Big Sky Country becomes Big DRY Country?

One thing that people are quick to forget is that there are vast portions of this country that NEVER grew sustainable food crops, and most of Montana was among them. Western Montana is almost entirely mountainous, and Eastern Montana has, traditionally, been desert like dry, due to something called The Rain Shadow Effect. Irrigation has changed that, to some degree, but it remains almost entirely ranching land, and when it's dry, that land supports less cattle. "Droughts" are largely the result of variations in winter pack, not because of a shortage of rain, because there's pretty much always a shortage of rainfall in Eastern Montana.

Last year, at one of our Planning Commission meetings, we had a bunch of farmers come in to complain about proposed drainage off of a business park that was being developed -- it seems that their cropland was already being flooded regularly, what would this new park do? After some back and forth with the city planner, the truth emerged -- the areas that they were complaining about were, in fact, drained swamp land, never intended for cultivation, but draining it, combined with some years of lower than usual precipitation, had led them to the belief that this was arable farmland, not a drained swamp, and it was the city's responsibility to keep it so. We said no -- some places are just not intended to grow food, sorry.