Bigger Threat to Rural Community: GF&P or Expanding Farms?

South Dakota Cattlemen's Association 1^st VP Todd Mortenson of Hayes is worried about the fraying of rural community. In a hearing before a legislative committee Monday on the operations of the state Department of Game Fish & Parks Monday, Mortenson expressed his concern that as the state buys up more land for hunting and recreation, it crowds out neighbors:

Government purchases of land make it more difficult for a rural community to survive, a Stanley County rancher testified.

The point was driven home on his trip to Pierre that day, Todd Mortenson said. He stopped to fight a hay-yard fire at a neighbor's ranch and realized that there were few other neighbors for miles around. There was a time, he said, when many ranchers would have rushed to fight the blaze.

"Neighbors are getting farther and farther apart all the time," he said. "When the state starts purchasing land ... it takes away some of the fabric of the rural community" [Terry Woster, "Agency Criticized for Land Policies," that Sioux Falls paper, 2008.08.12].

Fewer neighbors in Stanley County... due to GF&P land purchases? In 2000, the population of the county was 2,772. 1,991 of those folks lived in Fort Pierre. That leaves 781 people spread out over the 1,440 square miles of land in the county, a population density of 0.54 people per square mile, or 19.5 people per 36-mi² township.

George Vandel, assistant director of GF&P's Wildlife Division, says GF&P has purchased 3,100 acres over the past couple years and now has 291,000 acres total of game production and water access land. That's less than 1/100^th of the 44 million acres—over 90% of South Dakota's land area—used for agriculture.

The average size of a farm in South Dakota is about 1400 acres. In Stanley County, the average ag operation is 5,200 acres. Even if GF&P had bought all 3,100 of those new wildlife/water access acres in Stanley County, it wouldn't have entirely bought out one average-size ranch.

If farm and ranch neighbors are getting fewer, the likely culprit is not Game Fish & Parks, which purchases land for the common use of all South Dakotans. The blame lies with the consolidation of bigger and bigger ag land holdings in fewer and fewer hands. When the modern corporate ag-industrial system makes it harder for veteran farmers to hang on and young farmers to get in, we're bound to see the countryside empty out and all the growth concentrate in town. That population pattern appears to be exactly what's happening in Stanley County: the only reason the county population has increased over the last decade has been the growth of Fort Pierre outpacing the decline of the surrounding rural population. GF&P buying a few acres here and there around the state is the least of the causes of that trend.

Short on neighbors? It might give us more solace to blame the government, but GF&P's purchases of land for public use are a flea to the thundering buffalo of our economic system favoring big operators and crushing small farms and ranches and the communities they used to support.