6 ms·

Isolation, financial pressure, lack of control, fear of being the generation that fails. Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual busine

Isolation, financial pressure, lack of control, fear of being the generation that fails. Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family). So chances are if you farm your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. did to. There's immense pressure on each generation to not be the one that lets the family legacy die. Our fields are named after the previous families that owned them. Most failed because someone died unexpectedly without putting their land in a trust, or the next generation simply doesn't want to farm (for good reason). Those that do survive are very game of thrones. "That field belongs to the Dicksons, that one is the Hoechs - they have 2 sons working with them now". Land auctions/purchases go through a lot of backroom dealing where patriarchs from various families horse trade. It's a very interesting subculture of the midwest.

immibis 3y ago
So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us
- prottog 3y ago
  How does that follow?
  - mihaic 3y ago
    Race-to-the-bottom capitalism forces farmers to fight on price, since they can only sell in bulk to big enterprises, squeazing out their profits. Farming associations actually help here, since they can negociate like a union, but not sure how much the US would approve of this "communism".
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Trust are good and even needed for the producers. Just look at OPEC... It would be lot worse for them if they did not manage supply. Same goes for farmers if they can't control the sell price.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the concentration wealth. But an industry going from 90% of the population to 1%, even over a few hundred years, is going to have some bad effects.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us No no. It's all working to plan. Consolidation leads to bigger, more efficient farms. Or so the big land owners think... That much land requires ever more sophisticated technology, which big corporations are happy to provide and make people dependent on, all while collecting farm level data to allow someone to play the futures markets. There is a pecking order. Whom do you serve and to what end? And now I've reached my cynical threshold for the day and need to unplug and go outside ;-)
  - immibis 3y ago
    And then if your farm is not as efficient as the big land owners think it should be, you lose everything you ever worked for or loved. It's no surprise some of these people kill themselves.
  - thephyber 3y ago
    I don’t understand this line of thinking. If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you. Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      I would hope that if we learnt anything from the pandemic, that we learnt that efficiency is not the end all and be all. Efficiency creates fragile systems.
    - chucksta 3y ago
      You can't eat silver. Farms also shape rural communities, literally and figuratively. >Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons What would you call Community supported Agriculture? (https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the farm to table movement? Farmers markets?
- farmguy 3y ago
  Just making it more competitive. Yield on corn 50 years ago was half what it is today, which is good for a growing population. Our neck of the woods in the 70s used to have 25 farms where now 1 family farms the entirety. If you're good at what you do (to the degree you can control), you'll survive and keep growing. Biggest issues are your kids getting taxed to oblivion on land they inherit (this kills the farm) and outside investors bidding land way above where it reasonably cashflows because it's "cheap". But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...
  - hattmall 3y ago
    But like they are literally killing themselves so it must not be that big of a blessing... How much is the inheritance tax?
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It depends on the state, but even if you have a $5m exemption on inheritance, if you inherit $10m of farmland, you need cash to keep the land (or go into debt) or liquidate the land.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      No federal estate tax on $10m of farm land (kicks in around $13m this year, from what I can tell—the so-called "death tax" is often framed as applying to a whole lot more people than it actually does). Further, I'm pretty sure there are ways to structure a business that'll prevent even amounts exceeding $13m from being affected—granted, that would require advance planning which may or may not have been done. The rest would vary state by state and depend on the relation to the deceased, but I'm pretty sure it'd be $0 or negligible in most cases, on a $10m estate, for spouse or children at least, even with minimal advance preparation.
      - farmguy 3y ago
- eppp 3y ago
  Its changing who is doing it, not so much ending it. It will wipe out what is left of the small midwest towns though when it all consolidates.
- thephyber 3y ago
  Capitalism is still feeding us. Farmers and their vendors are orders of magnitudes more efficient than centuries ago. Family farming has always depended on cheap/free labor of children (and slaves / serfs / indentured servants / illegal immigrants). Corporate farming at least makes those transactions more honest and transparent.
  - LesZedCB 3y ago
    lawyers and PR departments afforded by corporate farmers are most certainly not making things more transparent. the only thing they do is obfuscate the particular human individuals exploiting the workers.
- ars 3y ago
  It's one of the reasons I hate this push to get rid of cars and move everyone into cities. It just increases the isolation of Farmers and other rural people. Strong Towns actually has a stated goal of reducing the interstate system! (Strong Towns, weak country, should be their new name.) We need to reverse this trend - more people back into tiny cities, and yes, even suburbs. Sure, looked at only from a money point of view, cities do a lot - but it's all services, and very little actual good people need in order to live. There's more to a strong country than just money.
