What is your opinon on corporate/large farming operations?

I do not understand your concern about GMO crops and a bad ecconomy? I don't see a connection. Many of the comments on GMO around this place do not reflect reality, but we are all entitled to our opinions. Rather than guess as to what your concerns are, could you explain more of what you are concerned about as to the GMO angle?

I agree the ecconomy goes up and down, and farmers are in a very few year good bubble here. Most of this is caused by the poor USA dollar, this has allowed China, India, and others to buy our USA crops for what looks like a bargin to them, and looks like real high prices to us. Someday soon, farm grains will return to the typical low priced commodity and farmers will not make much more than breakeven if lucky.

At this point in time, it is mostly farmers in the USA buying farm land. I too worry about outside countries investing here, but at this time, it is not happening in any amount at all.

Again at this time, farmers are pretty comfortably funded as to land - banks and farmers still remember the 1980's, and so farmers is one of the few segments of the USA that is not allowed to get too high of a debt level for land. It will be easy for them to get in too deep on seed/fert/machinery loans when things blow up, but land itself is being pretty closely watched so as not to get in too deep. No garentees, and some will get pinched, but - it's in fairly good shape.

When the ag bubble bursts, land values will drop, machinery values will drop, gonna be hard on the smaller and bigger machinery companies - esp the smaller ones. The land will get restributed to those with some cash, the banks and lending places will get bailed out by the govt, and like in the 1930's, and the 1980's, things will go on. Little different, but all will work out.

Doesn't mean it will be easy or nice for everyone, but those of us farmers who plan & think, will continue on.

My crystal ball, anyhow.

--->Paul

Farmers in the corn belt grow corn, because of climate and soil and growing season , which is suited to the production of corn. In other words, you grow what grows well in your region.. In Candada we have very little subsidy to farmers, and no minimum price guarantees, so the subsidy issue is not transferable or at all similar to that of the U.S..

No farmer "has" to grow certain gm crops. Farmers can grow what they want... Again they grow what works well. For some, it is gm canola, for others, non-gm soy. It varies so much! And no, a farmer does not have to buy their seed at all, they can use their own. And they are certainly not tied to buying seed from companies that buy their crops. Another food inc. idea that is refuted.

Again, here in Canada, we have very little govn't involvement in agriculture, so I can't really comment on your cheap food, profits for farmers and corporation ideas, because up here, our subsidies are less than 10% of american subsidies!

I add between 2 and three tonnes an acre of crop residue back into the soil every year, thank you very much! I use fossil fuel rather than using a pair of oxen. I don't use pesticides, ever. I use herbicides in very slight amounts. And just how big is my "big horsepower"?
Again, you are making statements about that which you know absolutely nothing. Strange indeed.

And finally, what do deer elk and bears, partridges, grouse, geese, ducks, and cranes and swans eat? Since agriculture came along and produced food and open cover for animals, populations of most wildlife have exploded.

Some room? Nearly a quarter of my acres (2240), isn't enough? how many acres do you dedicate to wildlife?

I am defensive btw, only because you think you know my farm. As the other guy was adamant he knew my earthworm species, while sitting in Michigan, you sureseem to know I am killing wildlife with "pesticides" I never use. A bit astounding, dontcha think?

Could you define 'monoculture'?

To me, it means planting one crop, over & over and over, year after year.

Here in the midwest, we rotate morew or less between corn & soybeans, so I don't consider that a monoculture. But, some folks say a field with only one type of plant in it is a monocrop, and for some reson think that's bad, and so then yes we grow monocrops.

I suppose it looks like I'm stuck in a rut - I like to grow corn and soybeans and oats and alfalfa and raise a few cattle. Any of these things needs to make money - farming is a business and I need to make money to live off of just like anyone else - but I enjoy growing stuff. Currently corn pays the best, soybeans pay ok, the cattle use the alfalfa and oats to pay a little. So perhaps I'm in a corn rut, about 1/2 my land ends up in corn. If the pay works out different, I'll plant something different - I try to meet the demands of buyers, who typically are 1/2 USA folks and half other countries. I've grown wheat, rye, and other crops in the past, and dabble with a little plowdown like raddish, turnip, clover, pea, and other crops.

It feels like good farming to me, not like a rut.

We have markets. I have a coop elevator 1/2 mile from my driveway, so it is easiest to take grain there. But I can sell to other feed mills, coops, soybean processor 30 miles from me, other farmers who feed livestock, or the ethanol plant 15 miles from me. _Most_ grain around here is handled by a coop elevator which gathers it together and makes feed, or ships it to a port or bigger user of grain.

