Inequality Down On The Farm

Bloomberg:

“It’s almost like ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’” said David Kohl, an economist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, describing the unprecedented good fortune of grain farmers. “They just shot in the ground and up came bubbling crude oil, and they became millionaires.”
Nowhere is the surging value of property more evident than in O’Brien County, Iowa, a perfect square of 24 miles in each direction, tucked near the corner of the South Dakota and Minnesota borders. An acre of O’Brien land in 2011 was valued at $9,513, a 33 percent increase from 2010 and the state’s highest average, according to Iowa State. Income disparity also has escalated. The top 10 percent of wage-earning households collected 54 percent of the county’s income in 2010, compared with 40 percent a decade earlier. Of more than 3,000 U.S. counties, O’Brien had the 23rd highest jump in income inequality from 2000 to 2010, based on census data.

Farmers have been doing great the past few years, but their neighbors are falling further and further behind.  Behind both their farmer neighbors and folks in the cities.  As for farmland, it can't keep going up forever.  Somebody is going to get burned.