for every 10 farmers leaving , one is becoming a farmer

So What Does it Take to be a So Called Farmer Today?

And do I really want to be one?

Part 2

    So when I was ready to go to AG school, the common theory and supporting evidence said that for every one farmers going into farming in 1974, there were 10 farmers leaving the business. This was enough information for mom to prove to me that her choice for my future career was the right path.

    Numbers are misleading and surely this one was. The farmers leaving the business were a lot of old school farmers who had been doing the same thing year after year with limited success, making a living the hard way, and the only way they knew how.  Technology was ushering its way into farming where it required you to accept and understand new technology to increase yields by managing your farm in a different way where you tried to maximize every acre under your charge by the latest of technological advances.

    Fertilizer and pesticide were your friends. The old cultivators for growing corn were on their way out. Larger more modern equipment capable of plowing hundreds of acres in a one pass scenario saved fuel and increased the tilth or texture of the soil, and when you combined these tractors and implements with herbicide and pesticide tanks you reduced your passes over the field even more. Reports of farmers combining planters with these units in open fields where you were doing thousands of acres of planting made these units ideal.

    All this technology was costing money, the farmer of the year for the state of Ohio said he never expected to get out of debt in his lifetime. He expected to keep turning over any profit he made into buying larger farms and improving his technology so that he could farm more acres with less labor. This is fine in theory but in reality, you hope that your health holds out, that interest rates don’t rise and your wife doesn’t file for divorce. So along with this interest in bigger farms the banks were requiring you to incorporate your farm which offered many benefits including tax benefits not normally granted to farmers and offered the banks a way to consolidate their investment as now it was much easier to take back the farm and when your wife took the kids and ran away with Earl the mechanic, and you had a really bad year trying to plant and harvest.  Your father in law was soon out the farm he had worked for the last thirty years having put it up for collateral in order to get an operating loan you had to default on because you had no crop insurance at the time. That was all right, because the bank already had plans for your property to be taken over by the corporate farmer down the road who needed the acreage to expand his dairy operation.

      Foreign trade deals with China and other third world nations allowed the U.S.  to become a leader in exporting grain to other countries. This in turn required farmers to become even more productive as technology again increased as equipment manufacturers like John Deere and Case saw that they could add more features to their tractors and began refining their designs, at the same time tractor prices began to climb till now an average tractor you could buy for around 100000, almost as much as  farm. This isn’t a low end tractor instead it is a tractor you would need to provide yourself with a comfortable living today.

     It would be enough to farm say 300 acres in a grain operation. it is by no means your only piece of equipment as you would also need today a high boy sprayer worth around 60000, a planter equipped with sensors and tied into your GPS on the tractor to monitor planting rates and fertilizer being applied to the seed, increasing or decreasing the amounts to as it relates to the planters positon in the field and recording the results to be coordinated with the combines record to see if you need to increase fertilizer usage for the next year. It takes a tech engineer to trouble shoot all the problems that can go wrong with setups like this. Proprietary contracts are being written by equipment manufacturers that now require you to contact the manufacturer for the keys to unlock the computers on these machines, making them so that farmers can no longer work on their own equipment despite how old the machine is.

     A price tag for an operation like this where one man can operate and own an operation by himself would be around 1.5 million with over a half a million in equipment alone and cash renting the land as opposed to owning it.  So what are your payments on 1. 5 million and then you add seed and fertilizer costs of which they are using genetically engineered (GMO) varieties designed to be used with herbicide specially designed to maximize yields on your varieties of corn and soybeans specifically selected for your growth requirements and land use.  As well fuel on a yoyo price where one year it is up and next it is down, and then couple that with your household expenses. No wonder your wife wants to run off with earl the mechanic after all he makes more money fixing your John Deere and the equipment, than you can farming 300 acres. Suddenly you find yourself a slave to technology and no longer a farmer but just a piece of the puzzle equipment manufacturers haven’t figured out how to replace just yet.

     But there is hope even in the worst case scenarios of a bust year, and that is if you signed your land up with the government and have all the production figures for your land and if there is a declaration of federal assistance available. You can have crop insurance to pay you a minimum amount so that you can continue making the payments and hope for a better year. This is what farming is all about today and if it sounds confusing there are agricultural advisors out there who can point you in the right direction and look over your shoulder and into your bank accounts to maximize your yields and profits , of course for a price, and of course,  no liability if they are wrong.

        I can remember looking at a farm over the hill from where we are now and we thought about expanding our operation when I was younger. Boy in some ways I am glad we never did as then I would have felt compelled to stay put doing what a lot of farmers do today, working daylight to dark trying to make a buck to pay the mortgage and live another day. It can be lonely as hell sitting there in the cab of a tractor worrying about how all of it is going to work out in the end. Whether when you sum up your life’s work whether you will be satisfied with what you have accomplished.  

       And as far as that 1 farmer going into business for every ten leaving goes, well technology has in the same time replaced 100 farmers for every one going into business.  Huge corporate farms will be the order of business in the future as more and more small farmers will be squeezed out of farming to make way for more technologically advanced equipment the small farmer can’t buy. I seriously doubt that if a person wanted to go into business today could hardly find the financing available to let him get started on an operation large enough to provide him with a substantial income . You would have to come up with a sizeable down payment so large it is beyond the scope of the normal man when applied to today’s standards of farming in the United States. This is sad and a poor reflection on our country in the land of opportunity where many a man has made a fortune first by owning a farm. This is one opportunity that is quickly being further out of reach of the common man.