Errr, not in the rural area I grew up in. Gravel driveways are super common, gravel roads not so much.

To give some specifics: I only remember driving down an actual gravel road (like, for public use) a single time. In 18 years. Even my friends who lived >30min from the nearest "city" (~10k population) had paved roads all the way.

But that is just my own experience. Areas with a different climate or geography might be a totally different story. My hometown area is relatively flat, lots of farmland, and rarely gets severe winter weather.

Oh yes, my mistake, I was inferring the wrong conclusion from your first comment.

> Most of the roads are still unpaved, but you spend most of your driving time on the paved roads.

Yeah I definitely agree with that. I imagine if you were to look at my county's roads from a satellite, it'd be something like the (grid-shaped) veins of a leaf — the thick, prominent veins are the paved roads, providing the structure, while the thinner, branching veins are the gravel roads that run between them.

It's also funny that the article calls New Mexico a "warm place" considering I had to plow a 2-foot accumulation of snow off my driveway a couple weeks ago. New Mexico's climate is neither warm nor cold but diverse.

Santa Fe is weird this way because it's so old. Santa Fe is old by "old European city" standards; it's 166 years older than the United States. The roads downtown were originally burro paths.

That is a tricky question to answer. Farms need small towns scattered all over - that is where many of the teachers, accountants, mechanics, hired hands, other services, and owners of the stores that serve all of the above live. Often small towns have factories that are not farm related and those employees live someplace. Do you count those small towns as rural? Many of the above have also realized that they can buy some build a house on marginal farmland cheap and so live rural but they are working a small town job - they may have a few goats or something but it isn't how they earn their money - hard they farmers? There are also people who retire to the country, hunting cabins (not residents), camp grounds (the owner lives there), and other non-farmers living in rural areas. Parents generally transfer the farm to the kid who will inherit it over decades, and part of that is the parents move to a small house off the farm but still rural - are they living on a farm?

Depending on how you count the above you can say that most people in rural areas are not living on farms. Even if you don't count small towns residents, there are a lot of people who are not farmers living out there.

The people of the United States are broadly free to build a home wherever they can afford to, comrade, including on land that would otherwise be used for farming.

(Actual answer: I know a bunch of people who live in houses in the middle of seemingly-nowhere in rural Ohio, and almost none of them farm anything at all. They just seem to like the space and the quiet and the desolate isolation.

The only farmer who I know is my parents' neighbor, who has a house few miles away from their place.)

Certainly not. You will be lucky to find an area where 5% of the people living their are farmers or work on farms.

I don't have any real numbers to back this up, but I don't think so. Even in my quite rural area, most people live in towns despite the relatively vast, open farmland. My town's population is between 3-4000 people, but some are as small as 500. It'd take a lot of farms to spread all the people in my town out.

No, in fact, many rural areas are not economical for farming. But in those areas they may have other extractive industries to support a population.