  - immibis 3y ago
    I don't believe Strong Towns advocated for ending rural towns. Advice for improving cities doesn't say anything about people who don't live in cities. The closest I ever heard was that they should park their cars at the city border and go to the center by train.
- notjoemama 3y ago
  I see this critique all the time but never see anyone point to the ACTUAL problem: a lack of accountability. Is anyone here old enough to remember that telecoms were a plurality? Now they are consolidated into a few, or couple, I haven't checked lately. When they wanted to merge or buyout it used to be big news and regularly got denied to protect the market. But the last few monumental mergers have largely gone under the radar, a series of boxes checked and completed forms, and they're done. It's because people friendly to the entities are in the positions of decision. We know capitalism has flaws and is imperfect. It used to be our regulatory agencies would tell companies like Monsanto to take a hike. But now, they permit anything the corporations want to do. With that glaring of a problem, are we really talking about an economic framework called "capitalism"? No, we're not. Were this a Communist country then the oligarchs would be friendly to the regulatory agencies. Same issue, different economic foundation. Do you see where the problem lies now? It's not "capitalism". That's a nonsensical critique parroted by consuming inflammatory rhetoric, a waltz down the sidewalk of extremism from hateful social and news spaces online. Stop it, please.
dbg31415 3y ago
All of this. And the personality that farming attracts... it would literally destroy my Dad to fail at something he set out to do. There was a rumor that my grandfather killed himself. He had car trouble, and had crawled under the car to fix it. But somehow the jack slipped, and the car pushed a screwdriver into his heart as it fell. He was alone about 5 miles from the home place -- on a road where someone other than his family would find him. He was in his 70s... old for ranchers in the 1960s. Old for ranchers today. Bills were due, and his sons were all drafted into the military. But... once he died, 2 of his sons were able to get out of military service in order to come home and help take care of the ranch. Not everyone made it back, but those 2 did. And the life insurance paid off a lot of their debts that they had no other way of paying. (So now he's got a pasture named after him!) Anyway it's always been a hard life. They don't need a shrink, they need things to be just a little more fair. They don't need huge wins, but they need the ability to provide for the ones they love. Bankers, and re-sellers make money. Ranchers and farmers do not. It's a rigged system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The thing your post made me think about is that it seems like all of the professions that are actually critical for society (e.g. farming, teaching, construction, fishing, etc. - all of the "essential worker" type jobs) are actually the most punishingly difficult with the worst pay. Meanwhile I'm changing some text for an A/B test and posting on HN and making bank. Not sure what my point is here, other than this just feels wrong in some respect.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ironSkillet 3y ago
  It definitely often feels like the value capitalism places on certain skillsets is out of sync with the true intrinsic societal value. It ultimately boils down to the law of supply and demand, a brutally unemotional, uncaring concept.
  - WinLychee 3y ago
    At least in part it's not just supply and demand, but what capital owners have deemed your value is worth, and how much value you can produce for them given your role. A programmer at a big co can take that 300-500K/year you pay them and multiply it 10x, creating a lot of "value" due to far reaching impact at scale.
    - badpun 3y ago
      That is still supply and demand. The "demand" part comes from what you wrote about - how profitable the capital holders believe their tech ventures will be - this sets the ceiling for tech salaries. Currently, the capital holders are still very optimistic, which makes us in this profession still in very high demand.
      - WinLychee 3y ago
        Upon revisiting this, you make a fair point, I suppose that would drive demand.
jaredhallen 3y ago
Also, a growing dependency on a constantly increasing amount of input costs - fertilizer, engineered seeds, pesticides, etc. Input costs keep going up, while yields are slowing down, and the prices are already pretty much rock bottom. Hard to see a lot of hope for the future in the situation.
- bequanna 3y ago
  Input costs are high but cash crop prices are definitely not rock bottom and most ag commodities are still near recent highs: https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=m&t=ZS https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=m&t=ZS
badpun 3y ago
> Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family). Can anyone explain to me why farmland in developed countries is so expensive? It sounds like a terrible investment to buy it at such prices, and yet somebody's doing it.
- bequanna 3y ago
  The prices are set by large farmers adding acres and acres available for sale are relatively scarce. When you consider the people doing the buying are at scale (thousands of acres) and can spread the cost of very expensive equipment over many acres it starts to make sense. The marginal cost of farming another 80 acres in terms of time and equipment is quite low.
  - farmguy 3y ago
    Correct.
- ren_engineer 3y ago
  lots of foreign corporations buying it to secure food production and during the 0% interest rate days post 2008 lots of hedge funds and investors who just needed a place to throw money, similar to VCs investing in any random startup they could find. Worst case scenario the investors lose money on farmland and use it to offset taxes on a different investment. Losers are the local people who can't get land because some investor from California or New York buying via online auction
bryanlarsen 3y ago
> (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family). In Saskatchewan its $2K/acre and you need ~2500. Probably not a coincidence that it works out about the same...

