Posted by Paul on March 10, 2017 at 10:08:46 from (76.77.197.114):
In Reply to: Great Depression posted by davidt1 on March 10, 2017 at 09:06:16:
The combo of the dust bowl and the depression had to be so difficult.
If you were farming in other areas, you might have gotten by better than some town folk.
Mom came from a large family, and she talked of some of her sisters coming out when it was time to plant potatoes at the farm. The sisters cut the eyes out of the potatoes, planted the eyes, and saved the rest of the potato for food. It was pretty rough on the town folk that were just trying to get started in life..... My understanding the farm did ok with her parents, tighten the belt a little but they were used to living off the garden and canning and so forth anyhow, lots of labor from the big family, didn't make too much difference to those on the farm unless your timing was bad with some debt.
Dad never said much about the depression, the farm here is in a typically too wet area, so a drought gets it just a little dry here, not devistating. He said 1988 was much worse drought than the dust bowl days. I think grandpa had the farm paid for at the time, and so the depression happened around them all but they had food for the table and feed for the critters and they just carried on.
This region of the country tended to be frugal conservative Germans that owned their farms, and didn't go out on a financial limb very far, so they weathered the depression on the farm pretty good unless just happened to get a loan and were in the wrong place without a paddle.
I heard a lot more stories from him about WWII and the scrimping and iron and rubber drives and using coupons to buy stuff (rationed), and patching bald tires because rubber went to the war drive.
The whole 1980s was a much much worse time period for farmers in my neighborhood. The 70s was a time of ag expansion and everyone dove deeply into debt even the frugal Germans because farming was easy and machinery was rapidly getting bigger and the world was buy buy buy on grains, living large was the way to go! Until boom. And then it wasn't.
1988 was both the worst and best year here.
It was worst because we had a crop failure, this wet ground never dries out and it dried out and the heat was terrible, my neighbor sprayed 24d with drop nozzles on tall corn, (common back then, thistle control) and the corn had so little moisture it tried to live on that spray and turned white. Oddest thing I ever saw. It kept living, but it never set kernals or even much ears, ended up barren stalks from that spray. He chopped it for silage eventually.
Our corn field beside it set ears, but was few kernels, big fat round ones. I made 7 rounds combining it and dumped into the truck. Not because the hopper was full but the truck was getting so far away. Think we got 20bu corn on that field. Other fields in the low wet spots, the corn yields just jumped up, 80-100 these were the spots I normally didn't get much yield from as the crop would always drown out.....
1988 was also maybe the best year for ag in a backhanded way. The crop damage hit so much of the country was so bad, yields so low, that we -finally- were able to use up the govt stockpiles of grain that were sitting in this country.
The 1970s and early 80s had record crops, and pretty good prices early on. Jimmy Carter put on the grain embargo which scared the heck out of countries that depend upon buying grain to eat; those countries scrambled and found other places that were willing to grow and sell grains (Brazil expanded greatly in those few years!), leaving USA grain sitting In bins, no where to go no one wanted it. The govt saw farmers getting into trouble, and tried to help out by propping up grain prices with odd 'reward' programs. This made farmers grow even more and more crops. So every year the govt was buying more and more grain, and letting it sit in piles. So folks who needed grain saw those huge piles of grain, and stopped paying much for it - there was so much grain, no need to pay much for it, there would not be any shortage! The markets got very out of whack, and with the govt programs the only way you could break even was to produce even more grain on your farm. And so farmers did. The mountains of grain got bigger and bigger. Prices got lower and lower. The govt finally realized everything was going backwards, and started trying to limit the amount of grain being produced. That is where you hear of the old programs that paid farmers not to grow crops. They helped a bit, but really didn't do much.
Until 1988, when the whole country mostly had a crop failure, and we could use up the extra grain stockpiles finally.
The 2008 ecconomics slump from the housing bubble devalued the USA dollar, and so our grains started looking really good to other countries finally after decades of USA being the last country to buy from. Really cheap! So they bought a lot of grain from us again, came to us first. As well there were some minor crop failures in the mid 2000s. Nothing like 1988, but we raised a little less grain. All of which pushed grain prices to record highs - but remember with the cheap dollar those record high prices still looked like a sale price to other countries so they kept buying our grain.
And here we are today, with the dollar creeping higher and grain prices crashed down lower again, other countries not able to afford our high cost (because of dollar value) grains,, and interest rates thinking of moving up. We've had three years of really good crop production through most of the USA, lots of bushels sitting around......
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