The latest Census Bureau estimates of people living in each county raise the possibility that four years of modest population loss in rural America may be ending, says the USDA. “The 2014-15 improvement in non-metro population change coincides with rural economic recovery and suggests that this first-ever period of overall population decline, from 2010 to 2015, may be ending,” says Amber Waves, a USDA publication.
The story of people leaving farms and small towns for work in the city is decades old. But until 2010, enough children were born, along with a small flow of urbanites moving to the country, to keep the overall rural population steady or even rising slightly. Beginning in 2010, the rural population dropped by roughly 33,000 people a year. From July 2014-July 2015, the decline was just 4,000 people.
During the recession, rural birth rates dropped and some of the lures of rural life — lower housing costs, scenic landscapes and outdoor recreation — lost their allure. The result was that more than 1,300 counties have lost population since 2010, said the USDA. While those counties lost a total of 650,000 people, other rural counties gained more than 500,000 residents during the four-year span.
“The total population in non-metro counties stood at 46.2 million in July 2015 — 14 percent of U.S. residents spread across 72 percent of the nation’s land area,” said the USDA.