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My cousins farm wheat in NE Montana, on land that has been in the family for 100 years, and of course, lots more land. They use low till farming methods, with air seeders and using much more ag chemicals than they used to use. They used to strip farm, but now almost all their tillable land is in crops every year. My cousin told me that he didn't think they had done any actual plowing of the wheatland since the late 80's. They use a fraction of the amount of diesel they used to use farming the old ways, and even though the fertilizer and ag chemicals cost a lot, their yields are more than double per acre than they used to be. And where the whole area used to be very dusty 6 months of the year, now the air is much clearer and the problem of wind erosion of topsoil is more or less cured. And with the prices for wheat this year, they are doing very well. I read the article in Geographic. The real issue is the fact that a quarter section is way too small for a family to earn a living raising wheat, or for that matter, most legal crops. So the little homestead properties have been bought up by bigger farmers to achieve economy of scale to afford the big equipment used today. That left a lot of farmsteads, with their house, and maybe barn, chickenhouse and grainery. If the buildings were well built, maybe they are still being used. But buildings do wear out, and lots of times the old time farm buildings were not constructed very well, with lousy foundations one of the biggest problems. When the roof starts leaking, the rest of the building deteriorates quickly. It isn't just in North Dakota that the rural towns and small farms are disappearing. I live near Spokane, which is a fairly big city, with lots of jobs available. Spokane, and everything between it and Coeur d'Alene is growing fairly fast. But not that far out of the urban area, in farm country, the population is shrinking quickly. Where almost all the little towns used to support their own high school, now there are only a few consolidated school districts, and many of them are on a downward spiral in their numbers of students. There are fewer and fewer jobs available in the rural areas...where my grandfather sometimes had more than 10 hired hands, my 2 cousins farm 10 times the acreage and seldom hire any outside help. A friend of mine is a farmer that over the years has bought several other properties that included buildings. Back in the 80's he thought he could do OK by renting out the better farmhouses. He had a terrible time getting his renters to pay the very reasonable rent, and also had trouble with needing to do a whole lot of maintainance at just the worst times. And then he found that one set of renters was growing marijuana in the house. Since then he has bulldozed all the old buildings and got rid of the headaches. It is a real shame that SOME of the old houses have not been saved, since some of them were very good houses that could have continued to be enjoyed by the people living in them. But at least around here, it is just too much hassle to break a small parcel of land with the buildings off of a much larger piece of farmland. So lots of old houses and other buildings are just left to decay until they fall down or become practice burns for the local volunteer fire department.
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