Quote of the month

" Farming is not just a job. It's a way of life". HY-CAPACITY calendar.

If only the city slickers would try to understand that concept.

"The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything he buys at retail, sells everything he sells at wholesale and pays the freight both ways." John F. Kennedy

I may not have every word correct but it's close.

I feel that there are just too many farmers, children continue because that's all they know from growing up on a farm, other
get into it because they want to be their own boss. If they would stop overproducing then prices would go up and it would be
more profitable, but if we ever have food shortages then the $hit would hit the fan!

To me, country living is a way of life. Farming is a BUSINESS.

Farmers get in to trouble when they go from trying to make a living to trying to make money.

And every business be it a family farm or wal mart does not make enough money.

I'll agree to that.

That's what I've never understood.

Farmers complain, rightfully, that they can't make money off of corn at current prices. So they go out and plant every square foot they can into corn, further glutting the market and putting downward pressure on prices.

Why don't they look into an alternate crop that IS profitable? That's what business men do. If one profit center goes south, they look for an alternate product or activity that WILL make money.

When I was in high school, many years ago, I worked for a neighboring farmer over the summers. Along with the usual corn and wheat, he was raising soybeans before anyone else had heard of, or considered, soybeans. The neighbors all laughed at him and wondered if he knew what he was doing. I wasn't into my boss's books, but he was sharp enough that if he hadn't been making good money off of soybeans he wouldn't have been growing them.

It is a way of life something non farmers can?t understand you wouldn?t work this hard for next nothing if you didn?t love it .

Spoken like a true citiot

Rusty ..... yup, I've always believed that if someone else looks, thinks, behaves, votes, works, worships, dresses, lives or
does anything else differently than I do, then my problems are obviously caused by those other guys. I couldn't possibly have
anything to do with it.

I don't think you are giving farmers enough credit. You are assuming they are sitting in front of the TV waiting for someone to solve their problems and that they are, overall, bad businessman and poor managers. This is not my experience. I am a CPA with decades of experience. This year is my 30th year in private practice and I worked for others before that. I sold my first bale of hay almost 20 years ago. I have grown corn and soy. I have run the numbers on a lot of different crops and weighed the pros and cons. I have yet to come up with a crop that is going to work with my existing tools and make me more profitable. Existing tools??? Oh yes, retooling is sometimes required when changing product lines in a business. So switching from grain to beets or hops or whatever crop of the month is can be very risky and expensive. Many cannot afford to take the chance. Livestock? Big investment in infrastructure but now you are making money on what grain you grow through savings in feed cost. And I would imagine there are more than a few guys out there who will tell you that livestock is no road to riches either. It is not as easy as you would like to make it. Yes...corn will go up again some day and I will take a bushel to the elevator and come back with $3 more than I put into it. Then on the way home I will stop and fill the truck with gas that is twice what it costs today and head to the grocery and buy food that is three times what it cost today then head home with the realization that I am worse off than I was...today. My 2/100th of a buck.

Some of them still think they can make up for losses with more volume!

There?s a lot of things that make it all worth it . Like drilling in the spring on a 4020 and the sun hits your back and it?s not hot and not cold but just right and listening to the drill squeak as it goes across the field . Watching the new calves get born and see them grow pushing cows and calves up to high mountain meadows on a good horse . Cutting grain in the fall in the 7700 and watching all that clean grain roll into the bin out of the fountain auger . Four am mornings saddling and loading horses to push cows back down to lower ground the end of September and see all that fat calves

And it's a way of life that's disappearing - here in the UK the average of farmers is 60 years. Ten years down the line where does that leave us? The UK already produces less than 60% of the food we eat.....result of successive government policies, the classic example in recent years was when a (Labour) Agriculture Minister declared that "Britain's farmland is no longer required for the production of food" Huh ???
Jim (retired from that 'way of life' a few years ago).

Farming is a business,try doing it without enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table with no credit to keep going then say it?s not a business. Farming is not a right it?s a privilege,if the money doesn?t add up then sooner or later that privilege will be taken away if not voluntarily than forcefully.

