Recently, on a trip to North Dakota, I had the pleasure of staying with one of the areas largest local farmers - Jerry Seibold. While taking a tour of his fifteen hundred acre farm, I noticed large parcels of land that were not being cultivated. At the time, I had just assumed that he did not have the resources to farm all of his land, or there was something mechanically wrong with the soil composition that caused that portion of the farm to be "unfarmable." However, after conversing with him after he got his combine (a very large farming tractor) stuck, I learned that the "stupid government" has placed restrictions on backfilling, and the unfarmed portions of his land had soil that was too wet for farming. The wet spots, caused by low grades in the soil, could not be backfilled regardless of the amount of farmland they...