It certainly should raise the question as to whether expensive hotels should be built in those areas but if the question was raised it was answered with money. They have lax enforcement of some types of rules in some areas for some types of people. They have strict enforcement of rules in other situations. And that’s part of the problem with living in Hawaii - government officials are often inconsistent, incompetent, biased and/or corrupt. Hawaii makes California look like a well run state.
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Chikn, on a serious note, do you have any idea how feasible would it be to buy 5 acres of prime farmland in Iowa without being surrounded by conventional farmland and all the issues like chemical drift that go along with that? My sister-in-law and her husband and family live in Iowa, and my family just visited them over Thanksgiving. While we were there we visited the Brenton Arboretum (which especially interested me because they have a collection of thornless osage orange cultivars, and I have a very small (~1/4 acre) plantation of seedling osage oranges growing already and am interested in possibly planting more osage oranges), and the arboretum manager mentioned the issues they’ve had with chemical damage to trees growing on the sides of the property (none of it immediately lethal, as best I can remember from what I heard.)
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I don’t know about Iowa but in most places with large stretches of good farmland, it’s very difficult to find small parcels that are not surrounded by 100s or even 1000s of acres of farmland soaked in glyphosate or other toxic chemicals. Even when the drift is not bad enough to injure plants, it can be bad enough to impact your health. There is a lot of good farmland in western Missouri south of KC, and it’'s often cheaper than Iowa farmland, but it’s hard to find parcels that are not surrounded by poisoned soil, water or air. The other problem with Iowa are the pig farms… Take a look at Iowa in this national map of factory farms-
https://www.factoryfarmmap.org/
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The Palisades area is a superior area for peaches and wine grapes, probably apples too. Lots of commercial peaches and grapes are grown in this small town. Some folks consider these to be the best peaches grown anywhere.
Find a county near the dark black line…just DON’T go into Illinois…stay away! 
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Can’t help but to be curious about what you are going to be the use of your 1/4 acre seedling Osage after it matures. I know that some folks sell Osage as staves (or billets) for selfbow building. There is a market for that. Somehow though, I doubt if that is what you are going to be using it for. Why thornless? I thought it always had thorns.
Here is a screen shot of an orchard near where my grandparents lived in Colorado, this is just outside of orchard city. The trees would mostly only get water from irrigation but the winters are long and the summers are kind of hot. You can dive up on grand mesa in the summer and the temperature is always cool in the summer. I was up on grand mesa at the end of may and there was still three feet of snow on the ground, that’s where the irrigation water comes from
That’s what’s the matter with me, soaked in toxic chemicals
Yeah pig farms, bad news. We should shoot and bury all them pigs, right?
Ever been to Iowa? I can answer that…NO. You have no clue what your talking about.
Yes, I have been to Iowa. Multiple times.
No, I didn’t say that anyone should shoot and bury all the pigs in Iowa. That was something that just popped up in your head for no known reason. Maybe the toxic chemicals.
The only thing I was talking about is that there are a lot of pig farms in Iowa, which is a fact.
Top 10 U.S. states by inventory of hogs and pigs in 2017 (in 1,000s) (guess who’s number 1?)
When you find land that is cheaper than it should be in ag areas, whether they be in NW Arkansas, west Texas or Iowa, you should look carefully for nearby CAFO operations.
They can really bring down the price of land which might fool you into thinking you got a deal if you don’t know they’re there. Most people don’t want to be anywhere near a CAFO operation.
You would have to purchase small, isolated plots. They abound every where. Along creek beds or areas cut by roads, all over. I’m not sure where the Brenton is but Osage orange is at the northern extreme in the southern part of Polk Co.(Des Moines area). North of my house you don’t see them, just south of here they are stunted and small.
I’ve gardened and farmed in Iowa for years and have never had a drift problem even when my veg. fields abutted corn or soybeans. You talk to people, explain what you’re doing and they are most happy to accommodate you. You tell them they are jerks and are destroying the earth, conversation has ended and spray maybe done on a day that’s not appropriate.
Pigs smell bad, but the manure is spread and recycled. In order to economically raise poultry, you need to keep them protected, you need to have a system to collect eggs, feed nearby, a system to get rid of waste productively. That’s much easier when the are all together and you can use machinery to help. Same with cattle. It is never a good idea to mistreat your livestock, to waste their lives. It disgusts me to see animals wasted, it can’t always be helped but so stupid to do intentionally.
Same with chemicals, they’re outrageously expensive, trips across fields are expensive, spray on your neighbors is really pricey, the label is the law and that is so drilled into applicators heads because 1 screwup and your license is revoked permanently and so is your job.
Iowa has a lot to say for it and a lot wrong too, same as other places. 5 acres of prime will be hard to pry outa some ones hands unless you get a field where it’s hard to turn a tractor or isolated away from your main operation and most are spoken for for years to come. It’s a good place to live if the weather behaves, which it does 3-4 days a year!
