Farm Byline

I was anxious to see the county-by-county figures from the 2020 North Dakota census. I remembered when the 2010 census figures were published, the media coverage of the report focused on the growth in Bismarck, Fargo and the oil-producing counties.

Little attention was paid to the fact that only 11 counties showed population growth from 2000 to 2010. Forty-two counties lost population. Twenty-three North Dakota counties had lost at least 10% of their population. Two counties, Towner and Sheridan, had lost more than 20% – almost a fourth of the people gone, in 10 years!

It was more than 50 years ago, at one of the first conventions of the National Association of Farm Broadcasters I attended. The broadcaster who gave the invocation at the banquet said, “Thank you, God, for letting us work with the greatest people on earth. And thank you for the opportunity to help them help you feed a hungry world.” His prayer was a reminder to us farm broadcasters that we had an educational role to play in the landlord-tenant relationship that exists between farmers, ranchers and The Almighty.

The headline read “Banner Year for U.S. Beef Exports in 2021.” It was a reminder of how important the export market is for many U.S. agricultural commodities. The domestic market is critically important, too, whether the commodity is raised for food, feed, fuel or fiber. One part of the feed demand that we don’t often think about is pet food.

Pet food is a $40 billion industry in this country. And the pet food market is an important one for many agricultural commodities, including barley.

Drought is depressing. Drought is different than other natural disasters. Hail, tornadoes, flash floods – they often come with little warning. The damage can be devastating, but it’s quick. Those disasters are rather like a heart attack or stroke. Drought, on the other hand, is more like cancer.

Our daughter in New York sent me a BBC article she came across about the future of farming. It talks about “the communications technologies required to move data between the field and the computational cloud, and the technology to process mind-boggling volumes of information with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.”

How do you feel about the future of farming? It’s a future full of technological advances, with “drones detecting weeds and delivering the right mix of herbicide.” Farming’s future is exciting.

There is a Facebook group, “Dakotas Abandoned Images,” where people post pictures of old, abandoned farm buildings and horse-drawn farm implements. Those photos elicit lots of comments about farming in a simpler time – about hard work, family and dreams.

A newspaper account I found said steamboats passing through Bismarck in 1881 carried 1,800 head of horses and cattle and 600 sheep.

The Bismarck Tribune, on Sept. 1, 1882, reported, “The Coteaus are admirably fit for stock raising. Sheep do particularly well. The effect of the climate is to make fleeces heavier.”

In March of that same year, the Jamestown Weekly Alert reported, “A party of Philadelphia capitalists are contemplating sheep farming on a large scale in Dakota.”

In early March, I went to check the cows in the calving pasture near the yard. There, probably cleaning up after a cow had given birth, was a bald eagle. The frequent bald eagle sightings of recent years are another reminder of how the mix of wildlife on our farm has changed.

We are enjoined to find a job we love. It’s a favorite of commencement speakers: “Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” A veteran farm broadcaster who I know and respect wrote, “I was always so radio-crazy that I arrived at work early and left late.”

One who thinks agriculture’s reliability should not be minimized is Neal Fisher, administrator of the N.D. Wheat Commission. Fisher cites statistics that crops and livestock, combined, have generated between $7 billion and $8.5 billion in all but two of the past 12 years. If you add crop insurance and government payments, Fisher says, the annual new wealth from those two agricultural sectors has been between $8 billion and $10 billion in all but two years since 2008.