Interesting times, but then again I suppose it always has been. If you're in your 40's and an opportunity comes up to buy a really good piece of ground that "doesn't cash flow"... if you have enough economy of scale to swing it, you might get it paid for before you die, wouldn't that be great. Building generational wealth is a real thing, but at what cost and where does it end? You can't control where it ends, and it's kinda like buying someone a gift card as a birthday present, if you're going to be upset that someone uses it for something you really didn't intend for them to use it on, you probably shouldn't be giving it. I was on the fence for years, and realized that building generational wealth through farming A: means you have to have a generation that's interested in doing it behind you to make it work, cause you can't do enough of it in your lifetime to get a good foothold without a heck of a good start or a lot of good fortune, and B: I was missing almost everything that that generation I was working to pass along to had going on. As I get older I understand what I always heard about grandkids and how people say "my Dad was never at anything of mine, but he's almost always at my kids' stuff"... There's a fine line and it's a life many no longer have an appetite for, back to the discussion from last week about rural schools struggling / closing. Someone finally made the sensical comment that it's about fewer and fewer people want to live in rural areas. The trend for awhile was the retired folks were moving in there (which didn't help the school enrollment numbers) but at least it kept $$ coming in to the local economy. Now, the older folks have realized that having to hire someone to plow their driveway in the winter so they can get out, or power outages of extended durations, and just the inconveniences of long travel to get to a doctor, or physical therapy/rehab type places, or heaven forbid that daily trip to see a spouse in a hospital or nursing home environment from 30+ miles away isn't all it's cracked up to be. Here in KY, smaller hospitals are closing up shop, and medical practices are closing down in favor of working at a bigger clinic elsewhere and letting the insurance and the overhead be someone else's problem. Big push in the state for "Rural Medicine" programs for young folks wanting to be D.O.'s and work in a small rural practice.. you can practically go to med school for free on those programs, as they try to boost those rural healthcare programs back up. I read this morning that we even have a few counties out of our 120 that don't even have a certified ambulance service. That's crazy.