The sun just set over the Buffalo Ridge, and now it's brilliant hues of orange and red playing off the clouds are replaced with darkness, the ridgeline ten miles away marked by the twinkling lights of over a hundred wind turbines. Step outside and you'll likely startle a deer in the incredible quiet, punctuated by a handful of trains a day.
I moved to this rural bliss five years ago, leaving behind the hassles and high costs of urban living. For less than the price of putting a basement under my 138 year old city house I found a 1500 square foot very energy efficient earth sheltered home, built in the 1980s so it's all up to code with no asbestos or lead paint to worry about.
Isolated? The city park is kiddycorner and a town with grocery stores, library, etc. is only 10 minutes drive away. 20 minutes away are three larger towns with most everything you'll need and some you won't like a WalMart. If you're a Costco addict they're only an hour or so away, and within that same hours radius are a over half dozen colleges and universities. As you can see, we're not exactly deprived out here!
But this and most rural nirvanas are threatened by giant Confined Animal Feeding Facilities whose size is measured in acres and "output" is measured in millions of gallons. Between them, the "get big or get out" mentality of big ag is pressuring farmers to plow under and bulldoze the windbreaks and shelterbelts that have prevented another dust bowl for decades. War is being waged on our wetlands too, as natural wetlands are drained so farmers can lose more money producing $3 a bushel corn so big ag can have a surplus to keep the price of feed for the CAFOs and feedlots down and profits up.
And just by moving out to our little nirvana you can stop this transformation of our beautiful and bountiful countryside into one great big old megafarm of feedlots, beans, corn, and CAFOs from sea to polluted sea. 'Cause there's this thing called "setbacks"... Rode out to South Dakota to scope out the site of a proposed damn near 10,000 cow "dairy", and noted an eerie lack of anyone living in the area, save for the abundant wildlife in the pristine University owned lake just downstream. Got home and dug out the maps and noticed a definite no human "dead zone" around all the CAFOs, and they tended to be on hills also to satisfy the setbacks required from bodies of water.
This means that just one person-little ol' you-can keep out a CAFO and save family farms and wetlands and wildlife and small businesses and all kinds of good stuff. I've personally seen it happen when I didn't buy 30 acres in Pope County a few years back. Wasn't much of a farm by "modern" standards with a tiny house and falling down barn, but had a nice few acres of wetland in the middle, a couple acres of woods around the farmstead, and enough ridgetop real estate to site a couple wind turbines. "Snooze you loose"... The woods has since been cut down, the wetland was drained, and today you can hardly tell it from the surrounding several hundred acres of corn and beans.
So maybe you've got a job or trade that can be done from anywhere, or you're retired? Come on out here, help us keep the country bountiful and beautiful, and enjoy low housing costs, low stress, and high quality of life!