That is a real headline from this month, and it is the most compact description of rural Minnesota's problem I have seen. An entire county — with crimes to prosecute, child-protection cases to file, and a courthouse to advise — has no resident attorney to run for the job. As a lawyer, I find that a professional embarrassment. As someone who wants this state to work, I find it a warning.
But if you think that's the whole story of Greater Minnesota, you're about to be surprised twice.
The farm ledger: brutal, then partly better
Minnesota's median net farm income, from the University of Minnesota's FINBIN database — the best farm-finance dataset in the country:
- 2022: about $180,000
- 2023: $44,719 — down 76 percent
- 2024: $21,964 — the lowest this century
- 2025: $66,518 — a real rebound, still below long-run averages
Underneath the median, the divergence is stark. In 2024 the median crop farm cleared $2,371 — down 95 percent from 2022 — and the researchers stated plainly that without federal payments, crop farms would have lost money outright. In 2025, corn growers on rented land lost money despite yields ten percent above the ten-year average, and sugar beet growers lost roughly $500 an acre as sugar prices collapsed. Meanwhile cow-calf operators had their best year on record, over $600 a head, and dairy and hogs were strongly profitable. When someone tells you "farmers are doing fine" or "farming is collapsing," ask which farm.
The pressure shows up where you'd expect. Minnesota Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies went from 4 in 2024 to 13 in 2025. The state lost 1,300 farms in a single year (65,300 to 64,000) and 85 licensed dairy herds. In the Minneapolis Fed's most recent survey, more than three-quarters of agricultural lenders reported farm incomes falling again, with cropland values and cash rents both slipping. And through it all, government payments made up seven percent of gross farm income — a number that should worry anyone who wants farming to be a business rather than a subsidy program.
The infrastructure ledger
Health care. Rural Minnesota is losing services, one hearing at a time. Since late 2023 the state Health Department has held fourteen hearings on closures and cutbacks — labor and delivery ended in Fosston, New Prague, Fairmont, and Faribault; Mahnomen's hospital converted to emergency-only with no inpatient beds. University of Minnesota researchers found roughly 60 percent of rural Minnesota counties already had no hospital delivery unit before this round. And the law lets the state hold a hearing but not stop a closure.
Ambulances. The Legislature acted here, and it's worth knowing exactly what happened: a 2024 bipartisan law created an Office of Emergency Medical Services and put $24 million in one-time aid into low-volume rural ambulance services (30 or fewer trips per square mile), plus $6 million for a "sprint medic" pilot in Otter Tail, Grant, and St. Louis counties. Nearly all of it went out — $23.94 million awarded, roughly split between operations and equipment. One detail from the state's own report deserves a spotlight, given everything else this series has documented about oversight: one service's $265,306 payment was stolen when a vendor account was compromised, and had not been recovered. Rural ambulance money, gone to a thief. That's the fraud story and the rural story in one sentence.
Broadband. Minnesota set a statutory goal that by 2026 every home and business would have 100/20 megabit service. As of December 2025: 92.1 percent statewide, 81 percent outside the metro — about 155,000 households still short, roughly 149,000 of them rural. The state has invested $415 million, drawing over $508 million in matching money and connecting 121,600 locations, and federal BEAD money will fund another 74,739 — 58 percent by fiber, 25 percent by satellite. The state will not hit the 2026 goal, and its own Office of Broadband Development says the flagship Border-to-Border program and its companion are out of money and will not be offered again unless the Legislature appropriates more. That's not a prediction; that's the agency's sentence.
Child care. Greater Minnesota is short 42,581 child care slots. Minnesota lost half its licensed family child care providers between 2002 and 2022. In the most recent survey, 80 percent of Minnesota child care providers said the industry is in crisis. You cannot recruit a young family to a town with a job and a house and no daycare.
Now the surprise
Here is the part that contradicts the eulogy everyone keeps delivering. Rural Minnesota is not emptying out.
Only 19 of 80 Greater Minnesota counties lost population from 2020 to 2024 — down from 46 counties losing population in the 2010s. Average Greater Minnesota county growth flipped from −0.5 percent in the 2010s to +1.5 percent in the 2020s. As the Center for Rural Policy and Development's research director put it: "The old narrative of rural Minnesota dying is simply not true." Between 2020 and 2023, nearly 88,000 more people left Hennepin and Ramsey counties than moved in.
