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When I met Adam Temple, he was watching water run down his alfalfa fields with a slightly befuddled expression on his face. His family has been farming this land for generations, but he’s still learning how to keep the fields flat and when to plant the barley and peas and how a strike in Los Angeles can affect the hay market for the year.

Temple is not your typical Wheeler County farmer: He came back after leaving the area, living on the East Coast and serving in the Peace Corps. His grandfather needed some help around the farm, so he decided to give it a try.

Temple is one of a handful of multi-generational farmers still left in Wheeler County, though his farm looks different than his grandparents’ did. They once had 100,000 acres and 12 employees—mostly cowboys—to herd cattle on the land. But the family sold most of its land back to the government, and now Temple has only about 1,000 acres, which he farms himself with the help of technology and a part-time hired hand. He recently started renting a house on his land via Airbnb to make some extra money. He’s not sure what will happen to the land when he stops farming. His son likes to sleep in, and so probably won’t become a farmer, Temple says.

Farming is just one of the industries in rural America that has changed dramatically over the past half-century. It is more automated than ever, and a farm can be run with far fewer people than ever before. In 1900, some 40 percent of the population worked in agriculture, a century later, only 2 percent did. Similar dynamics have overtaken logging, mining, and other resource-extraction industries. In some ways, rural America, more than much of the rest of the country, is the victim of productivity gains. And in rural America, fewer other opportunities materialize to replace the jobs the machines take.

“In a lot of the industries [rural areas] have traditionally been dependent on, technical developments have replaced a lot of the jobs,” said Don Albrecht, the director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University Extension, about communities in the rural West.

And as jobs automated and fewer people were needed to run farms and cut trees, one-time rural dwellers moved to the cities, where the pay was a lot higher and the opportunities were greater.

“They never came back,” Albrecht said.

Shifting management of federal land has also changed the mix of jobs available, Albrecht said. The federal government owns 53 percent of the land in Oregon, and has reduced the amount of timber harvesting and grazing allowed on its lands in the past few decades.

Temple took me up in the small prop plane he keeps next to his tractor, and as we flew over his farm and the acres and acres of government land, we could see buttes and rolling green hills and a few small farms. Much of the land is owned by the government, Temple told me. From the air, we did not see many signs of humans. Temple pointed out Wheeler County’s three towns, all small clusters of homes and buildings surrounded by giant expanses of open land. Then he flew over homes out in the country. People didn’t live in most of them, he said, over the humming of the engine. They buy them as vacation homes and come out a few times a year from Portland or elsewhere, to hunt or to fish. Then they go back to the big city.