Boy, this brings back memories.

Years and years ago I wrote an article for Successful Farming about farmers who relocated from one region to another, and I talked to a couple of farmers who moved from the Midwest to farm those "prairie" soils on the east side of Mississippi and over into Alabama. One farmer, originally from Ohio, said that he and some other folks made the mistake of equating those dark, clay soils with rich prairie soils in the Corn Belt, only to have their hears broken once that first soybean crop came off.

It's a very tricky proposition to relocate, even across the state line. I've known any number of people who've done it successfully, even guys who've relocated from Europe and Canada. But maybe about as many who gave it up for a lost cause.

My brother-in-law farms rice and other grains in the Delta, and he pointed out a row of 30k-bushel grain bins down the road from him that he said were planned by a Midwesterner who has contracted to farm some land there. According to my brother-in-law, the system lacked heaters for drying corn and, in particular, drying rice, and they weren't in a cluster for more easily moving grain around for mixing and such. I thought it was sort of strange when I saw them for the first time over the weekend, and they were lined up one after another with more space between them than I could remember with other grain-bin complexes.

Evidently, the complex was set up kind of like it might have been back in the Corn Belt where there's less humidity and you don't have to contend with green rice. That, at least, was the supposition amongst the locals. Talk was, it had turned into a real challenge trying to deal with some greener, higher moisture rice that had been dumped on top of some drier rice. (This has been a season, anyway, when hardly anything dried down on schedule.)

I am not telling this to make light of anyone from the Midwest or to start some regional conflict on the forum. It simply gets tricky trying to go from one region to another and be open to some of the paradigm shifts that are necessary.

I guess we always see more Midwesterners coming to the South to farm than the other way around because of the relatively cheap land prices - rental and purchase - in headlong times like we've had lately. David Wright, one of the state agronomists in Florida, said he got several calls in the winter and spring from folks in the Corn Belt who wanted to know about renting some of the scrub or rangeland in Florida and planting beans on it. David and I are old enough to remember the last time that happened. And, after a couple of seasons, it went back to grazing.

Again, no slight meant toward anyone from the Corn Belt.