Editor’s Letter

I’ve seen several land rushes over 40+ years in the recreational pond management business. Many, until today, coincided with economic ups and downs. When the price of oil is high, we pay more for gas, people in the oil business buy land. Associated business owners’ profit, they buy land. When oil price plummets, land sells to entrepreneurs, or folks in finance, or professional people. Most of them call guys like me, to make their lakes better.

Today’s land rush is different.

It’s societal, in my opinion. Developers are buying larger tracts and breaking them into smaller parcels. Sure, that’s been happening for a long time, but not like today. I’ve gotten more Facebook messages, emails, phone calls, and texts from new landowners wanting to build ponds and lakes and figure out how to live a more rural life. In conversations, they’re tired of social strife in the city and want to escape it. They’ve figured out how to make their living from a distance, through zoom calls, online, emails and just over the telephone. Plus, small town America is friendly.

The real estate market, from housing to raw land, is on fire, with projections to be that way for some time.

The common bond of each of these new landowners, many of them first-timers, is how much they want to learn. They want their kids to learn. Some want a small semblance of sufficiency. Laying hens, a small garden, a pond with fish. Maybe some deer come across to drink. Song birds in the trees, hummingbirds in the flower garden.

Escaping the city, the remnants of Covid-19, societal unrest, their favorite haunts out of business…to the serenity of nature. There’s something soothing about the basics, eating a fish from your own pond, pulling a snap bean off a plant, before it’s ripe, and eating it right there, in the garden.

This land rush is different.

Stewardship is contagious.