Illinois is filled with farms and farmland but according to a website's rankings you actually should avoid starting a farm in the Land of Lincoln, but why?

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Growing up in Chicagoland as a kid you think of Illinois as 2 separate things really, you think of Chicago and the suburbs, and then south of interstate I-80 the rest of the state is just farmland and corn. Now that I live in West Central Illinois I know that there is a lot more to the state than just corn and Chicago, BUT there is a ton of farmland in the Land of Lincoln which is why I was shocked to see this report for a website ranking Illinois so low on the list for the Best States to Start a Farm or Ranch.

According to lawnstarter.com, they ranked Illinois as the 33rd best state in the country to start a farm or a ranch in 2021. Illinois ranked well behind a lot of its Midwestern counterparts like Iowa which ranked 7th, Missouri which ranked 18th, and even behind Wisconsin that ranked 24th. Now the list is determined by a number of different factors categories like Infrastructure, Climate, Costs, Return on Investment, and Illinois ranks really poorly in costs 48th in the country, and climate 35th, but Illinois does rank 14th best for infrastructure. To see the full rankings for yourself just click here! 

Illinois needs to find a way to change this ranking, I get it there is nothing politicians can do about climate, but they have done a good job providing infrastructure in the state for farmers, now they have to find a way to make it more cost-friendly or else what will Illinois be if we start losing our farmers and don't support new ones coming to the state?

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LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

 

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