What does that dark black line represent (Mississippi River excluded)?
If you want affordable land in that you could find it more in the south 1/3.
Not Chikn, but it is easier to find land not next to corn/soy in southern Iowa. Southern Iowa isn’t prime farm land. There is more pasture land in the southern 1/3 of IA. But really it is dependent on your definition of “prime farm land”. Like Chikn mentioned above, prime farm land with high CSR’s go for well over $10k/acre.
CSR = Corn Suitability Rating. Here in the corn belt, we have a lang rating system based on its potential to grow corn. A CSR of 100 is not necessarily good for growing fruit trees.
I’ve done a little looking wanting to be in that market, but I doubt it will ever be in reach. You could expect to pay a premium for sub-divided land in a 5 ac plot. Those plots often have home sites and outbuildings on them too. The closer you get the major population centers, it will really skyrocket in price as the market is tight and demand is high. Something with forest and a creek could easily go for a bit of money too, as hunting land, though those parcels probably are bigger than 5 ac.
Land prices really jumped a few years ago when corn was over $8 a bushel. They are starting to come down a bit.
Your totally right on that csr100 land, too deep and too rich. Some areas in S. Ia. would make excellent orchard ground, nicely sloped to drain cold air and decent markets both north and south.
We had a saying when I grew squash, don’t grow it until it’s sold.
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Chikn, have you followed the stories about dicamba from the last year or two, especially from Arkansas and Missouri? Those stories make drift seem like a very real and very extensive problem, and I believe it.
Here’s a good article about dicamba, and this is just one of many chemicals:
Sometimes it’s hard to explain to a conventional farmer what you’re doing when you’re growing on a small scale and in very different ways, different crops, etc. A few large farmers just start off hostile to anyone doing things that even implicitly suggest that there’s anything wrong with the conventional way of doing things (simply by being different and relatively inefficient by their simplistic ways of figuring things). And like you say, if you rub someone the wrong way, conventional farming neighbors might mess your property up (with chemicals or however) on purpose. And even if the neighboring farmer wants to be a good neighbor, that’s not to say his employees won’t be careless or ignorant, or that he won’t hire a contractor to spray chemicals for him whom you won’t ever even have an opportunity to talk to before he sprays right up to the edge of your property (or at least tries to.) I have personal experience with some of these kind of situations. My neighbors are very good to me and I haven’t personally had any major issues, but there have been enough little incidents to confirm in my mind how complicated things are and how much potential there is for things to go wrong.
The worst for me was probably broadcast barley cover crop seed that effectively ruined a large percentage of my small wheat crop last year when it was slung 50+’ across the fence, including the section of wheat I had intended to grow for seed which I had planted with hand harvested and hand threshed seed. A lot of work had gone into that. And the beginning of my field was 15-20’ from the edge of the property line. How much of the edge of my property should I have sacrificed? I have more than 5 acres, but most of my land is too rolling to be properly tillable, and a significant part of my tillable land is on the edge of the property. On a 5 acre property, leaving a 50’ buffer around the edge of your property would mean sacrificing at least 38% of your property (more if it’s not a perfect square.) And some of these chemical drift issues are measured in miles instead of feet. I really don’t think it’s fair to suggest these issues aren’t really anything to worry about.
The guy that ran the arboretum in Iowa didn’t make a big deal out of it, but trees at the arboretum had been damaged by neighboring farmers’ chemicals. You can say that’s not a big deal, but I don’t think you can assume the problem can be avoided if you’re growing next to conventional row crops.
On the other hand, the other common options, wilderness, suburbia, and rich people, often aren’t much better. If you’re surrounded by rural land that isn’t being farmed, it’s probably land that’s not very well suited to being farmed. Maybe it would be suitable to orchard crops but not row crops, and that might be a good option if you only wanted to grow orchard crops, but if instead of row crops you’re surrounded by mostly undeveloped wilderness, you could face huge wildlife pressure. A rural area that’s not too sparsely populated (i.e. relatively more densely populated than most parts of Iowa) will probably mean a lot of hunters keeping deer populations down, but more extensive wilderness could be really challenging in terms of deer and racoons, etc.
If you’re surrounded by or very near development/suburbia that precludes hunting, then you may have even worse deer pressure than you would if you were surrounded by wilderness. Of course, property prices and property taxes will likely be a lot higher. Maybe you can get an ag exemption to reduce the taxes (if you can afford the property in the first place), but in my state, for example, that requires that a bare minimum of 5 acres is in actual production – 1 full acre is automatically excluded from qualifying for the minimum as the home site regardless of whether the home site is packed full of fruit trees or whatever other crops – and that you’re grossing a certain amount of farm income every year, and the reduction doesn’t kick in until you’ve met the requirements (and paid full taxes) for 3 years first. And being near development often means lots of farming/homesteading unfriendly regulations: requirements to hook up to municipal water, exclusion of farm animals, rules against hanging laundry out on the line, neighbors that will try to find bureaucrats to harass you if you do anything that offends their often irrational suburban sensibilities, etc.