Some comments posted on this topic are right on the mark, while other comments are simply hollow. I am no longer sure what the meaning of a life style is. Being a criminal is a life style, being gay is a life style choice. I don?t see that farming falls into the same slot as being an alcoholic which is another lifestyle. Farming is a profession. And while many farms may be similar, few operate the same. I have made my living, working my farm for the past 39 years. I have enjoyed the freedom to plant whatever crops I thought profitable or necessary. To keep livestock or keep no livestock. I could buy a green tractor, or a red tractor, or buy a blue tractor and paint it black if I wished. Plough or go no till, use spray or go Organic, always my choice. That?s what farming has meant to me, the opportunity to live by my own rules, on my time , and if I profit or loss, it is my profit or my loss. I can work as long and as hard as I see fit, and no one can tell me I am doing things wrong, because this is the way the work gets done on my farm. And I don?t try to tell anyone else that they should do anything the way I do, or buy the brand of equipment I buy, they are free to make their own choice. That?s what farming is to me, freedom!
Bruce

Exactly if you want to keep farming you better run it like a business or you won't have the lifestyle or be farming very long.

Well just after WWII farmers were about 20% of the population and now they are about 2% and over production is more of a problem now than it was back then,so I can't see how reducing the
number of farmers anymore will solve the problem.My opinion if the gov't would get 100% out of farming with their money and their 'help' and let the free market work things out then farmers,
taxpayers,everyone would be better off.If farmers had to stand alone and not be bailed out for over production,risky crop production etc then things would settle out.

If you have to farm on credit you don't have much of a business. Borrowing money to buy land is one thing, anyone continually borrowing for inputs or seed stock is on the way down before they get started.

(quoted from post at 06:57:13 05/02/19) To me, country living is a way of life. Farming is a BUSINESS.

Click to expand...

Dead on the money!

Rick

It really is, isn't it. And it's a hard life, too. You can fight the bugs, and you can fight the blight, but you can't fight the weather and you can't fight the bank. Too many times have I watched what was growing be washed away or baked dry. And too many times have I plowed it back in and started over. But, like somebody else said, there are things that make it all worthwhile: like watching 3 straight furrows turn out behind you while plowing along in 3rd gear on good ground. The sweet smell of dusty ground and horse sweat cultivating corn. The sound a good sharp sickle mower makes mowing in native grass, and watching that grass fall in neat swaths. Watching the apples in the orchard bloom. I could go on and on...

My wife came here from Phoenix, AZ and is still in awe at what I do to make things grow, and go, on our little farm. We both work in town, because that's what it takes anymore for two people to make it. And we eat a lot of what I raise in the truck patches, but most of it goes to market. All the orchard fruit goes to market. 95% of the eggs go to market, and we just do manage to pay for the feed and seed and fertilizer and fuel. And I keep it up, year after year. Why, she'll ask me, do you keep it up. And I'll tell her the same thing I've told her all these years: Because I've been farming all my life and don't know anything but that life. But I've never been hungry, and I've never thought I was worse off or felt sorry for myself because of it. And some days I want to quit and say hell with it, sell out and move to town. But I know I can't do that. The sweat, the grease, and the very land itself gets into your blood and it won't come out and you or me of Jesus Christ Himself can't make it, either. But why would you want to? After so many years of being used to living the way we do, you get used to the life that you live. And there's nothing that can replace it. You'll always have a big empty hole right in the middle of you that you just can't fill. Not until you get back out on the land, and watch the sod roll over. Or smell that fresh cut hay. Or any of the 10,000 other little things that come with living on a farm.

And that's Farming. For me it is, anyway. It's not about the money. Its the joy and satisfaction that you get from wrenching something away from Mother Nature, and being able to say, after its all done, "I won. You may have beat the hell out of me. But by damn, I beat you in the end." And nothing else in the whole of God's world can equal that.

Mac

Bruce .... perhaps you could clarify the difference between what you consider a lifestyle vs a lifestyle choice. I can't seem to get my head around some of your examples.

My former college roommate is a city slicker through and through. He doesnt understand the first thing about farming no matter how hard I try to explain it. Quite a few years ago I was telling him farming is kind of tough right now. He asked me why I didnt just merely quit farming and find something else to do. He didnt understand the farming dedication and lifestyle then and still does not understand today.

One is voluntary and the other is involuntary. Farming is most definitely a voluntary choice, while being a drug addicted person is a involuntary lifestyle, even though it can be licked, most are victims of their lifestyle. The term lifestyle is applied to so many things now that have a negative connotation, just irks me.

Bruce .... this is the part of your post I wondered about ..... "Being a criminal is a life style, being gay is a life style choice." Sounds to me that you are pretty much saying (in this sentence) that a criminal is not choosing his life style. At least that's what I read when I read the whole sentence. Whatever, your point is well taken.

The urge to save humanity is often a convenient disguise for the urge to rule it.

Or something like that.

Someone told the husband of my grandmother's cousin "farming isn't a job, it' a way of life!" Laughton, a lifelong dairy farmer, relied "It is not, it's a birth defect!"