 10 in Wisconsin where more people died between 2000 and 2008 than were born, and the many long-time residents worry that the community services they depend on, namely medical care, will disappear with the aging population. As Bob Jacquart, owner of an Ironwood fabric-products business, points out, “We have five dentists in the area, and they all graduated from high school in 1968.” But there is hope in the presence of people like Palmer and Bergman—and perhaps a lesson. To date, much of the discussion around Wisconsin’s brain drain problem has revolved around the need for economic development, with state and business leaders calling for more incentives to spark job creation. And while jobs undoubtedly are an important part of attracting and retaining young, educated workers, employment prospects didn’t weigh heavily on Bergman’s or Palmer’s mind when deciding to settle down in Iron County. The choice was more about a way of life.

Two hundred miles south of Iron County, CALS demographer Richelle Winkler has been studying the factors behind worker migration, and she says something unique is happening in rural Wisconsin. “It’s a complicated story,” she warns, but one not entirely devoid of promising signs.

For one thing, “Wisconsin is doing much better than non-metropolitan counties in the U.S. overall,” says Winkler, an associate researcher in the Applied Population Laboratory, part of the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. While census figures show that the 47 counties in Wisconsin defined as non-metropolitan lost about 35,000 people aged 20 to 29 between 1990 and 2000, they actually gained college-educated residents. And while that’s true for the country’s rural areas as a whole, the rate at which college grads are moving into rural areas in Wisconsin is above the national average, Winkler says.

One possible explanation is Wisconsin’s relative economic diversity. Out-migration of college-educated people tends to be most pronounced in counties that lean heavily on mining or farming, which is why states such as Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and North Dakota struggle with chronic brain drain. Wisconsin has no mining-dependent counties, and despite the importance of agriculture to the state’s economy, only two—Lafayette and Clark—are considered farming-dependent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which factors only on-farm employment in making the designation.

To read the full article go to: http://www.grow2.uwcalscommunication.com/communities/gaining-on-the-drain.