Farm Byline

As we helped a neighbor haul cattle to grass last June, we drove past a ranch yard that had a very long tree windbreak extending from the barns to the south. I couldn’t help but think of the protection that shelterbelt offered cattle during the three-day blizzard just a month earlier.

At a trade show last spring, I asked a soybean industry official, “What is the most exciting thing happening in your world these days?” Without hesitation, he said, “Renewable diesel.” He went on to explain there were two soybean processing plants planned for North Dakota, and at least some soybean oil from those plants would be converted to renewable diesel at a refinery near Dickinson. The renewable diesel, he said, would then be shipped to states like California.

In May 1976, I sat across the desk from Allen Fisk, a state conservationist with the Soil Conservation Service. I don’t remember what the interview was about, but I do remember that Fisk had a barbed wire collection hanging on the wall of his office. Fisk got me started collecting barbed wire.

This past June, the small community of St. Anthony, south of Mandan, celebrated the 125th anniversary of its church. It left me with plenty to think about. Our family was part of the St. Anthony Catholic Parish as I was growing up, and we have been members since moving back to the farm 30 years ago.

A news article last month got me thinking about an interesting opportunity I had almost 20 years ago. The article stated food regulators had approved a genetically modified wheat variety for human consumption in Australia and New Zealand. The variety had been genetically modified by Argentinian scientists to withstand drought and the herbicide glufosinate.

As I prepared a rough draft of a “Farm Byline” for the May issue of North Dakota Living, I wrote some observations about the very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, situation farmers faced as they made planting decisions for the coming year. I set that column aside, though, and instead decided to write about the 25th anniversary of the terrible winter of 1996-97, which culminated with an April blizzard that killed over 100,000 cattle, and my experiences covering that blizzard as a TV reporter.

The TV news assignment editor called and asked if I would agree to be interviewed about my recollections of the blizzard of April 1997, as a cattleman and as a reporter. It had been a terrible winter. There had been a succession of blizzards. The April storm, named Hannah, killed more than 100,000 cattle in the state. Most vivid are my memories of the 120 yearlings that died southeast of Napoleon. The yearlings had drifted over a snow-buried fence.

It was such a dramatic contrast and it told a dramatic story. In mid-January, I spoke at the North Dakota Dairy Convention in Bismarck. It was a small crowd – very small, to be honest – a far cry from the dairy conventions of years ago.

Later that day, I talked to my niece, agricultural reporter Sarah Heinrich, who had attended a feedlot school at the Carrington Research Extension Center that same day. She said it was a full house.

On a cold day in late December 1978, photographer Donna VanHorn and I drove to Aberdeen, S.D., to do a report on foreign ownership of U.S. farmland. The economic boom in agriculture in the 1970s caused a dramatic rise in land values. The average price of farmland in North Dakota topped $100 an acre in 1972, then tripled in the next five years. There was concern that foreign investors might be taking advantage of the run-up in land prices, if not being at least partially responsible.