Cow counties are rural areas with a history of dairy farming or agriculture, often with small populations and basic amenities. They can be politically powerful due to districting, but are often under threat from development and urbanization. Some residents value their rural lifestyle and fight back with cooperatives, but clashes can arise between conservative and liberal values.
A cow county is a rural county with a typically small population and a history of dairy farming or other types of agriculture. The term is often used derogatorily, much like “hicktown,” to suggest that the residents are parochial and unfamiliar with the larger issues of the outside world. However, some residents of cow counties highly value their rural lifestyle and sometimes go to great lengths to defend it, as the developers have found.
A typical cow county has a long history of raising dairy or beef cows, meaning that numerous farms are often scattered throughout the county. Residents typically have rural attitudes, and towns in a cow county tend to be small, with very basic amenities. In some regions, cow counties have also managed to gain a strong position in the local legislature, thanks to the way the districts are constituted; a county with a small population has as much representation as a county with a large population, and sometimes cow counties band together to exploit that.
Due to the rapidly expanding development and industrialization of agriculture, many cow counties have found their traditional way of life under attack. Land in such counties is often broken up and sold for developers, as farms slowly fail because they cannot compete with larger, heavily mechanized farms. Many cow counties also struggle with an influx of city folks, who move to cow counties for their rural lifestyle and often don’t consider the full implications of rural life in a cow county.
Some cow counties have fought back; farmers, for example, can band together to create a dairy cooperative to keep their farms viable and keep the land in the family. In some cases, the cooperatives have actually bought agricultural land and placed deed restrictions on the land to ensure that it will continue to be used for agriculture while preserving the rural character of their landscape. Cooperatives also sometimes focus on traditional farming methods so that these techniques are not lost.
Many cow counties have very conservative values, which can be off-putting to people from urban areas, who tend, as a rule, to be more liberal politically. This can create clashes of values when new residents of a cow county come into conflict with old ones, including people who have resided in the area for generations. Such confrontations often illustrate class divisions as well as political ones.
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