An Urban's Rural View

Driving from Washington, D.C., to Newport, Oregon, crossing 13 states, I saw a lot of agriculture. But what I saw is barely a fraction of what these states grow and raise. For a more comprehensive picture I looked not out the window but at the statistics. This is the second and final installment of the cross-country statistical ag tour I described in my previous post (http://tiny.cc/…).

NEBRASKA: The Cornhusker state is third in the country in 2013 total farm receipts (http://tiny.cc/…) at $23.6 billion -- $7.4 billion corn and $10.6 billion cattle. It's 16th in land area (http://tiny.cc/…) but only 37th in population (http://tiny.cc/…) with 1.9 million people. My wife and I paused for a few days in Omaha; I will blog next week on a dinner conversation we had with a friend who grows corn and soybeans in eastern Nebraska.

COLORADO: Hailstones as big as taws -- large marbles -- greeted us shortly after we crossed into eastern Colorado. We turned tail and waited out the storm over a cup of coffee in Sterling and contemplated the state's stats: eighth in the nation in land area but in the low twenties in both population (5.4 million) and farm receipts ($7.2 billion). Cattle were the state's biggest 2013 line item at $3.7 billion. Crops collectively brought in only $2.3 billion, with corn the biggest at $668,000.

UTAH: Farm receipts keep declining as we head west. Utah's at $1.8 billion in 2013 were less than a third of Colorado's, which were less than a third of Nebraska's. Utah's receipts put it in the bottom quintile of the country. The biggest line item: cattle at $412,000. Utah is 13th in land area and 33rd in population. It is Number One, I would argue, in beautiful rock formations.

IDAHO: With fewer mountains and more cropland in a land area that's nearly as big as Utah's, Idaho ends the declining trend. It had $8.3 billion in total farm receipts in 2013. The top line items were interesting: dairy ($2.5 billion) followed by cattle ($1.9 billion) and vegetables and melons ($1.2 billion). Idaho ranks 39th in population.

OREGON: What sticks out in Oregon, from both the drive-by view and the statistics, is the agricultural variety. The state's farm receipts weren't as big as I expected -- barely in the top 30 in the country at $4.7 billion. But driving west from the Idaho border on US20, the first crops I saw were fields of vegetables I couldn't identify and fields that a sign suggested were hops. Cattle was the state's biggest 2013 line item at $765 million -- Oregon has its share of high desert pastureland. Dairy was a surprising (to me) second at $528 million. Variety was evident in the third, fourth and fifth line items: fruits and nuts ($661 million); vegetables and melons ($499 million) and wheat ($405 million). Corn, in contrast, was only $42 million.

Having arrived in Newport, I can sum up the value of touring with statistics in a few words: It paints a more rounded and accurate picture of the agriculture in the 13 states on our route. Looking out the window, by comparison, tricks you with an unrepresentative sampling of what a state grows. It has to: Whatever route you choose to take, a cross-country drive will cover less than one-tenth of 1% of the nation's 4 million miles of roads.

But while the statistics offer the more inclusive view, you would have to dig far deeper into them than I did to get the full story. Example: You'd never guess from the high-level USDA numbers that the U.S. raises sheep, but they were frequently visible on the hillsides of the western states on our route.

There aren't enough of them to make a separate line item in the farm-receipts tables I relied on (http://tiny.cc/…), but checking a different set of stats (http://tiny.cc/…), Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Oregon all make the list of top-ten sheep-producing states. And while overall sheep and lamb numbers continue to decline, the country as a whole had an inventory of 5.2 million on January 1, 2014. In a country as big and bounteous as ours, even the rounding-error product lines add up.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)