For Bruce from Canada on Landless surfs

I was late to the party on the Landless surfs posts but wanted to say I agree. Was thinking and talking about this lately. YES AROUND ME THIS IS THE CASE %100 SMALL BUSINESS, SMALL FARMS or any small operation is being bought up buy some big company. Timber land is also being bought buy some far away conglomerate. Seems like all this is at an excellerated pace. You don't deal with a person anymore it some director of operations from a company (usually far away) Lastly where there used to be several shops like (welding supply) they all been bought buy a big out fit. Some closed, Some expanded but your dealing with abc company so go to another city and you guessed it abc company owns them. AND THEY ARE NOT FRIENDLY ON PRICE OR TERMS THERE WAY OR THE HIGHWAY.

The link below is interesting, showing the amount of usable farmland world wide in various countries. Most interesting thing is the small graphs on the right side of the charts showing the history of the data. While some countries are stable or even increasing the amount of farmland, the top three (USA, India, and Russia) show a decline. This might add to the discussion in this post ..... here's the information.
Worldwide Farmland Country Comparisons .....

I must have missed that post or it got poofed. What I see are Mennonite and Amish farmers taking things down to the point where they make themselves peasants. Overbid for land where it takes six or more kids working so many hours per week to pay for it that if you or I did that Child Protective Services would have us in a jail cell in short order. Now the BTO's here probably depend more on outside investment to do what they do versus their Mid-Western counterparts. I am starting to hear instances where foreign money is coming into play but that seems isolated. I'm guessing that some of the BTO money is from illicit sources such as drug dealing. Consolidation has already happened with support businesses and as of late the fertilizer outlets are going from independents to national operations such as CPS. Mega Case IH is grabbing more territory and Deere is being merged into fewer but larger operations. I think that the area NH organization will get folded into Mega Case IH as the core of their business which is small and medium dairy is fading away.

Tell me what I missed from the previous thread.

it's on the 'tales' forum

That post is over on Tales. Still there - not "poofed" yet.

NY it was on tractor tales or some such. There is a few forums on here I read often and others I just scan occasionally. Things move fast on here, it was getting down on the page.

I had a meeting not long ago about that subject, farmland not being used.

Usable land can be a vague description. There is quite a bit of land here in NY that was used for agriculture 100 plus years ago that is not used today. Some of it is for valid reasons such as extremely erodible or marginally productive. Around Rochester, NY quite a bit of productive land that could grow vegetables has been converted to housing.

My grandfathers would be amazed at farming today. They both came from England where could never afford to own land. Just hard labour from dawn to dark. Now we are heading back to being landless here. Seeing lots of outside investment in farm land which helps push the price up too high for any young locals to buy. So the majority is rented back to the young guys that do farm. The older guys get tired of the endless high input/low returns of farming and sell out because that land they sell is their retirement fund.

I suppose it's a regional thing. Ya,farm land is being bought up by larger farms and the Mennonites,but as chairman of board of review,I have possession of the township tax roll and I can say that I don't see this land being bought up by absentee owners.

Deeremart is about the only example of having to deal with managers instead of owners. We have a local grocery store,a big hardware and rental business here in town along with a small local bank where the bank president is the loan officer. We're still among the luck ones I guess.

Rusty I have seen that land worth x per acre farm value. Worth 3 times x (if in the right place) for housing or industrial. BUT BACK WHEN, IT WAS ELLERY AND SONS (local outfit) DEVELPOING IT. NOT KNOW IT IS SIMON OR ELLIAS MANAGEMENT COMPANY. There office is across country and they use a contractor from 2 states away!! Yes the value precludes any young people from buying it. Also you and I can't swing it either seems like it has to be a corporate.

The property I am on was a alphalfa field 50 years ago. Now it?s mostly woods. As folks left the farm, a lot of small farms just went idle, and the fields grew up into woods. I guess it?s not economic to convert it into fields again. I only know a couple of big farm guys, but they seem to be educated, and hard workers. I don?t think they would be involved with anything illegal. And they seem to have multiple businesses.

Ontario is busy building cities on the best farmland we have . The few areas where peaches and other tender fruit can be grown .

RR watch very closely around you. what were getting at is examples: new drug store isn't Fabians family drug it part of big conglomerate like walgreens. Look at you stores TSC, Home cheapo and so on. Also watch malls or industrial places. There not owned by uncle John but some big national company. MY BEST GUESS IS YOU WILL SEE SOME CHANGES AND SOON!! Your bank will sell out to Wells fargo. Far as land wait till some holding company from New Jersey buys a big chunk, or a conservation group out of Colorado then they sell it 10 times so you don't know who owns it just a company name Like Typhoon or Toboggan!!!

where peaches and other tender fruit can be grown . You must be talking about Georgia not Canada!!!

