“My father had a farm in eastern Dallas County…” — “Progress,” Robert John Ford (from the musical “Utopia”)
The sight last week was so incongruous I couldn’t pass it up. Three bins, one tractor, one cornfield, just like so many other places in the state — except for the background. The harvest scene was surrounded by suburban multi-family units and buildings for the fastest-growing school district in Iowa. In the past the land was along what used to be a gravel 300th Street in rural Dallas County. Now it’s beside the four-lane-with-turn-lane concrete of University Avenue inside the Waukee city limits.
Cornfield in Waukee, across from Prairieview Middle School
I don’t know who owns or farms the land; it’s unlabeled on this map of property owners in the area (PDF). I don’t know if the owner has been offered money, and if so how much. Farmland in Dallas County is worth more than $7,500 an acre, but here in the middle of it all that would be an ultra-lowball offer. Its time as farmland, though, is certain to be short. Continue reading →