| Summary: | Agriculture in North Dakota by Scot Stradley, University of North Dakota Agriculture's importance to the North Dakota economy cannot be over stated Numbers only indicate in imperfect ways the fact that agriculture is one of the primary industries in human history. The development of dvilization is tied to agricultural productivity. Agricultural productivity accounts for both rural and urban population patterns. Urbanization is functionally dependent on agricultural productivity. The $14-$15 billion of agricultural land in North Dakota is universal to every township. This wealth and its annual product, or real income, draws industrial investment, transportation investment and investment in other parts of the economy such as government services, financial services, and business and professional services. The development of agriculture in North Dakota regulated the development of the towns because it is the main force in their commerce. Towns supply services related to agriculture such as marketing services, a legal system, a legislative system, and a society with its churches, clubs, etc. The State's political history is also closely connected with the economic history of agriculture. Land is the primary wealth of North Dakota as it is for virtually all states and nations. It is primary because, when property is secure, capital is used in connection to the various resources which land holds. Land is unique, because unlike machines and buildings, it cannot be easily manufactured This characteristic gains in importance as world population increases. The world is very close to cultivating the maximum arable land available. As the finite limit is approached the food production problem becomes much more dependent on human ingenuity. Science has assumed responsibility for the precarious balance between population and food and as you'll read in this chapter, it has managed to produce more from each acre. Yet, with world grain inventories at levels corresponding to the early 1970s, it is plain that this race is more nip-and-tuck than they'd care to admit. The land's natural productivity furnished an annual income of plants and animals that sustained Native American people in relative comfort and leisure. This annual income drew the fur trader Verendrye, the owner of a fur trade monopoly charter issued by the King of France, to the state as early as 1736 to try and capture some of the Hudson Bay Company's share of the income created by this trade. Later, from the late 1830s to the early 1860s, the Metis used the buffalo to manufacture pemmican in northeastern North Dakota, the state's first food processing industry. Their Red River Carts, transportation capital, shipped manufactured goods to the Twin Cities during its early development. Hide hunters, in search of humps and hides, slowly eliminated the buffalo, which was in its final days when waves of immigrants flowed into the Red River Valley in the 1870s, the Prairie in the 1880s, and lastly, the Missouri Plateau in the 1890s. Homesteading was complete by 1915. The bison bones had been picked and shipped to 490 Chapter 11 Economic Trends and Agriculture in North Dakota
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