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Most American farmers have second jobs to stay afloat

78 points by ilamont 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
luxuryballs 2y ago
Here I was thinking about buying a farm to live on as a second job that would also be a potential safety net if something major happens to the power grid or internet as I don’t see myself trading snippets of code with my neighbors for supplies…
- jives 2y ago
  I always say that as a developer, I'll be one of the first to die come the apocalypse. I'll be the useless guy with nothing to trade and no survival skills.
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    Keep yourself fit and at least you’ll be a good laborer.
    - smitelli 2y ago
      Until I crack a tooth or something and go mad from the constant pain.
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      Ok, I'll need coders after the apocalypse and you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life, that's not how that works. No gym fit is farmer fit enough.
      - lotsoweiners 2y ago
        Go to gym during the week and do gardening/landscaping work on weekends. Should get you a good portion of the way there.
      - Johnny555 2y ago
        >you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life You can, my brother and I worked on my Uncle's farm over the summmers for at least ages 14-18 and had no special "laborer" training, we went from high school classes to slopping hog, feeding cows, stacking hay, etc. Sore muscles and blisters are the norm for the first few weeks, but it doesn't take long for muscles to adapt and callouses to form.
      - yoyohello13 2y ago
        > you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life Pretty sure all slavers from the last 10,000 years would disagree. It doesn’t take that long to get used to manual labor.
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    No reason you can’t do both.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  Subsistence farming without using modern amenities is a whole different ballgame from the sorts of farms in the article.
  - luxuryballs 2y ago
    I would do it as a second income, it only becomes subsistence if the need arises.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Farmer will be just a fucked if the power goes off and doesn't come back on. Obviously not all of them but they are by no means just going to survive something like that.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  Friends parents have a 14 acre plot of land with chicken and a pretty sizable garden. They have to give away their eggs in the warmer months as there are too many. Unfortunately they haven't been gardening due to health but the chickens are still going. Most of the lot is wooded and is not difficult to maintain. It's no farm but I imagine it could support a few people. Edit: forgot to add they have about 25 or so chickens as of now. They have lost one to a fox so have these weather proof radios playing talk radio which keeps them away.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
> Even if cherries don’t pay, Hallstedt is determined to keep his farmland from becoming yet another subdivision. But to keep the orchard, Hallstedt said he needs to be able to stay in business. Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development. Anyways, it's probably a good thing that food is so cheap that you need to create it at large scale to make any money off it. Food production exists to feed people, not prop up small contributors to the food supply because their goods have been made too cheap and affordable for everyone.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  New residential development and purchasing recently had numbers come out, they’re pretty bad. If someone is buying land to subdivide, they would be better of not doing so.
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    Great. We are 8 million homes behind - I love that people get rich real easy is reason enough for people to go without homes. Smh for this world we've made.
    - lotsoweiners 2y ago
      Are the land developers supposed to lose money and be charitable? Costs for both materials and labor have up due to inflation, Covid, etc. How could you expect something different?
      - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
        [dead]
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Am I missing something? Whether the developers would be profitable or not building housing on a given tract of land doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the article or quote. The quote is presumably someone who doesn't want to sell their farm to residential developers period.
brink 2y ago
Protect the farmers.
- nayuki 2y ago
  Explain how
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    I guess buy their crops.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Honest question. Why? Clearly we need a food supply but why do we need to prop up unsustainable businesses that are over-producing demand? Farmers are massively subsidized and still barely make ends meet. Is that actually beneficial? I ask this as someone who paid for books and beer in college working on farms.
  - rajamaka 2y ago
    Still need to eat tomatoes when we are at war with country we buy tomatoes from.
    - PeterisP 2y ago
      Those farmers with second jobs would need protection from local megafarms who are outcompeting them, not other countries - it's not about location, it's about size of the operation.
