Heil Harvesting, Ulysses KS/Limon CO | This concept is interesting. Appreciate you taking the time to spell it out.
As msb said, it is free enterprise. Growth and crash will be part of the cycle. Operations of all size will fail, be overtaken, or grow. Farm sizes will increase. Rural communities will suffer. I look at rural communities different than many. It is my age. Rural communities will dwindle and likely should. The young people, the people of my generation have little desire to live in a small community as a whole. You should be happy, if the rural life does not fit you, so be it. Similarly, much is the case with farming. In a thread here, the question was asked what do your kids do? I did not figure the numbers. It was apparent most did not farm. Again, do what makes you happy. I would not want to be forced to live in a city or teach school. Not my thing, I would never be happy.
This pushes things to the limit. From a social aspect. You cannot force kids to come home and farm. The result-growing farm size.
From an economic stand point, you have to choose free enterprise or highly regulated government entities. A form of communism. As a group, farmers dislike the government. Especially meddling in there business. So how do you control it otherwise.
I fall on the size of free enterprise. Government control makes no sense to me. Forcing people to things they don't want, to live in areas they don't want does no good.
The sentimental side is real. Very real. I lack that gene. My father doesn't. He realizes however that he cannot have his cake and eat it too.
So a cartel? That will never work. FF is trying unique strategy to combat it. It will be interesting, very interesting to see how that works long term.
The picture you painted of farming is already very real in my area. Twenty thousand plus acres a larger percentage of which are irrigated, a feedlot or two, owning large shares in ethanol plants, direct buying fertilizer and other inputs, selling direct to ports and end users, owning commercial elevators, operate largely on their own money. Not the norm, far from it. Not uncommon and very real. For me, this creates great opportunity as I am interested in agriculture. Many of my friends, farm kids chose to move on. They are happy. There is no one to take over the "family farm".
One comment on help. We hire help. I am sure many others do. Help is part of our family. We want to see them grow and succeed. We try to facilitate that. Our previous hired help--we are happy for them. Many of them lead lives much more successful than our own. Great. When we look for help--we want a skillset and a person. Much more than just a hired hand as a person. And a skillset that is hopefully better than ours in their area. We look help them further develop that skillset. We look to help them learn a new skillset.
I am off my soapbox.
Edited by beh 4/14/2009 20:30
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Farm Consolidation. Trends and endpoints.
