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Agriculture
10:09 am
Wed October 31, 2012

Why is farmland so expensive?

Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
A clod of soil and some corn from some of the priciest land in Missouri: Saline County.
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On Friday, I left the rolling hills of Columbia, Mo., and headed northwest, to the flat farmland of Saline County. The purpose of the drive was to get a look at the priciest cropland in Missouri for a story I'm doing on how investors with no connection to farmland are increasingly interested in buying acreage in the Midwest. I had heard from farmers and real estate brokers that cropland values were at all-time highs in the Corn Belt, and incredibly many of the tracts of land are being paid for in cash.

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Agriculture
3:17 pm
Wed October 3, 2012

Rediscovering my family farm

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Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
My dad, Mike Swanson, gets his first combine ride from our cousin, Darwin Swanson, during soybean harvest.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
From our perch in the monster machine, we watched the beans pour from the back of the combine into the trailer alongside us.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
After a show-stopping dinner of barbecue ribs and a vast array of delectable sides, we watched the sun set.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
Wind turbines blinking red on the Knox County horizon.
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This past weekend, for the first time in 25 years, my dad and I visited our family’s farm in Woodhull, Ill.

By family, I mean extended family. Brothers Doug and Darwin Swanson — my dad’s first cousins — run the farm, which got its start with land bought in 1890 by my great-great grandfather, Swan Swanson, when he moved to Illinois from Sweden.

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Agriculture
5:37 pm
Thu September 27, 2012

Mud and Moonscape: Missouri towns struggle with flood recovery

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Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
"It is pure sand dunes," Atchison County Sheriff Dennis Martin said, of Corning, Mo. land still covered with sand a year after surging Missouri River waters receded. "Before the weeds started growing up, it looked like the moon."
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
Down the road, St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church is one of the flood's casualties. It closed after waters rose three feet high. Then the water sat there for months.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
A mud line marks how high the waters went on the 1893 Gothic Revival building.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
A toilet graveyard sits behind the church.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
The one-room 1912 schoolhouse behind the church is still caked with dried-up mud the river left behind. It also sustained water damage in 1952 and 1993.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
The waters put this schoolhouse stove under water. Church elders don't know if and how they will re-open the church.
Credit Abbie Fentress Swanson/Harvest Public Media
But Sheriff Martin says Corning is resilient. "We're going to see crop ground ... that has been renovated and the expense they are going to try to get this back in production has got to be phenomenal. But it is their life … it’s their home."
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Back in April, Harvest Public Media’s Grant Gerlock headed to Tekamah, Neb., to see how planting was going for farmers on the Missouri River floodplain. The river's surging waters put thousands of farm acres in Nebraska under water last summer, causing more than $100 million in crop losses in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

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Agriculture
1:29 pm
Thu September 13, 2012

Help us map out the drought in the Midwest

Credit Map by Abbie Fentress Swanson (Harvest Public Media). Data submitted by farmers and livestock producers through the Public Insight Network.
The nation’s worst drought in decades moved Harvest Public Media to look at how the drought is affecting livestock producers just starting out in the business.
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Parts of the Midwest got a reprieve from the drought this week, according to the latest US Drought Monitor report released on Thursday. The report found that last weekend’s cold front brought up to five inches of rain to southeastern Missouri, eastern Illinois and central Indiana.

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