      - rajamaka 2y ago
        My reply was in relation to the comment "Protect the farmers." I assumed that included local megafarms too.
  - jjmarr 2y ago
    Because it's objectively cheaper to outsource food production to countries with low cost of living. In an economically efficient world, all food in North America would be coming from Africa instead of going to Africa (see Dead Aid). But if that ever actually happened, those countries could blockade the United States and cut off the food supply. It would be a shitshow. Imagine the 1970s oil crisis, but instead of being unable to drive anywhere, mass famines occurred. In Canada, we don't use subsidies for the dairy market. We use "supply management" where we make it difficult to import butter or milk and ban farmers from producing too much of it. This keeps the prices artificially high which allows for farmers to continue domestic production in a HCOL country. However, 4 sticks of butter costs $6.
throwaway_29181 2y ago
This has been true for many, many decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film...
- defrost 2y ago
  Ditto Australia. This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same. Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc. It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.
  - PrismCrystal 2y ago
    I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
    - defrost 2y ago
      It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate. The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list). These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.
cpursley 2y ago
This is really disappointing and something I've thought about for years. One of my first website ideas was a platform to help connect communities with the local farmers. I've sat on a domain for years that I thought was really fun (farmersstand.com). I've finally gotten around to working on this as my Thanksgiving "Bolt.new" project - it's all mocked data now but feedback on the direction this could go is much appreciated: https://www.FarmersStand.com https://www.FarmersStand.com
- griffzhowl 2y ago
  I think it's a great idea - decentralizing food production and distribution networks, building lateral connections in communities etc. is definitely to be encouraged. One thing I would change is the domain... the double ss is no good: you want it as phonetic as possible so people can type it as they hear it.
dade_ 2y ago
Farms are also an excellent source of losses tax for high income tax deductions that want a large plot of land in remote place.
thunkingdeep 2y ago
Well, maybe most districts where the no1 employment sector is agriculture should stop voting Republican. /shrug
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  No the GOP is practically socialist when it comes to farmers, they just throw subsidies and tax breaks at them - Dems do that too but the GOP pretends they exist for the people in the Heartland, the farm folk just eat that up
- colechristensen 2y ago
  The Democrats have done a surprising job of losing the working class over the last 30 years. The voters haven't lost their minds, the party has.
  - paxys 2y ago
    Both can be true.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
chimeracoder 2y ago
Like most articles on American farming, this article doesn't actually specify what constitutes a farmer[0]. Oftentimes, "farmer" is used to refer strictly to the people who own arable land, not the people who actually work the land. In this context, the word "farmer" would be more akin to a farm landlord, in which case working a second job would not be surprising. Or to put it another way, for them, farming would be better described the second job - a source of passive income that supplements the income from the primary job. The language used in this article and the accompanying USDA report implies (though does not explicitly state) that it using this common definition of "farmer" - that is, referring strictly to the person, family, or corporation that owns the land, but not to any other laborers who work the land. This problem extends to most public discourse about farming and the politics thereof. Unfortunately, many folks have a very inaccurate picture of how agriculture works in this country, and the way it is discussed is a big component of that. [0] The USDA is similarly inconsistent with this language in its own reports, which only exacerbates the problem.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
How much of this is because of hobby farming and kids inheriting the family farm? Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs". I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell. You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that. Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer". With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job. Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google. It's never going to happen. Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  A lot of time businesses that farmers could do as side gigs become the primary gig over the generations but the farm just has to stay there and keep doing farming things so you don't get screwed by the municipality or state on zoning or facility related compliance BS.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Or you get to keep your agricultural property tax breaks.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- giantg2 2y ago
