2022 Spring Farm Outlook

Page 16 Spring 2022 Logan County Farm Outlook LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March / April 2022 Spring 2022 Logan County Farm Outlook LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March / April 2022 Page 17 Act, the final authority regarding Clean Water Act jurisdiction remains with EPA. WOTUS is not dead, and could once again raise its requirements and enforcement levels, especially if it is linked in any manner to the CLIMATE CRISIS hysteria that the current administration is pushing hard. In December 2021, the EPA released recommendations from the Farm, Ranch, and Rural Communities Advisory Committee (FRRCC) based on discussions from public forums from 2020 to 2021. FRRC recommendations include: • Placing limits on the scope of federal jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act by using the term “navigable”; • Clarifying the definition of WOTUS in terms that are easy to interpret; • Defining jurisdictional features that provide flexibility for farmers and ranchers to implement environmental innovation projects; and • Retaining clear exclusions that are critical to farmers, ranchers, and rural communities, including groundwater, canals, previously converted cropland, and more. The most pressing problem of the pre-2015 WOTUS regulations is that the rules are ambiguous, hard to interpret, and difficult to enforce and too far reaching. No one knows what the future of WOTUS will be, but know that the dead zone in the Gulf grew last year from an average of 50,000 square miles to more than 63,000 square miles, and something still needs to be done. [Jim Youngquist] I n the middle of the morning on a cool day in early March, the small conference room at the Lincoln Knights of Columbus filled with about 25 or more people, mostly men, a few ladies. Some were husband wife teams, others father son teams, some were there solo. Others were there strictly for business, and a few strictly to watch. The show was a land auction, featuring 40 acres of prime farmland in Eminence Township in Logan County. The land had recently been deeded over to Lincoln College, and was now being sold at auction with the proceeds to go to the college. The auctioneer Rob Nord with Martin Auction Service calls the auction, with the sale of the land being overseen by Heartland Ag Group of Forsyth. He begins the bidding at $15,000 an acre but gets no takers. He drops to $11,000 grabs that first bid then systematically works the price per acre up to $17,000. Bidders start balking at the price and he slowly pulls additional bids from the room $100 at a time. At 17.4 he stops the auction and goes into a private room with Dale Apperle of Heartland Ag Group, and representatives of Lincoln College. When they come out, he tells the group that the land is going to sell, then he takes another stab at getting the price up a few more hundred, but it doesn’t happen. The price for the ground comes in at $17,400 per acre or $696,000 for the 40 acre tract. After the auction, Ryan Apperle, the son of Dale, and also with Heartland commented that the sale of the land was in line with what was Land prices and cash rents skyrocket in 2022 Continue 8