In North Dakota, a wheat farmer with the name of John Bartelson, started generating royalty payments because of two oil wells that were drilled on his land. The finances of farmers across the northern Great Plains were changing because of the oil boom in the Bakken formation, according to a June 2008 Bloomberg report. Bartelson, aged 65, was among the many landowners who started earning money from oil beneath fields that had, for a very long time, been used only to grow wheat.
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