Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | When the population of grain producers retires and declines you just buy a bigger planter and bigger combine and still work the same number of acres. We aren't even beginning to acknowledge what happened and continues to happen in livestock farming. Here in a dairy state the megadairy is the answer, instead of 5-10 200-300 dairies you have a 1000 cows (at least) in confined housing taken care of by illegal aliens and half a dozen tractor drivers growing the feed.
The problem of beef is that somebody has to take care of them, build & fix the fences, put up winter feed etc. using land that was subdivided in 100-180 parcels. You can't get the economies of scale necessary.
Meanwhile, what are alternative crop options? Almost anything I can think of is too small a market to make a meaningful dent in the problem. The irony here is that dairy farmers in NY used to buy grain from the Midwest. Now we grow more & more corn & beans to sell into the same markets. |
Crop Acres: Slow to adjust