  "Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer"." It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.
troymc 2y ago
That's often how it goes. The market starts out with lots of small businesses, but over time it ends up up with a few giant companies. Economists call it industry consolidation. There are some interesting nuances at the beginning and the end of the "consolidation curve" [1]. [1] https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve
jmward01 2y ago
Farming is one of the most subsidized industries in the US. With the rampent belief that subsidies destroy other industries and are 'socialist' maybe the experiment should be made to remove subsidies for mega farms (not small ones) to see if it could correct this problem.
jfengel 2y ago
Old joke: A farmer wins the lottery. When asked what he's going to do, he replies, "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."
bdangubic 2y ago
you can replace “farmers” with most professions these days and this would still ring true
- paxys 2y ago
  Less than 5% of Americans workers hold multiple jobs, so no, that will not ring true.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    95% or americans are not afloat so that checks out ( https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=overall&variable=totcoll https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=o... ) also 35+% of americans have a side hustle so you are taking that 5% too literally :)
henvic 2y ago
Yeah. I know a beet farmer who struggled a lot with his farm to the point that he had to start selling paper at some point. Poor Dwight...
afpx 2y ago
How many of these farmers are hobbyists, though? Or, use the farm land to offset their taxes (like they do a lot where I live)? Maybe farming is their second job, rather than the other way around? If you go to the actual report, you'll see that the "very large scale farms" have the smallest percent of acres while also providing the largest value. Maybe the small-scale farms are inefficiently managed and operated. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263.pdf?v=8165.3 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263...
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  The guy running two head of cattle on 1 acre just so he can claim to be a "farmer" for the tax benefits will never have a profitable operation.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Not quite true. He can take that 2 head of cattle to the bank for a loan for 40 acres and that will make money - not a living but a profit. Then a few years latter more land and now he is a farmer. i work with a number of people on that plan. It is an open question how many will complete it and become full time farmers.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Thing is you can't get an ag exemption without provable business. Not sure what that looks like elsewhere but here you have to do a minimum of $10k gross sales. As small as that number is it's surprisingly difficult to hit fucking around.
    - bigfatkitten 2y ago
      What passes muster will vary between jurisdictions of course, but there are many ways of making a company appear on paper as though it has turnover. A classic is where the proprietor writes the company a check, and then the company writes him a check for the same amount.
015a 2y ago
I think the title should read "most family farmers have second jobs to stay afloat", as that appears to be the statistic the article asserts. This leaves out large-scale factory farming, obviously; the statement might still be true when large-scale factory farming is taken into account, but that's not what the article seems to assert? To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".
hobobaggins 2y ago
And with the Estate Tax (the 'death tax'), if you don't have significant savings (most farmers do not), when you die, your kids will have to pay the tax on their inheritance. And since it's really hard to sell just part of an estate (and especially a farm), that usually means selling the whole thing, just to pay the taxes on the thing you left behind for them. The estate tax should be repealed, not just at the federal level, but in the twelve states that also have an estate tax of their own, or we'll lose the family farm, and the family farmers, forever.. killed by taxes.
- xnx 2y ago
  Doesn't the estate tax only apply to farms worth more than $27 million?
  - not2b 2y ago
    Less than one percent of farm estates owed any estate tax in 2020. It's probably about the same in more recent years. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-percent-of-farm-estates-owed-federal-estate-taxes-in-2020/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-...
- positr0n 2y ago
  Where do you live that it's hard to sell a few acre parcel? That is not my experience at all in multiple states I have knowledge of. Also, most people have little sympathy for someone who just inherited assets worth more than $13M (and likely double that if married) before you owe a penny in taxes. If it's a legitimate business, get a loan to pay them and continue getting even wealthier. If not, sell it all and never work a day in your life again. In fact, option two sounds pretty good to me either way :)
jmyeet 2y ago
