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SW KS, near Dodge City | That's the brutal truth of it. Waaaay to much old money to compete against. Farmland you at least have to put a fair amount of labor/acre into it to get it to produce so you can recoup some land costs that way (also known as sweat equity) but grassland just doesn't take that much man power to operate... Ergo you'd better be going in w/ cash, or turning it into something more labor intensive than just grazing land. That, plus lots and lots of people will work for peanuts because they're a cowboy, so you have to compete against that too. And you also get to compete against all those ranchers with awesome mineral programs... oil wells.
Now having said that, if you're established in the cattle business and have the right programs, you can make it work, but you have to have a fair equity cushion to survive the drought/poor market cycle years. Those are the years that kill the leveraged guys, b/c the good years usually aren't good enough to offset those two problems + interest costs on top of them. | |
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Can Cows Pay for Land?
