The Economist April 9th 2022 33
United StatesFarmingFields of gold
F
or a pictureof the evolution of mod-
ern agriculture, you could do worse
than visit the barn on Philip Volk’s farm,
near the city of Rugby in North Dakota. In-
side the ageing building is hundreds of
thousands of dollars-worth of equipment.
A huge red combine harvester sits next to
the green “air seeder”, which looks a little
like a bread slicer, and a tractor larger than
a tank. Pulled by the tractor, which follows
a gps-guided map automatically, the air
seeder cuts through the soil and, in just a
week or so, sows the entire crop, which on
Mr Volk’s farm is mostly spring wheat. Five
to six months later, the combine harvester
picks it all up almost as quickly, and then
trucks take it down the road to a grain ele-
vator, where it is graded and loaded onto
trains that carry it out to the west coast,
mostly to be shipped to Japan.
With a team of four (and a few more rel-
atives and neighbours roped in at harvest
time) Mr Volk is able to farm 5,000 acres
(2,000 hectares) of land. His great-grand-
father, who immigrated to America from
Germany, had to plough the land with
horses, then sow it manually, with dozens,if not hundreds of workers. The farm’s first
tractor, purchased by Mr Volk’s grandfather
almost a century ago, still sits in the barn.
It is dwarfed by the modern contraptions
next to it, and would not be much use on
the farm now. “I would not want to go back
and sit on an open-cab tractor and have the
toil my grandfather had,” says Mr Volk.
America’s farmers face interesting
times. On the plains of North Dakota and
Montana, as across the border in Saskatch-
ewan in Canada, the biggest crop is spring
wheat, which is planted in April and har-
vested in late summer. Planting on farms
in Montana has begun already; Mr Volkwill start soon. Thanks to the war in Uk-
raine, wheat prices are the highest they
have been since 2008, meaning that farm-
ers ought to make a lot of money. But they
have to adjust for much higher input pric-
es, too, particularly for fertiliser and fuel.
And drought for much of the past three
years has lowered output.
Despite the higher prices, Mr Volk reck-
ons that he will plant only 5-10% more
wheat this year than he would have done
without the war, because the risk of spend-
ing so much on inputs is too high if the
crop does not actually come through. “Two
weeks of the wrong weather can change
the story in a heartbeat,” he says.
That is bad news for the consumers of
wheat, in particular poor people in coun-
tries in north Africa which rely on now-lost
Ukrainian and Russian supplies. Over half
of American wheat is exported. But it ought
to be good news for farmers, since a glut is
unlikely to push prices down again soon.
American farmers are making good
money. Net farm income last year in-
creased by 25%, according to the Depart-
ment of Agriculture (usda), to its highest
level since 2013. The department reckons
that it may dip slightly this year, partly be-
cause of reduced government support
linked to covid-19, and partly because of
higher input costs. But only slightly. The
price of farmland, an indicator of the prof-
itability of farming, as well as interest
rates, is the highest it has ever been. Farm-
land in Iowa, America’s most agricultural
state, has sold for over $20,000 an acre.R UGBY, NORTH DAKOTA
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