Booming WY City?? (Laramie, Torrington, Pinedale: for sale, foreclosed, loans)

[2HHI]

I recently saw a news program that highlighted a certain town in WY that is just booming with new, high paying jobs, housing is cheap, and anyone that wants to work should have no trouble finding a job.
Does anyone know what town this is and where in the state it is?
Does anyone know what kind of jobs the show was in reference too?
I just caught the tail end of the show, so sorry for the little bit of info, and if this subject was visited before, again, I apologize.
I appreciate any insight. Thanks !

[sunsprit]

Possibly Torrington, where the new jail is going in and they're announced hiring is starting for the workforce there. Most of the new jobs would be for jail personnel, so there are background checks and you'll be working in law enforcement.

Housing is reasonably priced, but going up quickly as the market demand hits. I've already seen the shift when they announced that the new jail was to be built there.

I wouldn't label the area as "booming". It's primarily an agricultural area, and it's been stable to slow over the last few years ... especially with the water shortages in the area of late affecting crop yields.

[jody_wy]

a year or so too late thanks to our president.... most of the jobs were in the gas patch... but no housing, man camps .... now we got stacked rigs

[wyolady]

Originally Posted by sunsprit

Possibly Torrington, where the new jail is going in and they're announced hiring is starting for the workforce there.

I wouldn't label the area as "booming". It's primarily an agricultural area, and it's been stable to slow over the last few years ... especially with the water shortages in the area of late affecting crop yields.

The water shortages may have been in prior years, but definitely not "of late". We've have more than our share of moisture this year. Our dirt road has washed out twice this summer.

We have farmers who are refusing their irrigation water this year because they don't need it. I think Nebraska will benefit, but suspect they are in less need this year as well.

[MRVphotog]

I would think it might be Pinedale with 4000+ gas wells slated for the next few years. It must be booming cause I just read that a McDonalds is coming to town. They just got word of some big government money to help with the poor air quality that is caused by all the wells.

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by wyolady

The water shortages may have been in prior years, but definitely not "of late". We've have more than our share of moisture this year. Our dirt road has washed out twice this summer.

We have farmers who are refusing their irrigation water this year because they don't need it. I think Nebraska will benefit, but suspect they are in less need this year as well.

Yes, thankfully this year there's been relatively abundant moisture, and the irrigation reservoirs are filling again ... some for the first time in many years.

But that's not much help for the farmers who went broke during the period 2002 through 2008, and lost their farms due to no or very limited production; there were a lot of "irrigated" farms that had turned into dryland and didn't have the ability to change over their crops and equipment into a different operation. Six years of losing lots of money was more than many farmers in the area could afford.

I know .... I've looked at buying some of them at very distressed prices, and the banks wouldn't give the "short sale" approval at the price the farmers were willing to sell the places for ... which was still more money than the productive value of their farms/irrigation equipment, and old infrastructure in light of the drought conditions at the time.

Maybe they'll finally get a chance to re-plant the dead hay forage fields and start over ... but for many farmers, that will require a bank loan to have the money to prep the field and pay for the seed and fertilizer costs. At this point, there's a number of regional and local ag banks that are failing because they don't meet the equity requirements of the fed these days ... farm loans and operating loans have always been a high risk bank business in this region.

[paintersspouse]

The show was on Pinedale but it is not booming now. Our next door neighbor's company does major business with the drilling companies. Business is not good and they continue to cut their expenditures.

The boom is no longer.

[wyolady]

Originally Posted by sunsprit

Yes, thankfully this year there's been relatively abundant moisture, and the irrigation reservoirs are filling again ... some for the first time in many years.

But that's not much help for the farmers who went broke during the period 2002 through 2008, and lost their farms due to no or very limited production; there were a lot of "irrigated" farms that had turned into dryland and didn't have the ability to change over their crops and equipment into a different operation. Six years of losing lots of money was more than many farmers in the area could afford.

Gosh, sunsprit. What area of SE Wyoming was that? Glad Goshen County didn't have too many farmers who went broke. In our driest years, they were short water but at least in southern Goshen, nothing that bad.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but here's one for ya. I grew up in NE Colorado on a dryland farm. Growing up30 years ago, our dryland wheat usually went like 25-35 bushell/acre. The very same, dryland ground just went 62 this year!

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by wyolady

Gosh, sunsprit. What area of SE Wyoming was that? Glad Goshen County didn't have too many farmers who went broke. In our driest years, they were short water but at least in southern Goshen, nothing that bad.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but here's one for ya. I grew up in NE Colorado on a dryland farm. Growing up30 years ago, our dryland wheat usually went like 25-35 bushell/acre. The very same, dryland ground just went 62 this year!