But yes, specialization was preached for a long time, perhaps mid 1970's, as a good idea in farming. I disagree, and it wasn't some universal ploy or anything - but there was a little bit of that thought for a time.

The govt likes to mess in things, like when Nixon & Carter set up grain embargoes that totally crushed our USA grain prices, and made other countries worry about depending upon us as a food supplier - we used food as a weapon, basically. This devistated our farm ecconimy, and many of the farm subsidies came about because of this - USA farming was being destroyed. None of these subsidies are gravy to live off of - if we are depending upon them, we are losing money. The real subsidies help you survive. Seems a little different than what you are saying? There is not minumum price garentee in grains - if prices drop, 2 types of support kick in, but they do not garentee any set price, they fluctuate day to day for one, and year to year for the other one. If either is being collected on, we are already in losing money' mode.....

GMO crops are very, very poorly understood or reported on by those outside of agriculture. It's nothing at all like you have heard. Forget that. GMO crops have certain traits that make it easier & cheaper to control weeds and/or to control insects. The companies (and there are many, at least 3 main large ones, many many many small ones piggyback off these 3 main ones)that create these traits want to get paid for their investments, and so they have created rules and regulations on how you can use these special types of seeds. Basically you can buy them to plant, and the harvest from that crop cannot be saved for more seed - it can be sold to anyone for any sort of normal use of the crop, but not to reseed. It's not any sort of evil plot, and it's not required to sell back to the original company. There are some portions of all the legal mumbo jumbo that I do not care for myself; but all in all, it is a fairly simple business transaction - buy the seed that saves you money on weed & insect control, and you got to live by the rules to buy the seed new each year. _Most_ seed since the 1970's has had various seed patent protection to prevent sharing/selling of seed - long before any GMO seeds were around. So, it's nothing really all that new or different. The GMO seed is just like the operation system of your computer - almost exactly the same licence type of agreement you have agreed to to be on the internet.

Parts of it I don't like myself, but it's not the evil that some try to make it out to be. Nothing that sinister - just business. Like the many licence agreements you have with computer software, cell phone software - heck did you ever read the agreement on a GPS unit? I counted something like 34 pages of it one day wehen I was bored, you agree to a whole host of things as soon as you start using a streets and maps type of GPS - crazy rules in there, too. Nothing more or less to it than that - same stuff you've agreed to many times without even realizing it I bet.

Yup, the govt wants a stable, abundant, cheap food available for the masses, and they will do anything to make it so. However, doing those things destroys farming, so they need to kick in some safetynet farm program stuff to keep farmers farming on the bad years. But it's not like anyone gets rich off the farm programs.

Farming in the 1960s and 1970s was pretty hard on the environment - pour on the fertilizer and insect & weed controls, as much as you need and whatever it is isn't tested well but use more so it works...... It's all cheap, pour it on, and work up the ground as much as possible.

Now, 40-50 years later, the bad chemicals are gone, the slightly bad ones are pretty tightly regulated, fertilizer costs too much to waste so we don't pour it on, we spoon feed it, and it costs too much to till the ground too much, so we do much more conservation sort of farming. Far less washes down the rivers, and there is less to wash in the soil than what was before.

Unfortunately, the farming most around here and in the media/ cityfolk want us to return to, is actually that 1960s time frame, when we let a lot of soil wash away, and messed up with fertilizer a lot.

Nothing wrong with having your own garden & tending it like you wish, but modern farming does a lot better job of caring for the land and the environment than forcing all farming to return to the 1960's model would be! imho

Sorry for the long reply, but you covered a lot of ground! I'm only one voice and I'm far from perfect, but I hope I gave you some things to consider from a small time grain farmer using 1970's equipment to farm as best I can in the modern world.

--->Paul

Portions of Canada have the Canidian Wheat Board, which I hear is verey heavy govt involvement - tho I hear it does not really help the farmers, so much as the govt!

--->Paul

Yes, the cwb! Which has forced farmers for 75 years only in western canada to market their grain only through them! Thankfully, legislation has been forwarded to give us the freedom to sell our wheat and barley to whom we wish...

Good, nay excellent posts above. You explain things well.

Control the food....

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Forerunner
Good question.

Modern large scale farming does appear to be doing everything possible to kill the soil for any purpose save sterile grain production.