Nobody wants to address the real problem here, just like with homelessness where the biggest contributor to and solution for is housing affordability. Why? Because that goes against vested interests in raising house prices. Marx created an analytical framework that perfectly describes what's going on here. Specifically, we're talking about the workers relationship to the means of production. A family farm is an inherently socialist construct because the workers, being the family that works that farm, is typically the one who owns that farm. They own the means of production. Consumers love this too, generally. Farmers markets, local produce and so on. So why don't we have that? Because of capitalism. Giant agribusiness corporations are set up to make family farming impossible to force consolidation. It's every aspect too. Seed subscriptions (essentially, GM crops), farm equipment maintenance (eg John Deere), even the lack of accessible healthcare. I'm really not sure people think about the impact on farming of the US not having accessible and affordable healthcare. There are many negative effects. This is just one of them. But farmers will often work a second job just to get insurance. Giant corporate farms? That's capitalism. Family farms? That's socialism. Walmart? Capitalism. Local mom-and-pop stores? Socialism. Comcast? Capitalism. EPB Internet in Chattanooga? Socialism. That may confuse you. You may be tempted to object because we've been sold on this idea that small business, in particular, is capitalism. It is not. If you still want to argue with that, why? Again, Marx describes this perfectly through the workers relationship to the means of production, regardless of your position on capitalism or socialism. Our entire economic system wants to coerce you into working for as little money as possible without you owning anything. That's the end-state of capitalism.
- docandrew 2y ago
  If family farms are socialism why did the bolsheviks kick family farmers off their land and collectivize the farms?
  - yoyohello13 2y ago
    That’s communism not socialism.
nightowl_games 2y ago
As someone who came from rural Canada, and who's dad is a farmer, and whose father in law is a farmer, I don't think this is true in Canada. That being said, your smart to do something in the winter time, trucking is an easy pickup for those cold months...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
abetusk 2y ago
I certainly am no expert but Dr. Sarah Taber talks about how many farms, especially small to mid sized, are effectively tax write offs and that the "put upon" farmer is a myth [0] [1]. [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1323297129830469638 https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.c...
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Not a myth, but likely already forced out of the industry or dead by their own hand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_the_Uni...
  - abetusk 2y ago
    Again, not an expert but Dr. Sarah Taber claims that number is inflated by considering farm employees, not farm owners [0]. The claim is that farm owners are no worse than the baseline but that farm employees, often times low wage, migrant or undocumented workers, are the ones that suffer from a high suicide rate. From the archived Twitter link: """ In other words, the farm lobby has stolen farmworkers' deaths as their own. """ [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1339644522955980800 https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.c...
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      I can speak to personally witnessing most of the ag families I've known in the last 50 years selling out to large ag conglomerates because the family ran out of generations willing to spend their entire life skirting bankruptcy. If the claim that this is predominantly ag workers and not owners outright committing suicide is accurate I'd probably counter something along the lines of in generations past before big ag strangled the life out of smallholding farmers most of those workers would very likely have been farm owners.
dangus 2y ago
The most saddening story of the article is the one about that mentions the subdivision. Our free-for-all development without any real regional planning is such a negative to this country. Sprawl killing land that’s good for farms, sprawl that really shouldn’t exist when there’s so much urban and suburban infill that should be done.
rr808 2y ago
Here in New Jersey our property taxes are crippling. However if you have a big 5+ acre yard and can sell $1k worth of produce you are "farm" and taxed at a much lower rate. You might need a second job to stay afloat...
pasttense01 2y ago
There has been a big change in what farmers do. Traditional farmers both raised crops (such as corn and soybeans) and raised animals (such as hogs, beef cattle, chickens, dairy cows). This is a year around operation. Nowadays there is much greater specialization. If you just raise crops you are busy in the spring (planting) and in the fall (harvesting) and do some work in the summer (controlling weeds) and very little in the winter. So this leaves a lot of time for a part time job. Raising animals has become both specialized (one type of animal) and these being mostly very large, fulltime operations.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sunflowerfly 2y ago
I live in rural America. The big farmers do not have second jobs. But there are tons of small hobby farms. And there are plenty of farms owned by wealthy people in cities for tax breaks or playgrounds (hunting, 4 wheeling, camping, etc). Production would likely go up if there were a lot fewer farmers.
zzz999 2y ago
[dead]
drewcoo 2y ago
Is farming their "second job?"