The one worry is the hardware store. It's been family owned for three generations,but the current owners who are brother and sister,are just a little older and a little younger than me. She has told me that they have so much inventory that there's no way an individual would ever be able to buy them out.

I'd talked to the bank president before about my fear of them being bought out. They've been around since 1923,didn't even close in the depression. He said it's in their bylaws that no person or entity can own enough shares of them to take them over. In fact,last year,two other large chains of banks closed,one right here in town and in a few surrounding town,and another one in Greenville. It increased the local bank's business to the point that they went ahead and opened a satellite location in the grocery store and put an ATM in another town. I think if anybody was going to take them over,it would have been done back when enough of that was going on to cause me to be concerned. It's the opposite here,the big chain banks are pulling out.

I would guess that most BTO's are hard working and honest. But like any barrel there are going to be a few bad apples in it. I'm not geographically close to know specifically but my understanding is that a few have a very bad smell to them in financial terms. Nothing adds up in a legitimate sense. Now if you embrace the notion that a number of people will take money under the table then things make more sense. I am not close enough to it to be of any help to law enforcement.

I agree. Alot of European immigration that occurred in the late 1800's and early 1900's, was caused by no land could be bought where they came from. Either you had some land, or you didn't. And it wouldn't come up for sale either. It would pass onto younger generations, or bought up by bigger land owners who wanted more. If you or your family didn't own any land, you more less lived on somebody else's and worked your whole life as a peasant. Your parents probly did the same thing while you were being raised.

I have always said that we would see the same thing in this country when it got highly developed. And I think we are starting to see it now. But I think we are going to see a different affect in these modern times. With newer bigger modern equipment, few people are going to be able to do the work of thousands compared with a century ago. I have a huge concern about what non-landowners will do to survive in the future. Living on rented land and more less be a peasant, is only going to be done by few. That won't happen though. Afraid is what will happen, is a few people will work for corporate businesses and paid salaries barely enough to live on, and everyone else will just have to fin for themselves.

What I do see is there really aren?t a lot of farmers. A handful of people do pretty much all farming in the county. And that number is going down every year. There are only a couple of dairy farms left, in a county that used to one of the biggest dairy counties in the state. But one is milking 4000 cows!

Economics are complicated.

I?m very surprised the number of farmers these days that want to and hope to rent more and more and more land, and have no interest in owning any.

In fact on the other farm forum, several talk about selling land they own to investors, so they can afford to rent more.


Long term that seems so stupid to me.

I realize economics are complicated, and farms like any business will naturally get bigger over time. And that renting help cash flow, even though it is a tough way to be financially solid.

Don?t understand the intentional effort to get rid of ones best asset.

Paul

This reminds me of a saying from the 1970's 1980's recession of repeated layoffs: " When my neighbor (or the guy working next to me) gets laid off, that's too bad. When I get laid off, THAT"S A DISASTER!"

The company I worked for at the time saw it's highest labor efficiency from keeping engineering, machining and assembly all working 55 hours per week (5 ten hour days and five hours Saturday morning. When business slowed, the company did not permanently cut back to 40 hour weeks to keep people employed. We would have a temporary two week slow down to 40 hours, have around a 10 percent layoff, and two week later go back to 55 hours per week. That policy was good for the surviving employees, but a disaster for those put out of work.

Is a similar thing happening in farming? The industry continually pushes to increase efficiency, which leads to overproduction and falling prices. For the most part, this leads to the more efficient producers expanding their production to maintain their income and the less efficient producers dropping out of the business. It's a boon to the surviving farms and a disaster for those pushed out of business.

Is increasing efficiency and over production the root cause of farm consolidation?

Some of the remedies that have been tried in the past:
Increase exports through "dumping" production abroad at discounted prices;
Quotas;
Spend taxpayer money to pay farmers to take land out of production;
Force consumers to consume excess production such as fructose corn syrup and ethanol;
Farmer's unions;
Dump excess production into the ocean.

Any new solutions?

Any one person can be a master at doing one thing but otherwise be an imbecile. No different than the cow or pig for slaughter eating happily away until that one day comes where BAM!!!!

Wonder what percentage of the population own say over 50 acres or even 25 acres of land? Probably not very many so its apparently not a big deal not to own land to a whole lot of people now.

Paul all I can say to that one is not owning the land puts you at risk. What if I lease from you and you put in housing or sell it? Or rent to a competitor for more money. How many times I have seen some business have to relocate because the lease was up and the owner wanted to do something else. Or worse they raised the rent to high and killed there tenant. But yes there are times when leasing will work out.