immibis 3y ago

So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us

prottog 3y ago
How does that follow?
- mihaic 3y ago
  Race-to-the-bottom capitalism forces farmers to fight on price, since they can only sell in bulk to big enterprises, squeazing out their profits. Farming associations actually help here, since they can negociate like a union, but not sure how much the US would approve of this "communism".
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Trust are good and even needed for the producers. Just look at OPEC... It would be lot worse for them if they did not manage supply. Same goes for farmers if they can't control the sell price.
travisjungroth 3y ago
Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the concentration wealth. But an industry going from 90% of the population to 1%, even over a few hundred years, is going to have some bad effects.
phkahler 3y ago
>> So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us No no. It's all working to plan. Consolidation leads to bigger, more efficient farms. Or so the big land owners think... That much land requires ever more sophisticated technology, which big corporations are happy to provide and make people dependent on, all while collecting farm level data to allow someone to play the futures markets. There is a pecking order. Whom do you serve and to what end? And now I've reached my cynical threshold for the day and need to unplug and go outside ;-)
- immibis 3y ago
  And then if your farm is not as efficient as the big land owners think it should be, you lose everything you ever worked for or loved. It's no surprise some of these people kill themselves.
- thephyber 3y ago
  I don’t understand this line of thinking. If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you. Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    I would hope that if we learnt anything from the pandemic, that we learnt that efficiency is not the end all and be all. Efficiency creates fragile systems.
  - chucksta 3y ago
    You can't eat silver. Farms also shape rural communities, literally and figuratively. >Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons What would you call Community supported Agriculture? (https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the farm to table movement? Farmers markets?
farmguy 3y ago
Just making it more competitive. Yield on corn 50 years ago was half what it is today, which is good for a growing population. Our neck of the woods in the 70s used to have 25 farms where now 1 family farms the entirety. If you're good at what you do (to the degree you can control), you'll survive and keep growing. Biggest issues are your kids getting taxed to oblivion on land they inherit (this kills the farm) and outside investors bidding land way above where it reasonably cashflows because it's "cheap". But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...
- hattmall 3y ago
  But like they are literally killing themselves so it must not be that big of a blessing... How much is the inheritance tax?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It depends on the state, but even if you have a $5m exemption on inheritance, if you inherit $10m of farmland, you need cash to keep the land (or go into debt) or liquidate the land.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    No federal estate tax on $10m of farm land (kicks in around $13m this year, from what I can tell—the so-called "death tax" is often framed as applying to a whole lot more people than it actually does). Further, I'm pretty sure there are ways to structure a business that'll prevent even amounts exceeding $13m from being affected—granted, that would require advance planning which may or may not have been done. The rest would vary state by state and depend on the relation to the deceased, but I'm pretty sure it'd be $0 or negligible in most cases, on a $10m estate, for spouse or children at least, even with minimal advance preparation.
    - farmguy 3y ago
eppp 3y ago
Its changing who is doing it, not so much ending it. It will wipe out what is left of the small midwest towns though when it all consolidates.
thephyber 3y ago
Capitalism is still feeding us. Farmers and their vendors are orders of magnitudes more efficient than centuries ago. Family farming has always depended on cheap/free labor of children (and slaves / serfs / indentured servants / illegal immigrants). Corporate farming at least makes those transactions more honest and transparent.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  lawyers and PR departments afforded by corporate farmers are most certainly not making things more transparent. the only thing they do is obfuscate the particular human individuals exploiting the workers.
ars 3y ago
It's one of the reasons I hate this push to get rid of cars and move everyone into cities. It just increases the isolation of Farmers and other rural people. Strong Towns actually has a stated goal of reducing the interstate system! (Strong Towns, weak country, should be their new name.) We need to reverse this trend - more people back into tiny cities, and yes, even suburbs. Sure, looked at only from a money point of view, cities do a lot - but it's all services, and very little actual good people need in order to live. There's more to a strong country than just money.
- immibis 3y ago
  I don't believe Strong Towns advocated for ending rural towns. Advice for improving cities doesn't say anything about people who don't live in cities. The closest I ever heard was that they should park their cars at the city border and go to the center by train.
notjoemama 3y ago
I see this critique all the time but never see anyone point to the ACTUAL problem: a lack of accountability. Is anyone here old enough to remember that telecoms were a plurality? Now they are consolidated into a few, or couple, I haven't checked lately. When they wanted to merge or buyout it used to be big news and regularly got denied to protect the market. But the last few monumental mergers have largely gone under the radar, a series of boxes checked and completed forms, and they're done. It's because people friendly to the entities are in the positions of decision. We know capitalism has flaws and is imperfect. It used to be our regulatory agencies would tell companies like Monsanto to take a hike. But now, they permit anything the corporations want to do. With that glaring of a problem, are we really talking about an economic framework called "capitalism"? No, we're not. Were this a Communist country then the oligarchs would be friendly to the regulatory agencies. Same issue, different economic foundation. Do you see where the problem lies now? It's not "capitalism". That's a nonsensical critique parroted by consuming inflammatory rhetoric, a waltz down the sidewalk of extremism from hateful social and news spaces online. Stop it, please.

