Driving through Kansas, Nebraska and parts of South Dakota in the summertime is like seeing the set of Field of Dreams over and over and over again.

For the second time in two years, we drove from Tulsa to Mitchell, South Dakota, on a long July 4th weekend.

Our route was about 660 miles. There are three basic ways to get to Mitchell, which is the southeast part of South.

One way is through Joplin, Missouri, and up through Kansas City. You drive through Sioux City, Iowa, en route to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is 70 miles east of Mitchell. This is the longest route.

I drove that one time with a loaded U-Haul truck while towing a Chevy Malibu on the back end.

This way you have divided highways almost all the way. But you also experience a lot of traffic driving through various cities. If I have to, I will drive on expressways through major cities but I prefer routes with lower traffic counts.

Another route goes through Bartlesvills and then heads up Highway 75 to Omaha/Council Bluffs and then it becomes the same path as the Kansas City plan.

I have driven this way once and while the traffic is much lighter, road construction created several bottlenecks. And Topeka, Kansas, is difficult to navigate.

I prefer heading west past Stillwater to I-35 and then north up through the middle of Kansas and Nebraska (on Highway 81). Wichita is the only big city on that route and it’s fairly easy to get through.

You do encounter some two-lane roads in Nebraska and you have to go slow through a few small towns.  But the traffic is truly light, even on the two-lane roads. And for some reason, you bypass most towns on that route.

Going that way, you see a lot of corn.

And soybeans and cattle.

There’s doesn’t seem to be much else to see on that route.

The agriculture in those three states fascinates me. It seems as though every available inch of farmland – even in the small towns – is planted with corn.

It is truly the breadbasket of the world.

The total Kansas corn production for 2020 was 766 million bushels and 24 Kansas counties had more than 10 million bushels of corn.

That is a lot, my friends.

But the corn production in Nebraska based on year-end surveys in 2020 was estimated at a record high 1.79 billion bushels. Farmers harvested 9.89 million acres of corn for grain and 4.94 million tons for silage.

Wow.

South Dakota farmers harvested 4.5 million acres of corn in 2020 – up 16% from 2019. That was 729 million bushels – almost at the same pace as Kansas.

To compare, Oklahoma averages about 25 million bushels of corn a year and most of that goes to dairies, feedlots and poultry operations.

That is impressive no matter how boring it might seem.

Bixby has the annual Green Corn Festival but Mitchell, South Dakota, has the only Corn Palace in the world.

The amount of corn grown has to be impacted by the use of corn in ethanol for blended gasoline. (By the way, I only use 100% gasoline with no ethanol and I was able to find gas stations that sell 100% gas in Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota).

As you drive through the corn fields, there aren’t many houses. The farmers live far apart on their acreages. Farming must be profitable because we saw a lot of new-looking houses and outbuildings along with some really old barns. The farms look profitable.

I have never had an ambition to be a farmer but I have great admiration for them. Bad weather can ruin a crop in a single day. Bugs can ruin a crop overnight. Crops are commodities and market forces can destroy profits. And international trade agreements can wreck the livelihood of American farmers.

Farming takes a great economic investment. Billionaire Bill Gates is reportedly buying up farmland and may be the largest property owner in the country. He pays top dollar and that squeezes out small farming operations that wish to expand. And foreign countries – China in particular – are scooping up farmland, which drives up the price of prime land.

It’s difficult for younger generations to stay in the farming business, especially when they are offered a fortune for the family farm they inherited.

Everyone should load up the family and take a driving trip to Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. When we took our family on road trips across the country, I asked the kids if they thought that the Earth was overpopulated. It’s not, of course, and when you see the wide open spaces on the Great Plains, you realize that the media and the progressives are telling bigger and bigger lies.

God bless the farmers. Our government should be helping them provide our food supply and helping them get the energy they need to run their sophisticated equipment.

These real “fields of dreams” are feeding America and the world.