WyoLady, I'm so glad that you got such a great dryland wheat crop. But the properties I was looking at were "irrigated" farms with hay forage crops, such as alfalfa ... which didn't fare so well over the last few years in the drought. There were many properties that did not receive functional irrigation water during the last several years.

Through 2007 & 2008 ... I looked at 9 irrigated farm properties in distress sales in Hawk Springs, Yoder, Veteran, Fort Laramie, and LaGrange. 4 were vacant, where the families had simply given up trying to make the payments on all the loans and had left the places. I made offers on 6 of these with "short sales", and none of them were accepted by the banks. Several of those properties are still for sale; in my opinion, it's because it would still take a lot more immediate cash outlay to prepare the ground and re-plant for a new start for next year's forage crop production than the properties are worth.

That doesn't include the properties where realtors called me to see if I was interested in looking at the places ... some of which had broken pivots or needed so much work on the infrastructure/pumps and water delivery that I wasn't even interested in seeing the places after their description and some of the numbers that they had.

I guess the difference in this thread between you and me it that I'm seeing the situation first hand on irrigated farms as a capable and motivated farm investor ... and you've got anecdotal experience with dryland farms in the area. Goshen County, especially the southern area around Hawk Springs, would make a convenient addition to my property in Laramie County for my forage business. So I've been looking .... and I've seen what's going on. Farms have been going broke ... even here in Laramie county, one went broke not two miles from my home.

The family has been custom wheat farming for 3 generations and farming 2 dryland sections nearby us. They were over $1.2 mil in debt to various federal agencies for equipment and land, and were getting less than half the cash flow needed to support that debt ... and they were following the regional dryland wheat harvest with their tractor/trailers pulling their combines and equipment around 5 states every year, with lots of contracts and a loyal following. There simply wasn't enough business and cash flow to support them ... their house is now vacant/for sale, and their property has been split up into 80's for dryland residental properties. The bank is going to lose big time on that, even if they sell all of the 80's at their asked price of $1,500 per acre; it simply won't cover the debt the folks have at the bank.

FWIW, I rotated an alfalfa field out into HRWW this last year under a pivot, and it's got a gorgeous stand under it ... possibly 70-80 bushel wheat. But I also planted the corners, and they look just as good. It helped that I turned the last of the alfalfa stand under when I plowed that ground ... my dryland wheat looks better than the 2 sections just to the north of me.

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by wyolady

Gosh, sunsprit. What area of SE Wyoming was that? Glad Goshen County didn't have too many farmers who went broke. In our driest years, they were short water but at least in southern Goshen, nothing that bad.

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but here's one for ya. I grew up in NE Colorado on a dryland farm. Growing up30 years ago, our dryland wheat usually went like 25-35 bushell/acre. The very same, dryland ground just went 62 this year!

Yes, and one of the key factors is that the varieties of HRWW now available to the farmer are much improved for yield over those of 10-15 or 30 years ago, too. There's more than just moisture as an input issue here for these dryland stands ... variety of wheat, fertilizer, and just plain luck with timely rainfall during the plant's growing cycle, no hail and no insects or disease or fungus or virus to affect the crop ....

Just to illustrate for the folks on this thread what's been going on with irrigation water in the Goshen county area ... which is directly tied to the drought of the area .... I, too, am not about to hijack the thread, but these issues are of real concern to anyone thinking about moving into the area. This is at the heart of the economic viability of this portion of Wyoming and whether or not jobs ... housing ... retail shopping ... and a community are even there for you to come home to ....

The Wyoming Livestock Roundup newspaper reports a lot on this area's ag and ranching activity, so it's a good resource of current events ... and past history.

For example, in one of the early 2008 issues, they interviewed Bill VaderVoort, the manager of the Goshen Irrigation District, who reported that ... "the Bureau of Reclamation is indicating there's not going to be an allocation this year". That was typically the marginal difference in GID water delivery for it's members of 1 cfs/100 acres instead of being able to supply 1 cfs/70 acres.

For the year 2007, the district had to forgo their "spring hay run" of water because of a lack of water, but were pleased to announce in 2008 that they would have a "hay run" until May 24th, then shut off until mid-June. These are critical times in the hay irrigator's season, when crops such as alfalfa demand an average of at least 1" of water per week for minimal growth and survival. They'll do a lot better with much more water, but if it's not available, at least the 1" rate will produce a minimum viable crop and the plants will survive without a lot of stress.

