Posted on 07/20/2018 6:10:06 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
RANSOM, Kan.—The Farm Belt is hurtling toward a milestone: Soon there will be fewer than two million farms in America for the first time since pioneers moved westward after the Louisiana Purchase.
Across the heartland, a multiyear slump in prices for corn, wheat and other farm commodities brought on by a glut of grain world-wide is pushing many farmers further into debt. Some are shutting down, raising concerns that the next few years could bring the biggest wave of farm closures since the 1980s.
The U.S. share of the global grain market is less than half what it was in the 1970s. American farmers’ incomes will drop 9% in 2017, the Agriculture Department estimates, extending the steepest slide since the Great Depression into a fourth year.
“You keep pinching and pinching and pretty soon there’s nothing left to pinch,” said Craig Scott, a fifth-generation farmer in this Western Kansas town.
From his father’s porch, the 56-year-old can see the windswept spot where his great-grandparents’ sod house stood in 1902 when they planted the first of the 1,200 acres on which his family farms alfalfa, sorghum and wheat today. Even after harvesting one of their best wheat crops ever last year, thanks to plentiful rain and a mild winter, Mr. Scott isn’t sure how long they can afford to keep farming that ground.
Costs for seeds, fertilizer and equipment climbed so high and grain prices dropped so low that he still lost more than $120 an acre. Afraid to come up short again, Mr. Scott decided last fall not to plant 170 acres of winter wheat, close to a third of the usual amount. U.S. farmers sowed the fewest acres of winter wheat this season in more than a century.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I thought we just passed a farm bill to throw them some bucks until times get better, no?
Or was this bill just pork for the politically connected, leaving the farmers to twist in the wind?
The corporate farms, with their crop diversity, are able to use federal subsidies to withstand crop price fluctuations, while the small farmers have to endure.
Times have changed along with people. Our ranch was established in 1885, without oil and gas it would be almost impossible to make a living now. Great grandmother used to load up the buggy and take it 10 miles into town and sell butter and egg’s to make ends meet. Less and less farmers in this area are relying strictly on cotton and running dual crops now. In a changing world you have to change your ways.
The day will come when people who know how to farm will be worth their weight in gold.
Greetings from a fellow Wisconsinite, born and raised there. One can travel for hours across that blessed farmland dotted with dairy farms. I pray they will be able to make a go of things.
It appears about the only prescient financial move I’ve ever made was to sell an inherited KS farm (160 acres) in 2013 at about the height of grain prices and production. It was on a sharecrop agreement, 2/3 for the farmer and 1/3 for the property owner. The only other thing that helped was a little bit of oil production.
For the record, that article is from 2017.
“The day will come when people who know how to farm will be worth their weight in gold.”
I say that all the time. One day I’ll be Queen of the World...and only because I can cook and bake from scratch, sew clothing or stitch up a wound and know how to grow veggies, medicinal herbs, fruits and flowers and raise small livestock.
Wildwood Weed
~ Jim Stafford
All good things gotta come to an end,
And it’s the same with the wildwood weed.
One day this feller from Washington came by,
And he spied it and turned white as a sheet.
Then they dug and they burned,
And they burned and they dug,
And they killed all our cute little weeds.
Then they drove away,
We just smiled and waved
Sittin’ there on that sack of seeds!
We rent our crop land to the local Dairy Farmer for feed crops for his Holsteins. We give him a good rate on the land because we want to help our neighbor succeed.
See my Post #10. Dairy Farms are getting hit hard, too. Grain is cheap, so feed costs are down, but the price of milk is way down, too. :(
America has long been in perpetual crisis over farm overproduction.
The use of crop rotation did wonders in keeping farmland productive, but it was extremely hard to promulgate. So what is needed is a cooperative venture between many farmers in a region to get a handle on agribusiness as a whole. Not cheap.
It needs to be a strategic plan that is incredibly flexible, and is as complex and difficult as it is to write computer software. It needs to incorporate things like underground and vertical farming, hydroponics, algae based biodiesel fuel production, methane generating mass composting, and inland aquaculture. etc.
Oh, I’m sorry! It was in my news feed this morning. Jerks.
Well, I can find a dozen other current articles stating the same thing:
This: Or was this bill just pork for the politically connected, leaving the farmers to twist in the wind?s:
And it needs to be able to stand up against the corporate farm machine. It appears some of the organic farms/CSA groups are making a go of it, but that may be a fad. I hope not, it’s great food!
Farmers have got to have 2 or 3 income streams going to make it. I would love to have a hydroponic set up; a local gal does that and has had great success. She sells the fresh fish to local restaurants and grows heads of lettuce (off of their waste) as bug as your head, and also sells those to the restaurants and at Farm Markets.
Beau and I are hoping to be ‘Millionaire Farmers’ one day. The trick is, you start with TWO Million dollars and you keep farming until you’re only worth ONE Million. ;)
Yes, that farm bill is an abomination. And, sadly, we know a few ‘farmers’ around here that have greatly benefited from Mother Government. ‘Farmers’ who are actually just ‘land owners.’
Breaks my heart to see some of their land in ‘set aside’ conservation, though we do need bugs and bees and butterflies and places for critters to live, as well.
Balance in all things.
We’ve farmed for over 40 years. We’ve seen our farmer population reduced to less than 10% of the farmers from 1974 when we started. We plan on farming 2 more years.
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