The furious pace of energy exploration in North Dakota is creating a
crisis for farmers whose grain shipments have been held up by a vast new
movement of oil by rail, leading to millions of dollars in agricultural
losses and slower production for breakfast cereal giants like General
Mills. The
backlog is only going to get worse, farmers said, as they prepared this
week for what is expected to be a record crop of wheat and soybeans. “If
we can’t get this stuff out soon, a lot of it is simply going to go on
the ground and rot,” said Bill Hejl, who grows soybeans, wheat and sugar
beets in the town of Casselton, about 20 miles west of here. Although
the energy boom in North Dakota has led to a 2.8 percent unemployment
rate, the lowest in the nation, the downside has been harder times for
farmers who have long been mainstays of the state’s economy. Agriculture
was North Dakota’s No. 1 industry for decades, representing a quarter
of its economic base, but recent statistics show that oil and gas have
become the biggest contributors to the state’s gross domestic product...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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