78 points by ilamont 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Here I was thinking about buying a farm to live on as a second job that would also be a potential safety net if something major happens to the power grid or internet as I don’t see myself trading snippets of code with my neighbors for supplies…

jives 2y ago
I always say that as a developer, I'll be one of the first to die come the apocalypse. I'll be the useless guy with nothing to trade and no survival skills.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  Keep yourself fit and at least you’ll be a good laborer.
  - smitelli 2y ago
    Until I crack a tooth or something and go mad from the constant pain.
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    Ok, I'll need coders after the apocalypse and you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life, that's not how that works. No gym fit is farmer fit enough.
    - lotsoweiners 2y ago
      Go to gym during the week and do gardening/landscaping work on weekends. Should get you a good portion of the way there.
    - Johnny555 2y ago
      >you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life You can, my brother and I worked on my Uncle's farm over the summmers for at least ages 14-18 and had no special "laborer" training, we went from high school classes to slopping hog, feeding cows, stacking hay, etc. Sore muscles and blisters are the norm for the first few weeks, but it doesn't take long for muscles to adapt and callouses to form.
    - yoyohello13 2y ago
      > you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life Pretty sure all slavers from the last 10,000 years would disagree. It doesn’t take that long to get used to manual labor.
- lotsoweiners 2y ago
  No reason you can’t do both.
roywiggins 2y ago
Subsistence farming without using modern amenities is a whole different ballgame from the sorts of farms in the article.
- luxuryballs 2y ago
  I would do it as a second income, it only becomes subsistence if the need arises.
NemoNobody 2y ago
Farmer will be just a fucked if the power goes off and doesn't come back on. Obviously not all of them but they are by no means just going to survive something like that.
MisterTea 2y ago
Friends parents have a 14 acre plot of land with chicken and a pretty sizable garden. They have to give away their eggs in the warmer months as there are too many. Unfortunately they haven't been gardening due to health but the chickens are still going. Most of the lot is wooded and is not difficult to maintain. It's no farm but I imagine it could support a few people. Edit: forgot to add they have about 25 or so chickens as of now. They have lost one to a fox so have these weather proof radios playing talk radio which keeps them away.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

