Wealth

Back when there was still prairie, the place I live was directly on the transition between the tall grass prairie and short grass prairies, a place that 150 years ago was called The Great American Desert.

On average, this area gets 24 inches of precipitation per year. That's not bad...a few months ago we were in Monument Valley and they get 5 inches. That's a lot less, but on the other hand, they're not trying to raise corn and soybeans.

To put 24 inches into perspective, a couple states to the east, Indiana and Illinois, get 38 inches a year. That matters. An extra foot of rain throughout the summer adds a lot of bushels to crop yield and doubles the value of farmland.

This year, we're pushing that extra foot of rain number. Of course, about 8 inches of that came in one night, which wasn't great, but I'm looking at the apple and pear trees, along with the grape vines, and I'm getting preemptively tired, just thinking about how much work harvest is going to be.

My great-grandparents settled here in 1880, and this was the land available. If they'd come a few years earlier, they could have gotten some of that rich farmland in Indiana, a few years later and they'd have had to go to western South Dakota, to try their luck on land that is truly meant to be nothing but grassland.

I've been thinking a lot about luck, and wealth, about the way opportunities and challenges are distributed. So many of us were born on third base but think we hit a triple, and I don't know if you can be fully aware of that unless you are out in the world and look around, to see true wealth and true poverty.

A few decades ago, we took several church youth groups on work projects in Jamaica, mostly to repair hurricane damage. On one trip, our project was to paint the inside of a church at a place called King's Vale, high in the mountains, halfway between Lucea and Savanna Le Mar. We also painted the inside of a small, newly built house on the edge of the church property. We learned that one of their parishioners had lost his house in a hurricane and had been living under a shelter of banana leaves. It was the community's first encounter with homelessness, so they decided the solution was to build a house. I was jealous to think about how simple it was to solve a problem by just being able to focus on the problem.

We just returned from a trip to Iceland. It's really kind of a paradise. In the city there are coffee shops, bakeries, and fish and chips restaurants everywhere, in the countryside there are good roads, stunning views, and hot springs. And everywhere the people are friendlier and more accommodating than is reasonable. However, it's also country that lives on the edge of a knife – summers way too cool and short to raise much of their own food, isolation, not to mention active volcanos. For most of its history, residents had to face the real danger of starving to death. If you tried to describe it to someone it would sound like a penal colony, a place to be avoided at all costs. Yet, if they’d have me, I could move there in a heartbeat. In the Crash of 2008, which was largely caused by bankers’ reckless speculation, Iceland suffered more than most places. A difference is that afterward, some of Iceland's bankers went to prison. None of ours did. Maybe that's why it feels like paradise.

A few years ago, I gave a speech in a farming community in the middle of some of that great farmland. At the reception afterward I eavesdropped as people talked about the recent death of a local farmer. At his funeral the widow was surrounded by solicitous neighbors who wanted to know if she'd decided what she wanted to do with their farmland. It truly is wonderful cropland, but I was glad I didn't live there.

There's poverty, and wealth, everywhere you look, and sometimes you find both in places where you don't expect it.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olso

n