As my car reached the top of a hill in rural southern Morton County, North Dakota, I felt like I was overlooking a huge patchwork quilt.
There were golds, yellows, deep greens and lighter greens, and pale purple that almost looked like lace. None of the “patches” were even or uniform, but they all fit together perfectly, with dirt-road brown or grassy green borders in between.
After wrapping up an interview for the
with Jaden Russell, North Dakota State University Extension ag and natural resources agent for Morton County, we started talking about how many crops there were so close by.
In under half a mile from
the spring wheat field we were standing in,
there were fields of corn, alfalfa and sunflowers. On my drive back toward Mandan, I also saw grass hay, native pasture, soybeans, sorghum and sudangrass — and probably more crops that I’m forgetting. There were many herds of cattle. There were windrows of hay and some that had been baled. There were cereal crops that had already been combined, and the straw had been baled.
Russell told me he used to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in Nebraska before moving back to his home state of North Dakota. In the part of Nebraska where he worked, corn and soybeans dominated agriculture, with most farmers planting just those crops. That’s making for tough times right now, with
corn and soybean prices where they are.
That patchwork quilt of agriculture I saw in Morton County wasn’t just a pretty sight. It’s a sign of the diversity that offers some strength and protection to agriculture in this region. If one crop’s economic outlook isn’t great, you can choose to put more acres into something else. I know very few crops are offering high prices right now, but farmers here can choose to minimize losses or at least spread out the risk. Those with livestock can grow more for feed (and perhaps even think about expanding a herd, given current cattle markets).
Jenny Schlecht / Agweek
No, all farmers can’t just switch crops on a whim. Some crops require special equipment or processes, and there aren’t markets for every crop in every place. Other crops — namely sugarbeets in this region — require market access, like having shares to a cooperative, which obviously can’t be obtained at the drop of a hat.
But how great is it to have options? No one is required to grow a crop that they know they will end up selling below their cost of production — meaning at a loss. If something else is a better fit economically or in a rotation, doing something different is an option.
As someone whose primary personal agricultural interest is in cattle, I’ve always had a bit of a hard time with hand-wringing over low crop prices, particularly when they’ve been low and appear likely to stay low. If you know something is going to lose you money, think of something else you can do.
We’ve had to do that forever in cattle. We come up with break-even numbers on selling calves off the cow, backgrounding or finishing. We look at the numbers for selling heifers for market or for replacements or developing them into bred heifers. Some producers put in the hard work to build a seedstock herd, with painstaking decisions on genetics and physique that give them a premium for their animals. We learn how to use market-based risk management tools like puts and calls or the USDA’s Livestock Risk Protection programs.
It’s not foolproof, of course, and
there have been many hard times in livestock, too.
That’s probably why our U.S. cattle herd
but it’s probably also why the ranchers who have been able to keep at it are seeing high prices now. We are not oversupplied in cattle and driving down our own prices.
The beautiful landscape I saw in Morton County — and similar counties throughout the region where a kaleidoscope of crops are grown — was a wonderful reminder that no one has to do any one thing in agriculture. You can pivot, you can be creative, you can choose to do something different. It’s a tough business, but there’s no reason to make it harder than it needs to be by sticking to something that isn’t working. Maybe your next crop season, you can add to the quilt of diverse crops this region has to offer.
Jenny Schlecht is the director of ag content for Agweek and serves as editor of Agweek, Sugarbeet Grower and BeanGrower. She lives on a farm and ranch near Medina, North Dakota, with her husband and two daughters. You can reach her at [email protected] or 701-595-0425.