Rising crop and land prices, technology are putting more land to the plow in Iowa and the Midwest

This Iowa golf course has been plowed under.

"Across much of the Midwest the sharp increase in farm earnings has driven the price of farmland to previously unimaginable — and, some say, unsustainable — levels," A.G. Sulzberger reports for The New York Times. "But in the process, to much less fanfare, the financial rewards have also encouraged farmers to put ever more land into production, including parcels that until recently were too small or too poor in quality to warrant a second glance." Those include golf courses, old family homesteads, farmland that had been idled and awaiting development, and land that had been idled or converted to pasture in return for payments from the federal Conservation Reserve Program. (Times photo by Eric Thayer)

The push to plow worries environmentalists and conservationists concerned about soil erosion and water pollution, but in Iowa, "the nation’s biggest producer of corn and soybeans, farmers insist that they are simply getting more value form their land," Sulzberger reports."The force pushing more land into production is the rise in crop prices: in the past five years corn prices tripled and those for soybeans doubled because of swelling worldwide demand, including demand for ethanol production. At the same time yields have spiked because of genetically engineered crops and improvements in farming technology, which are also allowing farmers to grow in previously inhospitable areas. In turn farmers, flush from the most profitable years in decades and looking for better places to store money than low-interest savings accounts or a turbulent stock market, are putting their money in land." (Read more)