dbg31415 3y ago

All of this. And the personality that farming attracts... it would literally destroy my Dad to fail at something he set out to do. There was a rumor that my grandfather killed himself. He had car trouble, and had crawled under the car to fix it. But somehow the jack slipped, and the car pushed a screwdriver into his heart as it fell. He was alone about 5 miles from the home place -- on a road where someone other than his family would find him. He was in his 70s... old for ranchers in the 1960s. Old for ranchers today. Bills were due, and his sons were all drafted into the military. But... once he died, 2 of his sons were able to get out of military service in order to come home and help take care of the ranch. Not everyone made it back, but those 2 did. And the life insurance paid off a lot of their debts that they had no other way of paying. (So now he's got a pasture named after him!) Anyway it's always been a hard life. They don't need a shrink, they need things to be just a little more fair. They don't need huge wins, but they need the ability to provide for the ones they love. Bankers, and re-sellers make money. Ranchers and farmers do not. It's a rigged system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

The thing your post made me think about is that it seems like all of the professions that are actually critical for society (e.g. farming, teaching, construction, fishing, etc. - all of the "essential worker" type jobs) are actually the most punishingly difficult with the worst pay. Meanwhile I'm changing some text for an A/B test and posting on HN and making bank. Not sure what my point is here, other than this just feels wrong in some respect.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ironSkillet 3y ago
It definitely often feels like the value capitalism places on certain skillsets is out of sync with the true intrinsic societal value. It ultimately boils down to the law of supply and demand, a brutally unemotional, uncaring concept.
- WinLychee 3y ago
  At least in part it's not just supply and demand, but what capital owners have deemed your value is worth, and how much value you can produce for them given your role. A programmer at a big co can take that 300-500K/year you pay them and multiply it 10x, creating a lot of "value" due to far reaching impact at scale.
  - badpun 3y ago
    That is still supply and demand. The "demand" part comes from what you wrote about - how profitable the capital holders believe their tech ventures will be - this sets the ceiling for tech salaries. Currently, the capital holders are still very optimistic, which makes us in this profession still in very high demand.
    - WinLychee 3y ago
      Upon revisiting this, you make a fair point, I suppose that would drive demand.

jaredhallen 3y ago

Also, a growing dependency on a constantly increasing amount of input costs - fertilizer, engineered seeds, pesticides, etc. Input costs keep going up, while yields are slowing down, and the prices are already pretty much rock bottom. Hard to see a lot of hope for the future in the situation.

bequanna 3y ago
Input costs are high but cash crop prices are definitely not rock bottom and most ag commodities are still near recent highs: https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=m&t=ZS https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=m&t=ZS

badpun 3y ago

> Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family). Can anyone explain to me why farmland in developed countries is so expensive? It sounds like a terrible investment to buy it at such prices, and yet somebody's doing it.

bequanna 3y ago
The prices are set by large farmers adding acres and acres available for sale are relatively scarce. When you consider the people doing the buying are at scale (thousands of acres) and can spread the cost of very expensive equipment over many acres it starts to make sense. The marginal cost of farming another 80 acres in terms of time and equipment is quite low.
- farmguy 3y ago
  Correct.
ren_engineer 3y ago
lots of foreign corporations buying it to secure food production and during the 0% interest rate days post 2008 lots of hedge funds and investors who just needed a place to throw money, similar to VCs investing in any random startup they could find. Worst case scenario the investors lose money on farmland and use it to offset taxes on a different investment. Losers are the local people who can't get land because some investor from California or New York buying via online auction

bryanlarsen 3y ago

> (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family). In Saskatchewan its $2K/acre and you need ~2500. Probably not a coincidence that it works out about the same...