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Rural America was helped and hurt by the sharp increase in commodity and energy prices in 2008. Farmers' net incomes rose with commodity prices, even though costs of production also rose with higher energy prices.

Most rural residents are not farmers. Low-income rural residents employed in low-wage jobs found their commuting costs rising sharply when gas topped $4 a gallon in June 2008. The pain of high gas prices was made worse by the fact that many rural residents drive pickups and other low-mileage vehicles. The percent of take-home income that many rural residents spend on gas is three times the US average of four percent, and some planned to move closer to cities and jobs to reduce commuting costs.

Rural is a residual concept, the area and people not included in urban. There are three major definitions of urban that result in three definitions of rural. An administrative concept, used by many USDA rural development programs, defines urban along municipal or other jurisdictional boundaries, so that rural is the land and people outside an incorporated city. The land-use concept used by the Census Bureau defines urban in terms of population density, such as how many people live in one or a group of counties. The economic concept, also generally based on counties, defines urban areas by their labor, trade, and media markets.

The administrative definition of urban generates the smallest urban and largest rural population, while the economic concept generates the largest urban and smallest rural population. Most definitions say that people living in places with fewer than 2,500 residents are not urban, but some raise the minimum population to 50,000, thus making more residents "rural." The 2000 Census reported that 21 percent of the 281 million US residents were rural, 59 million, based on the land-use definition (outside urban areas of 2,500 or more people), compared with 17 percent if the definition of rural is economically based nonmetro areas (outside metro areas of 50,000 or more).

Cromartie, John and Shawn Bucholtz. 2008. Defining the "Rural" in Rural America. Amber Waves. June. http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/June08/Features/RuralAmerica.htm Clifford Krauss, "Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average," New York Times, June 9, 2008.