However, GID has a lot of problems with seepage and loss of water from it's initial delivery points. In practical terms, this means that GID might deliver a rate of water into the system from it's storage that would be 1 cfs/100 acres, but functionally, a farm might receive much less due to delivery losses. This has been reported by recent studies to be as much as 38% water loss due to seepage in the older laterals and ditch delivery system.

So, if you take the drought years in the area beginning in 2002 where the GID didn't have much water to deliver, many of the irrigated acres were receiving only about 1/3 of the amount of water they needed through an ag growing season to produce a crop and sustain their plant base. For those of you who aren't farmers, you need to know that alfalfa is a perennial crop which is planted only once every so many years, perhaps on a 7 or 8 year cycle. The plant is poisonous to a re-planting of the field with more alfalfa, so it must be poisoned out with an herbicide to allow same year replanting, or it must be rotated out for 2 or 3 years with alternate crops and heavy plowing to remove the remaining deep roots every year until the old alfalfe stand dies out to allow a new planting.

If you can't sustain a good field, the yield goes down and the costs of plowing and re-planting (seed costs a lot of money!) have to be amortized over a much shorter life cycle of the plant, which is a significant financial burden upon the farmer's possible profits ... enough so that a 2 or 3 year life cycle of an alfalfa stand could wipe out the profits if the annual yields were low.

Brant Stantin of the Shoshone Irrigation District reported in 2008 that the water supply was the best they'd seen in "... the last 8 or 9 years". The drought was widespread across the area for some time, with a slight relief in 2005. But I do recall that several Eastern Wyoming small community domestic water systems were on the verge of running out of water to supply the residents, and imposed strict water use rules to minimize the water demand. Their water storage was literally at the bottom with no functional water available to replenish them from their surface water rights, and they didn't have wells.

My contact with water shortage/availability problems in the area actually started in the early 2000's. I recall the first farm I looked at that was a distress sale was a Ward family farm just East of Albin. At almost one section under a very old Zimmatic pivot, the family had abandoned the farm due to lack of irrigation water and a failed domestic well. The crafty ol' boy realtor showing me the property didn't say a word about the water problems, he left it to me to look over the place and figure out what might be going on. I had to ask him specifically what was wrong with the 2,000 gallon cistern that supplied water to the house ... it was broken and leaking, and the well wasn't supplying any water, either. It needed to have a new well drilled and cased for the domestic water use.

Similarly, the water sources for the pivot had dried up ... a combination of the well and GID surface water. They'd tried to keep 1/2 of the pivot going, but that too was a weedy mess and not productive. The dryland half was just stout weeds and needed complete re-working. The family had walked away from over $500,000 in debt on the place, and were asking almost $650,000 for it (a bit over $1,000/acre) .... I shook my head over that one, and offered $350,000, which was refused by the family and their bank for a short sale. IIRC, the place had been foreclosed and finally went to auction, where it brought only $227,000. They would have done better with my offer by several years and another $123,000. I flew over the place several times during the years and the irrigated land was just brown weeds for a long time.

I looked at another farm just outside of Hawk Springs, and even though it had surface water flowing through the property, it had no water rights to that water. The daughter of the adjacent farmer was the owner of the section, and the farm (as well as her marriage) had failed ... her dad owned water rights to the surface water, and his farm was doing fine. His daughter and grandkids were going to move back into a farmhouse on his place, and he regretted having sold the section to his daughter and son-in-law for their own place next door to him. But the asked price of $500,000 was consistent with a productive farm ... which the place wasn't producing. (We won't go into all the details about run-down ramshackle workshop and house structures, or broken side-roll sprinklers with broken risers and water delivery system ...). There's only so much a farmer can do with a can of WD-40, a roll of duct tape, and some old baling wire found around the property to keep things going ... and the (former) son-in-law was apparently a better consumer of beer than a skilled worker on the place. We were looking at costs of $50-80 per acre to bring the place back into productivity ... if there had been water assured for the place, which there wasn't. And the kindest thing you could have done with the house would to have been to set it on fire and clear the ashes when it quit burning so you could start over .... I've been in some serious sh*thole farmhouses in my life, but this one really took the academy award. I'm not very tall, and I couldn't even walk through the house without bumping my head on low ceilings or crouching over to hike up the stairs to the upstairs kid's bedrooms ... 5 bedroom, 1 bath (just around the corner from the stove and refrigerator in the kitchen).