Word: wheats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diesel tractors, brand-named Big Bud 525 and Steiger Panther, pushed 60-ft.-wide chisel plows into the gentle prairie around the hamlet of Winnett, Mont., quickly transforming what once was Wayne Bratten's 28,000-acre ranch into a raw wound of overturned earth. Eastern Colorado Wheat Farmer Emmett Linnebur became a part owner of the Crow Rock Ranch near Miles City, Mont., and used a fleet of ten supertractors to tear into 50,000 of its acres for wheat planting. In recent years, tractors have bulldozed some 6.4 million acres of marginal grasslands in Montana and Colorado...
Critics of sodbusting, as the increasingly common practice of slicing grazing lands into wheat farms is called, say that most of the marginal land of the Great Plains cannot support commercial exploitation. With less than 20 inches of precipitation a year, the region is semiarid. These marginal soils, where they are not too rocky or saline, are often too sandy for farming or are packed with calcium and lime. When overturned by plow blades, valuable topsoil only a few inches thick becomes vulnerable to wind and rain erosion; once gone, it takes decades to replace. The sodbusters are either...
Sodbusters buy rangeland at prices that are relatively low because of today's depressed livestock industry, plow and plant the acreage in wheat, then sell the cultivated land, sometimes to buyers unfamiliar with the region and the fragility of the range's topsoil. Since the mid-1970s, planted prairie tracts have shot up in value because of speculation in cropland as an inflation hedge and federal farm programs such as PIK (payment in kind...
...allows farmers to sell federal surplus grain if they agree to plant less wheat in a given year. If a farmer with 100 acres of wheat land wishes to apply for PIK, he must first have farmed the land for two years. Once his application is accepted, he can take some or all of the land out of production in the third year and ask the Government for, say, 80% to 95% of the grain that the land would have produced. The farmer can then sell that wheat for the highest price he can get. The national average this year...
While not directly affecting most speculators right now, the existence of PIK has helped encourage sodbusting. In one area of Montana, for example, undeveloped land that sold for $100 an acre recently fetched more than twice that price when tilled in wheat. Says Ronald Miller, a federal district conservationist: "As long as a person can come in and almost immediately double his money, the problem is going to continue...