We Are Too DumbTo Make A Living Farming

Every now and then a new guy, from the city, buys a a small rundown farm or a plot of land and moves here to begin farming. One I knew was going to make a living raising chickens, pigs and goats. He lasted about two years before he realized that his plan involved a lot of work and damn little pay.

Another bought a farm next to mine and he is trying to convert an old dairy farm into a produce farm. I think he believes that those of us who have lived here for many years are to dumb to learn how to make money farming. I give him one or two more years and then there will be some land for sale.

Now I am all for those who want to move to the country and do a some farming but they should do their homework before giving up their city job and jumping into farming. How many eggs or pigs does one have to sell in order to clear 30 to 40 thousand dollars a year for a modest living?

Maybe us old timers aren't so dumb after all.

That's been going on forever it seems. Had a guy move here from Detroit 40 plus years ago,gonna cut a fat hog in the arse raising hogs while he worked as a teacher. His first mistake was thinking his city wife would and could hold down the fort while he was gone all day. Didn't do any good for anybody to offer to help him. Even something like buying a tractor. I offered to help him find one,but nope. He found an old JD A. He bought that one because it was a Deere and he knew anybody could work on it. Yea right. that tractor never made it to the field.

Got another one who moved out here to his Grand dad's 40 acre farm. At first he was going to milk a few cows while keeping his job 50 miles away. That never got any farther than him milking a few by hand before he'd leave for work in the mornings. Then he tried a few beef cows,but he was breeding heifers too young and too small and loosing all of his calves. He finally gave it up. He still lives there,but nobody works the ground. He made the same mistake with a tractor. I had a nice Ferguson 30 that I wanted to sell about the time he moved up here. He didn't want it. Said if I wanted to sell it,there must be something wrong with it,so he came home one night dragging a trailer with an old open flywheel A with a rattle can paint job. No better than the one the first guy bought.

But yea,the whole "I'm going to be organic and natural" thing takes most of'em out right from the start these days. I was thinking about that from a post somebody had on here yesterday. With Roundup ready technology,the availability of older no-til equipment at a fair price so you don't need a real big tractor,it should be easier than ever for the inexperienced to grow a decent crop but they let their politics get in the way.

A coworker of mine, a city boy, thought I was rich when I got a check for $8,000 for selling 50 hd of lambs. I told him that I had a feed bill to pay and still had to buy hay for the ewes for the winter, I was only about $2,000 in the hole after that. He didn't understand the net vs gross income side of the equation.

I was raised on a small tobacco farm. All of my family on both sides were farmers. My father loved farming, but also had a "town job".He was at one time the service/parts manager of a Farmall dealership, but in the late 50's because of his wartime service and continuation with the USAF reserves got the opportunity to be a parts man on a much bigger scale in charge of an aviation parts depot at a major Air Force facility. As a result, he basically held two jobs while I was growing up: One as a civilian employee of the USAF and the other as a tobacco farmer.
My dad understood what a lot of you older fellows here on the forum do: its not how new or nice your equipment looks, but how much stays in your hands after the tobacco is sold and the corn is picked in the fall.
I was expected to be his full-time hired hand while he was off at work. Unlike a lot of my contemporaries, I was expected to do the work and have the responsibility of an adult at an early age and I feel that this stood me in good stead later on in life.
This was hard work, and it made me determined to get an education, not so that I would not have to farm, but so that I would have options to have a steady off-farm income if I chose to farm.
Life led me away from the farm and as a result of my career I have never had the time to get into farming like my dad did. However, I have held on to the family farm land and even managed to add a little on to it. I have a good farmer that tends my land. He does a very good job and I have always been reasonable re: rent. Both of us have been happy.
I realize that farming today involves risk, financial committment and effort that I am not able to give with the demands of my professional career,but I enjoy the tractor hobby as a way to keep in touch with my roots in farming and to enjoy "mechanicing".
Unlike a lot of my generation, I will not sell any of my land for cheap houses to be built on. Like Dad said: "they aint' making anymore of it...EVER "
I may work in a different environment and work in a white coat and scrubs instead of blue jeans,but I am down deep a farmer and never consider myself to be anything other.I have been there and done that and I'm proud of it.

Had one from Fl.buy a IRS lien small farm 20 acres about 20 years ago thought he was going to make millions on it was going to have calves and horses the first year he was here we had a wet spring as soon as he saw us cutting wheat hay everybody was to drop what they were doing and cut his weeds he called hay him and his wife were experts on everything the one neighbor cut his hay one morning and they wanted it baled that afternoon it lasted about a year and they were gone.

I moved out to the farm and have been milking chickens for 3 years now....

7$ (4$ for us) corn got a few small timers started around here but we'll see how that goes with the prices soft.

I don't think most people understand the total investment needed. If it hasn't been done by the generations before you it is awful hard to do it all at once.

Just to tile some fields, or pull out old fence line, even bringing the ph back on an old plot needs 150-200$ an acre here before fertilizer. Unless you have a dairy nearby for manure your fertilizer cost is going to be huge on old fields.

My biggest fault as a part timer is equipment costs. I have to oversize as I don't have time with full time employment to take all day. Also stuff like a brillion seeder that you only need one day a year is expensive when there are no rental options here.

Most new guys comes in with the attitude that he is going to reinvent the wheel. The guys with a big fat inheritance or rich relative usually can stick it out for a while and put on a big show plus fool people.

I don't know which is worse, the citiots that think they can raise 9 horses, 22 goats, 11 chickens and a llama on their 1.7 acre ranchette, the wannabe hippy/OWS/organic type that buys 10 acres of swamp to grow produce on for a non-existent CSA or the life long farmer BTO who can't understand why I don't go in debt up to my eyeballs on new equipment.

They all give me headaches.

