You may have noticed all the semitrucks hauling hay last fall and this winter. That’s not surprising, given the 2021 drought. In the hardest-hit areas, cattlemen put up little, if any, hay and were forced to sell cows, buy hay, put up hay somewhere else or a combination of all three. You see trucks hauling hay every year, and obviously more in dry years. What was different this time was what those semis were carrying.
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.
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.
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.”