I am sorry, but this is totally true. I live in BIG cash crop country. Here its round up and corn round up and soy beans, all GMO, round up round up round up. You think round up don't kill the soil? Think again. How many cash croppers do you know that don't use round up? I know ONE in this COUNTY, and there are dozens of croppers.
Why do you think all the farm wives here die of cancer in their 60's and leave their husbands to fend for themselves? It's disturbing how many this applies to. Ag runoff due to field tiling and more round up.
Have you read the atrazine reports? Its legal, then the county water table is fully contaminated, then they make it illegal, but its still legal in the counties where the water table isn't testing poisoned yet. NO they can't just make it illegal across the board, they have to wait until AFTER the water is poisoned. Isn't that great?

You think GMO doesn't cross pollinate with the OP corn? OF COURSE it does, and they just approved GMO alfalfa. How long do you think it will be until it all cross pollinates? Google for the reports on cross-pollination of Mexican corn varieties pure for hundreds of years. Pure no more!

ANY cash cropper that sprays poison in the ground and uses GMO seed should be horrible ashamed of themselves for the part they are taking in poisoning the earth and contributing to the slow death of the generations. Have you read the reports about what eating GMO corn and soy does to a person over the course of their lifetime? Why do you think so many children are classed as ADHD? Why do you think America is getting dumber? WHy GMO high fructose corn syrup of course!

Ok, to answer the OP original question, how can these farmers afford to be so big? Government subsidies man! Isn't it great to be chained to the government? Round here, you get a yearly check because you have land. The amount per acre is based on what has been planted over the last X number of years. We got a check on 50 acres. It was 700 a year total. That was low because our base used to be corn and had a hay transition on it. I couldn't imagine how much the guy who owns the land across the street gets. He plants only corn and soybeans (highest check amount) and owns 6-800 acres or so. That check will certainly cover the land tax, which is low and then some. I know 3 people that have bought land in the township in the past year for a total of between half a mill and 750,000. Cash crop farmers all of them. They ain't rich. 1-3% farm land loan interest sure helps (floating btw) Just wait until the crop bubble bursts, the ethanol joke falls flat and the land subsidies stop. Interest will skyrocket and a lot of cash croppers will lose their land. Then at least land values will stabilize and people will be able to afford to be small farmers again, but it won't happen until we get a secretary of ag appointed with half a brain. THAT'll be the day.

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Though I am not a lifelong farmer, I tend to agree with Rambler's opinions. To me, farming is an ever evolving occupation--part art, part science. What was "good" in the 70's in the Sec'y Butz era is only one phase of that constant change. I knew Dean Butz personally when he was just the Dean at Purdue. He was a character, of course, but overall, a pretty good man. I think the flatulance from his own bean fields in NE Indiana spilled out of his mouth instead of the proper place many times......... Overall, his advice to individual farmers to get efficient and maximize their farm operations was good. There was considerable waste and slippage in those years--one little example of which would be the non-acceptance of four wheel drives on medium sized tractors--a practice that was used on smaller holdings in Europe many years earlier. Another would be the use of the timber frame barn for centralized farm operations--certainly a waste of efficiency and labor which stole considerable profits in the new commodity driven markets(even though they were picturesque and nostalgic). And, who needed woven fencing with electric fences and confinement practices that were starting up? And those long waits at the local elevators at harvest time?

If we are guilty of anything, it may be that we who satisfy our daily hunger have allowed the pendulum to swing too far. I am not enamored of the CAFE process or the battery egg operations, and I have changed from drinking milk from the large, computerized, corn silage dairies--to a form of milk from pasture raised cows. I think we have allowed ourselves and our children(many of whom live in cities and apartments now, and who have to have two jobs) to become too dependent on industrialized food--just one more part of a "consumer" driven economy in these scarce times. We need to find a modified economic system that doesn't rely so heavily on "consumerism" to survive. Maybe a healthy part of that system is just what this forum is all about, the use of homestead ways of life that allow us--and our children--to have a bit more food independence by growing and providing for ourselves, and them--and building savings and economic reserves instead of asking for govt help so often.

Another opinion is that we on this forum have allowed ourselves to retreat into opposing camps where we hurl the same old bullet points over the walls at each other. As these threads continue, these themes heat up until they get closed. To that end, here's a listing of some demographic facts about farming and such. Maybe we can discuss with more knowlege for while.... : http://usda01.library.cornell.edu/us...1_revision.pdf

geo

I live in row crop country, too, and have since the 1980's. This is Missouri River bottom land, it has been farmed ever since it was settled in the mid-1800's. In the early days they grew potatoes, today it is corn, soybeans and wheat.

