Chip Taylor

Agriculture-dependent areas

...have seen some big changes. From the Billings (MT) Gazette:

In the nearly three decades between 1974 and 2002, more than half of the individual farms harvesting wheat in Montana disappeared.

At the same time, the number of acres farmed remained about the same, and the production of wheat on those acres actually increased by more than 3 million bushels.

That statistical snapshot illustrates the altered relationship between farmers and the land in Eastern Montana, where the major crop remains wheat.

The causes? Technology for one.

Large numbers of people moved off the land as agriculture developed from a labor-intensive activity to a capital- and technology-intensive industry. The farms they left were bought or rented by the farmers who stayed.

...

Fewer farmers harvested more wheat because of better seed varieties, tillage methods and machines and technology.

With on-board computers and electronic sensors, a farm machinery operator can know when a seed planter line is plugged or if he's losing grain out the back of a combine. The machine can calculate yield and where in the field it varies. Tractors can be steered across the prairie by a satellite signal to a global positioning system attached to the tractor cab.

"We're farming with wires now," said Thomas Welch, a professor of agriculture technology at Montana State University-Havre.

Welch said modern machinery is so efficient and powerful that engine hours have dropped from 500 a year to 200. Farmers who had three combines now own just one.

"Everything has gotten bigger and more efficient," he said.

The other claimed culprit is federal policy.

Besides the economies of scale, another factor cited in the depopulation of farmland in Eastern Montana is the Conservation Reserve Program.

The idea of the 20-year-old farm program was to remove highly erodible land from production, reducing the loss of soil to wind and water that historically plagued the Great Plains states. At the same time, the land put into CRP would reduce the acreage planted to crops - wheat and barley mostly - which were in surplus in the mid-'80s and depressing market prices.

The program has been hailed as a success for its restoration of bird and wildlife habitat and reducing soil erosion.

CRP contracts are generally for 10 or 15 years. Farmers agree to put land back into range grasses and not farm it for the duration of the contract. In Montana, the average payment for land in CRP is about $35 an acre; every fall, the state of Montana and its farmers get about $110 million from U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But CRP is a controversial subject. The consensus, especially in Eastern Montana, is that it was detrimental to small communities and made things harder for young people trying to get into farming.

The CRP has undoubtedly had local effects on the amount of farmland available. But at the beginning of the article it was stated that "the number of acres farmed remained about the same" from 1974. One might expect that removing some land from tillage would result in other, previously untilled, land being brought into production. This leaves me of the opinion that the main factor is technology.

Producing more food with fewer people is a good thing on the whole, but it does put communities whose economy depended on agriculture in a bind.

The Washington Post ran an article on the effects of the CRP sometime back.