While the short-term trend is disturbing, as with all booms, gold rushes, dot.com runups, and real estate bubbles, this one too shall bust.
Areas of the Dakotas have had record summer rainfalls for 3 years running which have given the illusion that they are capeable of sustaining productive row crop growing.
The reality is that if these trends return to anywhere even near the long term averages, then productive growing of corn and soybeans will not be possible in most of these “new” growing areas.
Also, while crop prices are at record levels, so are the input expenses. The yields that have to be achieved just to pay for input expenses will very quickly teach a hard lesson to anyone gambling on marginal land and weather patterns.
I don’t think the average person realizes just how big of a check today’s farmer has to write just to pay for fuel, seed, and fertilizer to get the crop into the ground. Forget about all the equipment and growing season costs, just the basic inputs are huge.
These days, most farmers cannot afford to throw seed on the ground and see what happens as they did in the past. During the last boom in crop prices in 2007, we saw a neighbor of my uncle’s plow up a quarter section that had been put in CRP for decades by the father of the current farmer. The soil is light and sandy and there’s a south facing slope to most of the section along with low ground, all of which contributed to the original logic to put it in CRP due to low average yields.
Well, that little gamble lasted 2 growing seasons and now it’s back in reserve. My uncle stopped and looked at the corn on the stalks and estimated that both years due to hot/dry weather, the yield was going to be somewhere between 60 and 75 bushels per acre as a field average. The other way to say it is that the producer was losing his @ss on that field.
Margins vary by farm, but as an average yield on corn, for example, because of expenses my relatives have to maintain about 110 bu/ac to break even. Their 5 year average is 150 and this year they estimate the 130s, but there is lots of variation in the fields.
The older retired farmers I talk to say that for 25 years all anybody talked about was who was breaking 70 bu/ac on corn. That was the money spot for a very long time. Now the target moves up on an almost yearly basis.
I’m not happy to see CRP and grassland disappear and I’m also not happy to see what I know is going to happen. Irrational exhuberence and outlier weather patterns making farmers make poor long-term decisions that will come crashing down on them soon.
. Whatever happens, I hope more people step up to the plate like you and your pop to preserve what is left 