Because the land is so low-lying, in many places there are drainage canals. These catch runoff from the fields. So they should be dead zones, right? Wrong! They have cattails growing in them, they are full of frogs, and white and blue herons stalk these shallow waters, hunting and feeding. If the runoff was so toxic as some of you want to believe, these canals would not teem with life.

The local wildlife includes deer, turkeys, badgers, coyotes, possums, coons, and more. Huge flocks of Canada and snow geese stop over. Again, how do all these creatures thrive if the environment has been ruined by farming?

In the spring, before the ground is dry enough for the farmers to get in and work, and before it is warm enough to plant, the fields turn green with an assortment of weeds and grasses. If they were really "sterilizing" the soil, that wouldn't happen.

After seeing it with my own eyes year after year, I have come to believe that modern farming methods are not the environmental disaster they were made out to be.

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I leave 3/4 of my garden to wild plants and rotate every few years. My other place the field has been wild since I bought the place in '97. Building soil tilth very quickly now.

If the warm-blooded critters are eating your crops, then they aren't as wild as they could be. Now are they?

Big horse power would be more horses than you can hitch to an iron plow. There, what do you think of that?

Sure. Would have been a stoke of genius if our immediate ancestors would not have allowed these farmsfromhell in the first place. The only real winners are the administrators of the corporations having engineered the process from the beginning.

Anyway, the Earth has a limit and I think there is enough starvation around the world to insist the human population has reached it.

IMHO They suck!

You are a funny guy, and for this i am glad! The animals on my farm may eat some of my crops, but they are still wild. They hide in the forest in the day,and come out and reap my crops at night!!! Actually this fall, I lost 20 or so acres of oats to elk and bears. They just hammered it down! the animals are so tame, I have never yet spotted the bears, and I see elk 4 or 5 times a year....lol

As for big horsepower, we have two.

I am glad you are building your soil. it is a good feeling to be improving things, isn't it? My untilled soil is also building itself back, and for this I am grateful indeed.

The really large farms are a way of exporting profits out of the small towns. They are also a place for the gamblers to invest their money now that the housing bubble popped.

Farmland prices are skyrocketing just like they've done in the past. I think we are going to see another round of farm foreclosures complete with suicides. The only thing different is this time there won't be any drastic declines in crop prices.

The price of food isn't going to drop now that we've hit 7,000,000,000 hungry mouths to feed and another 1,000,000,000 to be added over the next 12 years.

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Well don't confuse the Combines for the Corp that bought the land.. They may be a different company..

My cousin who lives and farms in Lancaster County, PA owns about 12 combines (the last time I saw him and talked to him) and leases them and runs them for farms in the Mid-west. He started small and continually invested any money back into the business.. So while it may seem that it is a major Corporation, it may not be...

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My opinion is that they are mass producing food cheaply, so health and quality are not priorities. Bt corn just scares the heck out of me and those factory farm chicken houses are an abomination.

As someone who has worked on a large farm i can attest to the large amount of chemicals that are used to grow certain vegetables. Of course it can be done healthier, but it would probably cost more. Personally, I prefer to grow my own food so I know what is, and isn't, in it.

That is a good point goldeneye, regarding chemical used on vegetables and fruits. Large scale veggie growers use a lot more chemicals than grain farmers, and is part of the reason that I as a grain farmer also have a large garden. When mature crops are sprayed to prevent rot, and spoilage, it is different from wheat being sprayed at the three leaf stage for sure.

And we raise our own meat for the economy and for the taste and health issues. Again, i must say to those anti-farmers on here that just because i farm grain in a conventional way, it does not mean I don't take care with what I eat.

I did actually join this site after all, and I enjoy the homesteading lifestyle, home grown foods, and want to learn more. But when my benign to nature occupation gets slammed by those who probably don't farm, and learn what they think they know from food inc type programming, or certain others on this site, I must defend the truth.

Dale

Yeah, but $4 diesel kinda takes the shine off.
A friend of mine told me he bought seed corn for 260 acres and it cost him over $27,000.......just for the seed, and those tractors don't get 40 miles to the gallon.
It's not all profit, and for the work they do, it doesn't pay that good.

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you are exactly right. that is why they must keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The profit margin is so slim, bigger is the only way to keep your head above water.

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