Here’s one example of that kind of thing:
http://reason.com/archives/2017/12/23/upstate-new-york-town-defeats-council-me
A CAFO, so long as it isn’t right next door, might be preferable to some of these other options if you’re actually wanting to grow fruit and maybe do other farm/homestead things. I lived in an “extreme” CAFO county (mainly broilers) my first 4 years farming before I bought the larger property where I live now. It was a great place to live and farm (although not the easiest market for direct marketing, but not too far from better markets either.) The people were great. There were a lot of advantages to having neighbors with not-too-huge farms and tractors and equipment, etc., such that we could buy straw bales cheaply if we wanted them for mulch, hire someone to do tractor work for us, find rot-resistant locust posts for sale, find hunters or trappers willing to come help us for free with animal problems, etc., etc. I think there’s really a lot to be said for living in a working class, rural community.
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I worked in Iowa in the 1990s ,and was shocked to see severe herbicide damage (Atrizine ,at that time) in the middle of most every town.
The street trees in town !
Also I noticed that despite being on the best soil in the world,
And a high % of the population being farmers, there were hardly any gardens,
I asume because of spray drift ?
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I see lots of farmers who don’t have much garden. They need to maintain sharp focus on their commercial crops in order to survive. ALso, some farm communities maintain diversified produce auctions where you can buy anything in season for low and often “give away” prices. At one local auction in Virginia you could buy a whole bin (20 Bu) of apples for $25 and a bushel of tomatoes for $10
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I see a lot of farmers that don’t have much garden
I see this too,but don’t understand ?
I think the real reasons commercial farmers frequently don’t keep gardens are pretty much the same reasons other people don’t keep gardens: they’re picky eaters and they don’t hardly eat vegetables; if they eat lettuce they want it pre-mixed and pre-washed and they want it to be available 365 days/year and taste exactly the same every time; they don’t want to leave the air conditioning of their tractor cab and do manual labor, in part because they’re out of shape (vicious circle); their wives work regular jobs and have no interest in any kind of farming lifestyle – they might even go out of their way to avoid having anything to do with farming things… In fact, it seems rare for dairy farmers to even drink their own milk, let alone make their own butter or cheese… I know plenty of other produce farmers (including direct-market organic farmers) that rarely if ever take the time to cook from scratch, let alone freeze or can their surpluses to eat in the off season. A friend of mine lived on a coffee plantation in El Salvador for a couple years where the workers drank instant Nestle. I think the reason so many beekeepers love to talk up honeybees’ importance as pollinators is because they don’t really appreciate honey and they don’t hardly eat it. You’d be hard pressed to find a conventional corn farmer that ever ate a pan of cornbread made from his own corn.
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Interesting that its so much cheaper there!
Sadly, you cant buy anything cheaper than that here.
Properties where building is allowed are far more expensive.
They can range from 25€ per m² to 1000€ per m² (In lower Austria 150€ per m² is very common … even in villages! 
)
Its a nice place to spend time together there.
We were driving from Brisbane to Airlie Beach and back and visited some really nice places.
I hope that i can visit Australia again in 2020-2021.
Want to see that beautiful land again!
Hillbilly,
I can speak to that. I used to own a CAFO (600 sows) and now have a small commercial peach orchard. My wife’s grandpa farmed full time, till he was 90. He worked very hard (sun up to sun down type of thing) but wasn’t much for gardening because he said the returns on labor were so poor for gardening. He kept a few fruit trees, but that was about it.
He was right. He could take care of more livestock, or farm more acres and make a lot more money than gardening.
I’ve found the same thing true. For example I used to plant sweet corn by hand. It was a laborious process to plant enough to have some to put up. Last summer I bought a planter and planted about 3.5 acres of sweet corn. It’s only a 4 row planter, and I could plant an acre in about 15 minutes (You can figure about an acre per bottom per hour on a planter.) It was incredibly easy and fast compared to what I was used to.
For me, I just don’t have time to garden anymore. I do lots of physical labor in the summer. My back ached this summer from picking and hauling peaches. I’d have to take time away from my orchard to garden, and there just isn’t much return compared to growing and selling peaches.
Honestly, I’m pretty tired in the summer, to the point I don’t even pick a few small blueberry bushes I have in the backyard, or a small strawberry patch. I’m just too tired to even pick them.
I used to garden (and enjoyed it immensely) before I had the peach orchard. I still garden a tiny bit, or at least plant things. Occasionally I throw in a few small rows of beets. My wife and I are talking about planting some turnips next spring. I do grow and sell fruits like apples, peaches, and tomatoes, and some sweet corn. We get to eat all we want of those, so you might say I’m sort of gardening that way.
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Let me know when your best are about to start, I need to help your returns. You grow the best!!
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