> Even if cherries don’t pay, Hallstedt is determined to keep his farmland from becoming yet another subdivision. But to keep the orchard, Hallstedt said he needs to be able to stay in business. Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development. Anyways, it's probably a good thing that food is so cheap that you need to create it at large scale to make any money off it. Food production exists to feed people, not prop up small contributors to the food supply because their goods have been made too cheap and affordable for everyone.

dgfitz 2y ago
New residential development and purchasing recently had numbers come out, they’re pretty bad. If someone is buying land to subdivide, they would be better of not doing so.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  Great. We are 8 million homes behind - I love that people get rich real easy is reason enough for people to go without homes. Smh for this world we've made.
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    Are the land developers supposed to lose money and be charitable? Costs for both materials and labor have up due to inflation, Covid, etc. How could you expect something different?
    - iphoneisbetter 2y ago
      [dead]
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Am I missing something? Whether the developers would be profitable or not building housing on a given tract of land doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the article or quote. The quote is presumably someone who doesn't want to sell their farm to residential developers period.

brink 2y ago

Protect the farmers.

nayuki 2y ago
Explain how
- lotsoweiners 2y ago
  I guess buy their crops.
mulmen 2y ago
Honest question. Why? Clearly we need a food supply but why do we need to prop up unsustainable businesses that are over-producing demand? Farmers are massively subsidized and still barely make ends meet. Is that actually beneficial? I ask this as someone who paid for books and beer in college working on farms.
- rajamaka 2y ago
  Still need to eat tomatoes when we are at war with country we buy tomatoes from.
  - PeterisP 2y ago
    Those farmers with second jobs would need protection from local megafarms who are outcompeting them, not other countries - it's not about location, it's about size of the operation.
    - rajamaka 2y ago
      My reply was in relation to the comment "Protect the farmers." I assumed that included local megafarms too.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  Because it's objectively cheaper to outsource food production to countries with low cost of living. In an economically efficient world, all food in North America would be coming from Africa instead of going to Africa (see Dead Aid). But if that ever actually happened, those countries could blockade the United States and cut off the food supply. It would be a shitshow. Imagine the 1970s oil crisis, but instead of being unable to drive anywhere, mass famines occurred. In Canada, we don't use subsidies for the dairy market. We use "supply management" where we make it difficult to import butter or milk and ban farmers from producing too much of it. This keeps the prices artificially high which allows for farmers to continue domestic production in a HCOL country. However, 4 sticks of butter costs $6.

throwaway_29181 2y ago

This has been true for many, many decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film...

defrost 2y ago
Ditto Australia. This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same. Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc. It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
  - defrost 2y ago
    It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate. The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list). These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.

cpursley 2y ago

This is really disappointing and something I've thought about for years. One of my first website ideas was a platform to help connect communities with the local farmers. I've sat on a domain for years that I thought was really fun (farmersstand.com). I've finally gotten around to working on this as my Thanksgiving "Bolt.new" project - it's all mocked data now but feedback on the direction this could go is much appreciated: https://www.FarmersStand.com https://www.FarmersStand.com

griffzhowl 2y ago
I think it's a great idea - decentralizing food production and distribution networks, building lateral connections in communities etc. is definitely to be encouraged. One thing I would change is the domain... the double ss is no good: you want it as phonetic as possible so people can type it as they hear it.

dade_ 2y ago

Farms are also an excellent source of losses tax for high income tax deductions that want a large plot of land in remote place.

thunkingdeep 2y ago

Well, maybe most districts where the no1 employment sector is agriculture should stop voting Republican. /shrug

NemoNobody 2y ago
No the GOP is practically socialist when it comes to farmers, they just throw subsidies and tax breaks at them - Dems do that too but the GOP pretends they exist for the people in the Heartland, the farm folk just eat that up
colechristensen 2y ago
The Democrats have done a surprising job of losing the working class over the last 30 years. The voters haven't lost their minds, the party has.
- paxys 2y ago
  Both can be true.

aaron695 2y ago

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chimeracoder 2y ago

Like most articles on American farming, this article doesn't actually specify what constitutes a farmer[0]. Oftentimes, "farmer" is used to refer strictly to the people who own arable land, not the people who actually work the land. In this context, the word "farmer" would be more akin to a farm landlord, in which case working a second job would not be surprising. Or to put it another way, for them, farming would be better described the second job - a source of passive income that supplements the income from the primary job. The language used in this article and the accompanying USDA report implies (though does not explicitly state) that it using this common definition of "farmer" - that is, referring strictly to the person, family, or corporation that owns the land, but not to any other laborers who work the land. This problem extends to most public discourse about farming and the politics thereof. Unfortunately, many folks have a very inaccurate picture of how agriculture works in this country, and the way it is discussed is a big component of that. [0] The USDA is similarly inconsistent with this language in its own reports, which only exacerbates the problem.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

How much of this is because of hobby farming and kids inheriting the family farm? Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs". I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell. You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that. Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer". With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job. Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google. It's never going to happen. Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.

potato3732842 2y ago
A lot of time businesses that farmers could do as side gigs become the primary gig over the generations but the farm just has to stay there and keep doing farming things so you don't get screwed by the municipality or state on zoning or facility related compliance BS.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Or you get to keep your agricultural property tax breaks.
  - deleted 2y ago
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giantg2 2y ago
"Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer"." It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.

troymc 2y ago

That's often how it goes. The market starts out with lots of small businesses, but over time it ends up up with a few giant companies. Economists call it industry consolidation. There are some interesting nuances at the beginning and the end of the "consolidation curve" [1]. [1] https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

jmward01 2y ago

Farming is one of the most subsidized industries in the US. With the rampent belief that subsidies destroy other industries and are 'socialist' maybe the experiment should be made to remove subsidies for mega farms (not small ones) to see if it could correct this problem.

