Agriculture Losing Out To Oil Interests

The MonDak has always stood out as an agricultural area, which is the prime reason many of us chose to make this region our home. We liked the farming way of life and preferred the peace of the country to the bustle of commercial centers. Well, our cherished way of life has practically vanished as agriculture and its lifestyle has had to move aside for the oil industry. The oil boom continues to trump agriculture in numerous ways and many area farmers feel that in the coming years, agriculture in our region faces very serious difficulties as it seeks to remain profitable while having to compete with oil interests.

Phil Hurley, who farms in the East Fairview area, has seen tremendous changes already and foresees ever increasing hurdles that agriculture will face. “Things are really changing and it will be a challenge to farm,” he says. “Oil came into this beautiful valley and is ripping it up. It is sad to see. Things are happening fast and there is more and more oil activity all the time.”

For those who have mineral acres, their loss gets compensated to a certain extent, but not nearly enough to rectify the curtailment or loss of farming activity. “We do have some mineral acres so we do get a piece of the pie,” Hurley comments. “However, we have fields with no mineral acres, and in North Dakota, if you don’t have mineral rights, an oil company can just come in and put in a well. We have such a well in the corner of a field, and the well takes up four acres. We received some surface damage compensation, and we can still farm around those four acres, but the crop that was in that field at the time was totally destroyed.”

He adds, “Now they want to run a pipeline through a field by our house. We already have that field ridged and ready for beets.”

Besides oil interests claiming more and more parts of his land, Hurley has experienced other problems in trying to farm, problems that didn’t exist a few years ago. “My goal was to expand,” he remarks, “but that’s at a standstill. There is no way I can buy property because farmland is now selling at commercial rates or above. There is no way farmers can compete with that. I can still farm, but it is on reduced acres.”

He continues, “Traffic is terrible. I’m dreading spring work. I need two or three flaggers just to get from farm to farm. During beet harvest last year, the truck traffic on the road was incredible. Most drivers took gravel roads all the way to the beet dump to avoid the traffic. We have some beet acres near Sidney but safety is key to me and to move equipment from here to Sidney is very bad as we need to run on the highway for two of those miles, and I’m concerned about the safety issue.”

The rape of the land promises to continue as oil activity shows no signs of slowing down in the near future. Man camps and other non-agricultural uses of the land will continue to escalate, robbing us of precious farmland. “If all the man camps and other activities happen that we are told are coming, you won’t recognize Fairview by the time summer arrives,” Hurley concludes.

Although other areas of the MonDak may not have the frenetic chaos found around Dore, the region’s farmers and ranchers still feel the brunt of increased traffic and experience many problems that hamper agriculture. Dan Thornton, who farms in the Lambert area, sees farm and rangeland around Lambert disappearing under the influx of oil. He expects to encounter serious problems in his ability to grow a crop in the coming months and years. “For the first time I can look out my picture window and see oil wells,” Thornton comments. “Each location takes up between five and seven acres and some properties have four oil wells. That adds up to a lot of acres. I see locations marked on the Crane road so more are coming and there will be more encroachments.”

“It is hard on farmers who have worked the land and on those who have bought more land,” Thornton continues. “When a farmer buys new land, mineral rights don’t come with it so farmers with that land can’t benefit. The oil companies just take the land away, pay a set amount for easements, and that’s it. The farmer doesn’t share in the harvest of the minerals.”

For many area residents, oil takes precedence. Agriculture continues to lose when it comes up against oil interests. Thornton wonders what people expect future generations will have to eat, as more and more agricultural land gets taken out of production. “For me, the biggest thing is that we have the horse behind the cart,” he remarks. “The price of commodities has gone up, but nowhere near as much as the price of oil. Farmers need oil products to run equipment, but input costs like fuel and fertilizer are getting out of hand. People need to decide if they want to eat food or drink oil.”

He adds, “With input costs so out of hand, if a farmer has one disaster year, it could be all over for him.”

If all farmers received a share of the oil wealth, it would provide some compensation for the loss of land, the inconvenience of farming around oil, the horrendous input costs farmers face just to plant a crop each spring, and for the loss of a way of life. However, that won’t happen, and agriculture will continue to lose ground. “Half the people in our area are not profiting,” Thornton remarks. “They don’t have oil wells and it gets harder and harder to keep up. We are getting to the point where we have the haves and the have nots. Farmers with some oil income will be OK, those without will continue to struggle and get to the point where they will disappear.”

The pastoral way of life we have known has gone the way of the tyrannosaurus Rex, a fact that makes many of us weep. “The old way of life is no more,” Thornton says. “Oil has taken that away. Many people are leaving, looking for the way of life we had here and that we no longer have. They want it back, and they know they won’t find it here.”

He concludes, “I have a friend from Oklahoma who witnessed an oil boom in his area. He told me two years before it happened just what would happen here to us, and he was right. He came here to get away and to enjoy our way of life, but now that way is gone. This used to be frontier, the way we liked it. Now we are just an oil hot spot.”