And it fits a pattern University of Minnesota Extension has documented for decades: rural Minnesota loses 18-to-25-year-olds and gains 30-to-49-year-olds — has, in every decade of census data since 1970. Newcomers arrive with education, earning power, and children, and they come for a slower pace, affordable housing, and safety. One study of newcomer households in west-central Minnesota estimated each contributed about $92,000 in local economic activity in a year.
So Greater Minnesota's problem is not that nobody wants to live there. It's that the things a returning 35-year-old needs — a delivery room, a daycare slot, a working internet connection, an ambulance that arrives, a grocery store, and yes, a lawyer in the county — have been quietly disappearing while the demand for them grew.
What works
The bright spots are all the same shape: local ownership plus a state match.
Minnesota's electric cooperatives won over $22 million in a single Border-to-Border round to build fiber to their own members — East Central Energy, Federated Rural Electric, MiEnergy — because a co-op's shareholders are its customers and it will serve a road that no national carrier will. In Detroit Lakes, a USDA-classified food desert, farmers founded Manna Food Co-op and expanded it with mission-driven financing. In northeast Minnesota, independent hospitals formed Wilderness Health to share services and keep care local rather than sell out. The Department of Agriculture's value-added and meat-processing grants put capital into small processors so a hog raised here can be slaughtered, packed, and sold here. And the EMS aid package proved the Legislature can act fast when rural lawmakers of both parties push together.
What we can do: Refund broadband — the agency has said in writing the money is gone with 149,000 rural households still unserved, and this is the rare public investment with a documented completion date. Treat child care as economic development, not welfare, and finish the slot gap. Give the state some actual authority when the last delivery room in a county closes. And build professional pipelines for rural Minnesota — loan-repayment and residency programs for the doctors, nurses, and yes, attorneys who will otherwise never see a county like Red Lake. I'd take that assignment seriously; the profession I belong to should be embarrassed enough to help fix it.
Rural Minnesota's story isn't decline. It's a place people are choosing again, waiting on a state that hasn't finished building what they need.
Sources
Farm income: University of Minnesota FINBIN/Center for Farm Financial Management and U of M Extension annual reports (Apr. 8, 2024; Apr. 3, 2025; Apr. 1, 2026) with Agweek and Morning Ag Clips coverage; 2024 FINBIN report (crop-farm median, federal-payment dependence) via the Minnesota Corn Growers summary and the report PDF. Bankruptcies: American Farm Bureau Federation Market Intel (Feb. 9, 2026) using U.S. Courts data; Minneapolis Fed (Sept. 24, 2025). Lender conditions: Minneapolis Fed agricultural credit conditions surveys, Q2 2025 through Q1 2026 (May 18, 2026). Farm and herd counts: USDA NASS, Farms and Land in Farms 2025 Summary (Feb. 13, 2026) and Milk Production (Feb. 20, 2026). Commodity prices: USDA WASDE (Aug. 2024; Aug. 12, 2026). Rural health: MDH hospital closure/curtailment hearing docket (Oct. 2023–Aug. 2026) and Minn. Stat. § 144.555; UMN Rural Health Research Center data via the Post Bulletin (Feb. 10, 2024). EMS: 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 122 per MN House Public Information Services; Office of Emergency Medical Services mandated report, "2024 Emergency Ambulance Aid Program" (award totals, spending breakdown, and the stolen payment). Broadband: MN DEED Office of Broadband Development, 2025 Broadband Development Annual Report (published Jan. 2026), including coverage percentages, program totals, BEAD awards and technology mix, and the funding-exhaustion statement; Minn. Stat. § 237.012; Governor's Task Force on Broadband 2025 Annual Report; Minnesota Rural Electric Association and MiEnergy on cooperative awards. Child care: First Children's Finance need analysis via the Greater Minnesota Partnership (Dec. 11, 2025); 2026 Minnesota Child Care Business Survey, Minneapolis Fed and First Children's Finance (June 5, 2026); GMNP on family-provider decline. Population and migration: Center for Rural Policy and Development, "The State of Rural 2025" (Jan. 15, 2025) and "Migration in Rural Minnesota" (Feb. 26, 2026), with MinnPost coverage (Apr. 7, 2026); U of M Extension "brain gain" research by Ben Winchester (2000s–2010s census data, labeled as such). Bright spots: MN Department of Agriculture AGRI grant program pages; Reinvestment Fund on Manna Food Co-op; Wilderness Health. Opening item: MinnPost/KAXE, "No one is running for Red Lake County attorney" (Aug. 25, 2026).
Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.