jfengel 2y ago

Old joke: A farmer wins the lottery. When asked what he's going to do, he replies, "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."

bdangubic 2y ago

you can replace “farmers” with most professions these days and this would still ring true

paxys 2y ago
Less than 5% of Americans workers hold multiple jobs, so no, that will not ring true.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  95% or americans are not afloat so that checks out ( https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=overall&variable=totcoll https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=o... ) also 35+% of americans have a side hustle so you are taking that 5% too literally :)

henvic 2y ago

Yeah. I know a beet farmer who struggled a lot with his farm to the point that he had to start selling paper at some point. Poor Dwight...

afpx 2y ago

How many of these farmers are hobbyists, though? Or, use the farm land to offset their taxes (like they do a lot where I live)? Maybe farming is their second job, rather than the other way around? If you go to the actual report, you'll see that the "very large scale farms" have the smallest percent of acres while also providing the largest value. Maybe the small-scale farms are inefficiently managed and operated. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263.pdf?v=8165.3 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263...

bigfatkitten 2y ago
The guy running two head of cattle on 1 acre just so he can claim to be a "farmer" for the tax benefits will never have a profitable operation.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Not quite true. He can take that 2 head of cattle to the bank for a loan for 40 acres and that will make money - not a living but a profit. Then a few years latter more land and now he is a farmer. i work with a number of people on that plan. It is an open question how many will complete it and become full time farmers.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Thing is you can't get an ag exemption without provable business. Not sure what that looks like elsewhere but here you have to do a minimum of $10k gross sales. As small as that number is it's surprisingly difficult to hit fucking around.
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    What passes muster will vary between jurisdictions of course, but there are many ways of making a company appear on paper as though it has turnover. A classic is where the proprietor writes the company a check, and then the company writes him a check for the same amount.

015a 2y ago

I think the title should read "most family farmers have second jobs to stay afloat", as that appears to be the statistic the article asserts. This leaves out large-scale factory farming, obviously; the statement might still be true when large-scale factory farming is taken into account, but that's not what the article seems to assert? To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".

hobobaggins 2y ago

And with the Estate Tax (the 'death tax'), if you don't have significant savings (most farmers do not), when you die, your kids will have to pay the tax on their inheritance. And since it's really hard to sell just part of an estate (and especially a farm), that usually means selling the whole thing, just to pay the taxes on the thing you left behind for them. The estate tax should be repealed, not just at the federal level, but in the twelve states that also have an estate tax of their own, or we'll lose the family farm, and the family farmers, forever.. killed by taxes.

xnx 2y ago
Doesn't the estate tax only apply to farms worth more than $27 million?
- not2b 2y ago
  Less than one percent of farm estates owed any estate tax in 2020. It's probably about the same in more recent years. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-percent-of-farm-estates-owed-federal-estate-taxes-in-2020/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-...
positr0n 2y ago
Where do you live that it's hard to sell a few acre parcel? That is not my experience at all in multiple states I have knowledge of. Also, most people have little sympathy for someone who just inherited assets worth more than $13M (and likely double that if married) before you owe a penny in taxes. If it's a legitimate business, get a loan to pay them and continue getting even wealthier. If not, sell it all and never work a day in your life again. In fact, option two sounds pretty good to me either way :)

