[AT] In the market for a rural place

Cecil R Bearden crbearden at copper.net
Wed Oct 30 13:06:12 PDT 2013


My advice to anyone looking at a place to move/retire to is find one you 
can grow a garden on.   We live NW of Oklahoma City on 80 acres that 
were bought by my folks as an investment without really investigating 
the details.   When my wife and I moved out here, we later built a house 
near the old homestead site, but growing a garden for food is next to 
impossible.  Water cannot be found on this whole place.  There is some 
surface water that comes from springs on neighboring land. The best 
source was diverted by a rich newcomer so he could have a pond to look 
at.  Livestock water is now from a rural water system. Our water bill is 
never less than $75/month.  The red clay n this area is either hard as a 
rock or slicker than #2 gun grease.  When dry the ground will crack open 
as much as 2 inches and nearly 2 ft deep.  When the cracks close up, the 
ground quits absorbing water.  You can move 1/4 to 1/2 mile in any 
direction and the land is totally different.   Soil surveys do not 
explain this either.  This land is one of the highest points in the 
county and it appears  that it was just under the beach when the Permian 
sea was at full level.  When the sea receded the first time, the sand 
moved down slope and left this #@$% red clay.  It is only good for 
pasture ground and it takes many years to get the native grasses to 
cover completely.  What good soil was left on this piece of land was 
washed away with the farming practices of the dirty 30's.   We had a 
garden over the lateral field of our house trailer we lived in when we 
first moved here.  I brought in a semi load of river sand, and a truck 
load of cow manure from a feedlot.  Then 3 pickup loads of grass 
clippings from the city.  I roto tilled this several times before 
planting.   Water was supplied by pumping from a water hole in the creek 
and hauled by a tank trailer to water the garden.   Now, due to 
development, upstream there is no water in the creek nor in the spring.  
Well water is non-existent, we have 3 dry wells, and we only water with 
rural water.   Selling out would involve a lot of work and probably 
might not result in much improvement except a place to grow a garden, we 
have been here over 30 years.  Now that we have time to move and could 
afford it, we just don't have the energy.

As I stated at the first.  Find a place you can grow your own food on, 
it will be necessary in the future.

Cecil in OKla

On 10/30/2013 1:00 PM, John Slavin wrote:
> My son-in-law and I were having a conversation about this topic a couple weeks ago.  He's career navy and will be retiring in a few years and was just thinking outloud about some farmland.  He has some rather specific needs and wants a mix of rolling, treed and tillable farmland.  It is not as easy as a city person might think to find land with all the attributes you want within a certain proximity of the place you want to live, at the price you want to pay.  It's the old, you can have two out three deal.
>
> Plus, I have been observing that some auction houses in particular, and to a lesser extent realtors, are splitting out the tillable farmland from the rolling ground, so instead of 40/80 acre tracts, or combinations thereof, you end up with gerrymandered metes and bounds tracts of prime farmland or rough land sold separately from each other.  Makes sense, given how expensive land has gotten, but makes it more difficult to buy a farm with a combination of land use types. Just the other day I saw a farm that had been together for generations split up.  The bottom ground and flat upland was sold to out-of-state investors.  The hill and rolling upland (that the investors might perceive as junk) was sold to a completely different kind of buyer.
>
> John
>
> John C. Slavin
> jslavin at marktwain.net
>
> Everything around you that you call life was made up by people who are no smarter than you.  Steve Jobs.
>> Message: 11
>> Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 06:24:10 -0400
>> From: "Dean Vinson" <dean at vinsonfarm.net>
>> Subject: Re: [AT] In the market for a rural place
>> To: "'Antique tractor email discussion group'"
>> 	<at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
>> Message-ID: <002a01ced55a$2d2c3d50$8784b7f0$@net>
>> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
>>
>> Thanks very much, gentlemen.  I've had some electronic searches set up via a
>> realtor for a couple of years now, just to get familiar with what's out
>> there, and got pretty serious about it last spring.
>>
>> In August we let an auction get away from us that I still have some regrets
>> over...the house and barn weren't much but if there's a nicer parcel of
>> rolling USDA-prime farmland, pasture, and hardwood woods in southwest Ohio,
>> I don't know where it would be.
>>
>> Gene, I'd be honored to be your close neighbor and would love to get some
>> plowing time in with the Super M.  As it turns out I might at least come a
>> good ways in your direction--there's a place west of Urbana that we just
>> decided to go take a third look at.  First look resulted in "Wow, this could
>> be it."  Second look resulted in "But there are some practical issues that
>> we're not entirely sure we're up for, so probably best to keep looking."
>> But that decision isn't setting too well...so time to go back and make sure.
>>
>> Dean Vinson
>> Dayton, Ohio
>> www.vinsonfarm.net
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