No, you’re wrong.
A large general upward pressure on price DOES NOT affect the whole country to some extent.
The upward pressure on price did not extend 2000 miles; the only way he could get rid of it was to give it away.
There’s a point at which the cost of transport of a commodity, cattle feed in this case, exceeds the value of having it at a different place.
Someone could have picked-up the alfalfa in Michigan and transported it to California and fed it to cattle there, and they would have gained weight and been worth more at market.
That increase in value at the market would not, however, have exceeded the cost of transporting the alfalfa.
You really don’t get it.
Local movement of a commodity always expands outward in a ripple effect.