jmyeet 2y ago

Nobody wants to address the real problem here, just like with homelessness where the biggest contributor to and solution for is housing affordability. Why? Because that goes against vested interests in raising house prices. Marx created an analytical framework that perfectly describes what's going on here. Specifically, we're talking about the workers relationship to the means of production. A family farm is an inherently socialist construct because the workers, being the family that works that farm, is typically the one who owns that farm. They own the means of production. Consumers love this too, generally. Farmers markets, local produce and so on. So why don't we have that? Because of capitalism. Giant agribusiness corporations are set up to make family farming impossible to force consolidation. It's every aspect too. Seed subscriptions (essentially, GM crops), farm equipment maintenance (eg John Deere), even the lack of accessible healthcare. I'm really not sure people think about the impact on farming of the US not having accessible and affordable healthcare. There are many negative effects. This is just one of them. But farmers will often work a second job just to get insurance. Giant corporate farms? That's capitalism. Family farms? That's socialism. Walmart? Capitalism. Local mom-and-pop stores? Socialism. Comcast? Capitalism. EPB Internet in Chattanooga? Socialism. That may confuse you. You may be tempted to object because we've been sold on this idea that small business, in particular, is capitalism. It is not. If you still want to argue with that, why? Again, Marx describes this perfectly through the workers relationship to the means of production, regardless of your position on capitalism or socialism. Our entire economic system wants to coerce you into working for as little money as possible without you owning anything. That's the end-state of capitalism.

docandrew 2y ago
If family farms are socialism why did the bolsheviks kick family farmers off their land and collectivize the farms?
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  That’s communism not socialism.

nightowl_games 2y ago

As someone who came from rural Canada, and who's dad is a farmer, and whose father in law is a farmer, I don't think this is true in Canada. That being said, your smart to do something in the winter time, trucking is an easy pickup for those cold months...

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abetusk 2y ago

I certainly am no expert but Dr. Sarah Taber talks about how many farms, especially small to mid sized, are effectively tax write offs and that the "put upon" farmer is a myth [0] [1]. [0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1323297129830469638 https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.c...

forgetfreeman 2y ago
Not a myth, but likely already forced out of the industry or dead by their own hand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_the_Uni...
- abetusk 2y ago
  Again, not an expert but Dr. Sarah Taber claims that number is inflated by considering farm employees, not farm owners [0]. The claim is that farm owners are no worse than the baseline but that farm employees, often times low wage, migrant or undocumented workers, are the ones that suffer from a high suicide rate. From the archived Twitter link: """ In other words, the farm lobby has stolen farmworkers' deaths as their own. """ [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1339644522955980800 https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.c...
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    I can speak to personally witnessing most of the ag families I've known in the last 50 years selling out to large ag conglomerates because the family ran out of generations willing to spend their entire life skirting bankruptcy. If the claim that this is predominantly ag workers and not owners outright committing suicide is accurate I'd probably counter something along the lines of in generations past before big ag strangled the life out of smallholding farmers most of those workers would very likely have been farm owners.

dangus 2y ago

The most saddening story of the article is the one about that mentions the subdivision. Our free-for-all development without any real regional planning is such a negative to this country. Sprawl killing land that’s good for farms, sprawl that really shouldn’t exist when there’s so much urban and suburban infill that should be done.

rr808 2y ago

Here in New Jersey our property taxes are crippling. However if you have a big 5+ acre yard and can sell $1k worth of produce you are "farm" and taxed at a much lower rate. You might need a second job to stay afloat...

pasttense01 2y ago

There has been a big change in what farmers do. Traditional farmers both raised crops (such as corn and soybeans) and raised animals (such as hogs, beef cattle, chickens, dairy cows). This is a year around operation. Nowadays there is much greater specialization. If you just raise crops you are busy in the spring (planting) and in the fall (harvesting) and do some work in the summer (controlling weeds) and very little in the winter. So this leaves a lot of time for a part time job. Raising animals has become both specialized (one type of animal) and these being mostly very large, fulltime operations.

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sunflowerfly 2y ago

I live in rural America. The big farmers do not have second jobs. But there are tons of small hobby farms. And there are plenty of farms owned by wealthy people in cities for tax breaks or playgrounds (hunting, 4 wheeling, camping, etc). Production would likely go up if there were a lot fewer farmers.

zzz999 2y ago

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drewcoo 2y ago

Is farming their "second job?"