Southeast Colorado | white shadow - 5/3/2025 08:32
Jon, my observation from last year's road trip, confirms everything you have said. We bought a Mack truck at Bruckners in Oklahoma City last year and to avoid scales we came home straight on HYW 281 all the way home. The rural areas in Kansas and Oklahoma are much different than they are in the Dakotas into Minnesota. Signs of rural decay and poverty are very easily seen. As soon as you cross into Nebraska it starts getting better. South Dakota has boomed in agriculture the last 15 years and you can see it everywhere you look, and we don't raise wheat anymore. New houses, shops, grain bins and shiny paint. There is a lot more at work in South Dakota's prosperity besides not planting wheat, but it is a component. Wheat has been a price dog for decades and yielding more bushels isn't the pathway to prosperity. Cattle may be the way to better revenue streams for you. Governmental support and policy are keeping a lot of ground in wheat where it should be in grass for cattle. The market took advantage of the cattle producer for decades; people got out of ranching and now look at where cattle price is. Apologies to anyone I have offended---just an honest report of what I saw.
Besides the look of the countryside in Kansas and Oklahoma the biggest take away from the trip was the amount of irrigation in Nebraska. I was amazed at the amount of irrigation in Nebraska. If water ever gets taken away in that country it will be a huge production hit.
A lot is at play there Shadow. You guys have less evapotranspiration...........which leads to a better ability to grow corn. There is a fine line east vs west where corn can truly be grown consistently. And add to that, the more north you are (admittedly to a point) the better chance you have of consistently sticking a crop. Most of our land........along with western KS, should be growing summer fallow wheat. As in one crop every two years. But since the USA has given away its wheat market............that just doesn't work anymore. So here we find ourselves in the current conundrum. If there wasn't subsidized crop insurance............no one around here would grow dryland corn or Milo.
Now go a little further south of us...........and they encounter even more issues. That's why the cattle growing industry is alive and well down there. I happen to think it will continue to move north as the economics dictate. The current problem is that cow prices have previously been just too depressed. Perhaps times are a changin'?? |
The long slow bleed out of farm equity.