Its not just the ones that move in that go broke I know a bunch that were raised on farms and they got in over their heads and went broke.Farming is just like anything else there are a lot more that fail than succeed,but its OK because Walmart and the Gov't need help too.
On the flip side a fellow near me bought an old farm started a produce business and now is buying from other growers and has customers in MD,PA,VA and DC has about 40 people working for him.

Yep, like the feller sez, If'n yew wants to make a small fortune farming, best to start out with a large fortune!

It almost would be a nice change of pace to have a clown from the
city or hippy organic guy come in. Pretty much obnoxious BTO's or
Mennonites anymore who thinks your place is going to be for sale
(cheap) in a few years.

Like this?
40 acres and a fool

This kinda reminds me of a lady in town that I know... I went to a auction & there she is, so
we talked & I asked what she was looking for at
a farm auction... Well she went to Tractor Supply & split a order with another friend of hers for some baby Chicks.. At this auction was a Used
6 box chicken coop. I watched as she spent
805.00 for a chicken coop?? She spent that much
just so she could have fresh eggs? A Few months
passed & I seen her in town, asked how the
chicken business was doing?? She said it was fun, hasn't gotten any eggs as of yet but the chickens are really growing.. Told me to come over sometime & take a look at them.. So I did, after I arrived she said it cost her 100.00 to have a tilt bed move the coop to her house. She did have 6 birds, She said 3 of the fight all the time so
she spent 50.00 to make a bigger pen to separate
them.. So out of 6 Birds, 3 Hens & 3 Roosters &
no eggs to date........

This is very true but how many of us have seen some local farm kid decide that they are going to set the world on fire and take off for the big city with a HS diploma and dreams only to come back 2-3 years later with their tails between their legs? My some who was doing sound professionally was going to move to the big city and DJ. Found out that no one was DJ'ing cause folks would be waiting behind the bar to rob the DJ of his equipment, money, vehicle and maybe his life. He's back in Fargo now working a regular job.

Rick

(quoted from post at 13:13:14 09/13/13) This kinda reminds me of a lady in town that I know... I went to a auction & there she is, so
we talked & I asked what she was looking for at
a farm auction... Well she went to Tractor Supply & split a order with another friend of hers for some baby Chicks.. At this auction was a Used
6 box chicken coop. I watched as she spent
805.00 for a chicken coop?? She spent that much
just so she could have fresh eggs? A Few months
passed & I seen her in town, asked how the
chicken business was doing?? She said it was fun, hasn't gotten any eggs as of yet but the chickens are really growing.. Told me to come over sometime & take a look at them.. So I did, after I arrived she said it cost her 100.00 to have a tilt bed move the coop to her house. She did have 6 birds, She said 3 of the fight all the time so
she spent 50.00 to make a bigger pen to separate
them.. So out of 6 Birds, 3 Hens & 3 Roosters &
no eggs to date........

Click to expand...

By my calculations, $955 will buy a whole lot of eggs down at the Wal*Mart...

Still reminds me of a foreign operation called Mastock in the 1980's. they were a big dairy operation in Denmark, Norway of someplace up there. they had plans to build a 10,000 cow dairy in Georgia. they said "the American farmer needs a lesion in efficiency". They went belly-up before they made it to 2000 head.

That is unless you can find some woman from the city wanting her own fresh eggs.

If you're not making any money from that,it sounds like it might be time to switch to wool hogs or selling goat eggs. Only half the cholesterol of chicken eggs you know. And naturally homogenized to boot.

I have been farming the same 12 acres with old half wore out, patched up equipment, for the last 40 years--for only one reason. Because I purely love doing it. Some years I make some money, some I lose, but each year I win cause I raised a crop one more time. Obviously I worked at a good job off the farm the whole 40 years too. Yes, I came from a farm background--guess it gets in your blood.

Bill, sounds a lot like the story of my life, except as a kid I did
NOT want to be a farmer after having been through all that.
In no particular order, a farmer is a chemist, doctor, veterinarian, mechanic,
businessman, plumber, electrician, carpenter, trucker, welder, husband,
father, community citizen and probably many more I forgot.
In small communities like mine, if he were not honest at any of
them, he would be finished.
I'm glad I was taught the work ethic, skills and values of a farmer.
Even though I don't farm now, the lessons were well learned.

It has taken me fifty years in this business, the first thirty five as a 'part timer, to learn that I am just another dumb farmer. I throw some seeds on the ground in the spring, harvest them in the fall, play golf or fish all summer, and go to Cancun for the winter, and collect gubberment payments for it. I have poisoned the ground and air, washed all my soil into the Chesterpeak, and complain about taxes. I raise contaminated crops, sick cows, and Frankenstein corn. Oh, yeah. And I block the road when I move my machinery. Dang, I love being dumb.....

The farmer wannabe's don't have a clue on what kind of credits and debits to put into a farming budget, whether it's grain or livestock. Most of them don't know what a budget is.

But I know old time farmers who don't know how to budget. In fact a lot of them don't. The banker does the budget and the farmer farms by how much the banker will lend to him. That way the banker can keep the farmer deep in debt, paying him interest, but not so far in debt that he's insolvent to the bank examiners. The farmer retires with practically nothing left over after his farm sale but the banker doesn't care about that, he's made interest off the farmer for all those years. When you think about it, the banker is the smart one. Jim

I'd welcome them as well. Around here, farms are becoming condos and golf courses.

I was wondering how many farmers were taken to the cleaners by the Tyson "chicken get rich plan"? Or Smithfield's hog confinement. I was told once that if a pig confinement moved next to you, don't worry as it has a 10 year life.
Maybe one should try to educate the city transplant.

We have some city folks move in from out of state. Starting to make their fortune raising deer. I can't wait to see how that plays out.