Climate Considerations When Buying A Retirement Ranch

I started researching the climate over 20 yrs ago for a very specific reason, I was getting ready to buy a small farm or ranch, and I wanted to pick a favorable area.

I'm not your typical redneck hick, I'm a farm kid, with an engineering degree, and 30 yrs of experience in military/aerospace development. Plus, I also studied geology during the time I lived in the southern California desert.

So I started by downloading the raw climate data, and read the climate study reports. I soon found real problems with the way this analysis has been carried out. These folks are definitely not engineers or geologists.

But I also started noticing repeated climate cycles which have occurred during the last four ice age cycles, and other cycles that occurred during this interglacial. It is absolutely true that the climate changes (frequently) and periods of sustained drought collapsed many prior civilizations. It is also true these climate cycles were caused by variations in Earths orbit, our sun's magnetic field strength, and large volcanos and impact events. I'm not discounting that man could cause climate change by emmiting large amounts of dust or sulfur dioxide, but I'm convinced that we are not the cause of changes occurring now.

So back to my desire to buy a farm. I started out looking at land all over the western US. After considering the climate, i decided to avoid areas dramatically impacted by the little ice age (1300_-1850 AD) or the dust bowl drought of the 1930s. Therefore I decided to move out of the desert southwest and Colorado Plateau, the upper plains of Montana, the Dakota's, and the great lakes.

I ended up focusing on the Ozark and Ouachita mountain region of Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas.

 

The Ozarks are my second choice after Eastern Texas. I am somewhat concerned about the New Madrid fault letting go, so the Ozarks might be somewhat better than Eastern Texas if that happens.

 

It seems as though we have very similar backgrounds, such as education, career choices, and even our extra-curricular interests (geology). My choice when deciding to leave Arizona was southern Idaho, which is where I've been for a year. Since I'm not worried about any caldera eruptions or such from YNP, Idaho seemed (and still seems) the right choice.