The Woods

Cultivated Crops, Percentage of Landmass by WMU

Cultivated Crops, Percentage of Landmass by State

"Areas used for the production of annual crops, such as corn, soybeans, vegetables, tobacco, and cotton, and also perennial woody crops such as orchards and vineyards. Crop vegetation accounts for greater than 20% of total vegetation. This class also includes all land being actively tilled."

Silvel Diesel Heater. Follow up video. THE TENT. What have I learned. Questions answered.

They seem to work pretty good until the EPA catches on and starts to ban their import. They're relatively inexpensive and maybe some point I'll have to get one, as it sure would be nice to heat my truck cap with one, you can run it all night and just warm, dry air pushed into your truck cap or tent, while the dirty diesel burning part it's outside. Does require about an 1 amp of electricity an hour (12 watts) to run though though.

Change in Grasslands – Pasture in Albany County from 2001 to 2019

Change in Grasslands - Pasture in Albany County from 2001 to 2019

Multiple, often contradictory things can happen to land cover over two decades, as you can see with this map.
 
Suburban sprawl in the area around the city reduced the amount of grasslands over the 18 year period, while in more outlaying areas the decline of dairy meant less silage and corn was planted but more grass was grown/grazed for beef.
Here is the R code: https://github.com/AndyArthur/r_maps_and_graphs/blob/main/Albany County NLCD Decline in Grasslands.R

 

How a Native Tree Became a Threat to Nebraska’s Grasslands | All About Birds All About Birds

Battling a Green Glacier: How a Native Tree Became a Threat to Nebraska’s Grasslands | All About Birds All About Birds

Sarah Sortum has a photo of her grandparents receiving a conser?vation award in 1973 for planting trees across their ranch in the eastern Nebraska Sandhills.

“In my grandparents’ generation they were really encouraged by conser?vation programs to plant trees,” says Sortum, who now helps run that same family-owned acreage, known as the Switzer Ranch. “Remember, this is the Arbor Day state. That’s a way of life in Nebraska, planting trees.”

The trees, primarily native eastern redcedar, offer shade and visual relief from the unrelenting horizon of prairie. Their dense branches and evergreen needles provide a windbreak and natu?ral snow fence to protect the homestead, and a virtual “outdoor barn,” in Sortum’s words, for calves in spring.

“Now we have these beautiful, mature cedar windbreaks, and they are valuable to us,” she says. “But now we have all this seed source.” subscribe to Living Bird magazine

Research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln shows that that seed source—the fully grown redcedars burst?ing with tiny cones at the ends of their evergreen branches—can propagate a wave of cedar seedlings that spread out a couple hundred yards away from the parent tree. Two generations after her grandparents planted them, those redcedars are spreading out from the homestead and windbreaks, creating an ungovernable front of woodland. And it’s not just the Switzer Ranch. The same thing is happening throughout the Sandhills—and across much of the central Great Plains.