“Seems to me if I wanted to get great farmland, Detroit would be a good place to look.”
The land might be cheaper, but you have to pay a platoon to guard during the harvest (not just to protect workers/equipment, but also so the locusts don’t get your crops at night).
I can probably build an army to protect my farm (plenty of available manpower), unfortunately I would have to look into serious cash crop (opium) to make this farm profitable. It would end up looking like the farms in Cambodia.