Off topic why don't farmers strike in 2017

acben20 wrote: I know this is not the place but I would like to see what others think.. I farm our family farm and can't believe that in this age corn prices are this low.. I think farmers should strike next year why plant another crop for some else to make money off.. It's sad when every one in the world needs a farmer three times a day but he can't even afford to feed him self.... Just venting sorry..

I remember 2012. The drought that year yielded 15-60 bushels/acre for corn on some farms. Some lucky souls received a late summer hurricane leftover rain, so their soybeans might have yielded 55 bushels/acre.

AMEN dpower! 

DrAllis wrote: After nearly 7 years of great profits and now you want to strike ??? really ???

Great profits ? Just because commodity prices are high, doesn't mean there are great profits. Inputs, or seed, fertilizer,chemicals, parts, machinery, land, rent. Have all went up just as much as the commodity prices. I now spend nearly 4 times as much as me and my dad did, 10 years ago when he was still farming. What we put out for 120,000 ten years ago, now is half a million. It hasn't been all profit over the last 10 years. I ain't complaining, but we have inputs of 5.00 corn, and it's 3.00. You can lose more in 2 years, then you made in the last 10. With the inputs today. 2012 and 2015 were complete wipeouts here. 2012 being worse then last year.
          IG

dpower wrote: no small farmers are left in our area. All big guys farming 4,000 acres or more. Neighbors use to help each other now they stab each other in the back for ground. Sad deal but maybe some of these low prices will get to these big boys that have become too greedy.

It already is!  I know of at least three of the big guys around here who got locked into long term leases for the inflated prices they offered the landowners to take the ground away from other farmers a few years back.  When prices went down they figured out that they couldn't make any money farming if they were paying that much for ground so they sold out and broke the leases.    All three of them were in their late 50s or early 60s so I guess they just decided to retire early.









Edited by VAfarmboy - 27 Aug 2016 at 2:16am

DougS wrote: Strike, acben20? Who are you going to strike against? Your local elevator? The government? The government may be able to set price guarantees, but it will do so with acreage allocations. The 'fix' is for all farmers to cut back production by x%. Doing so will drive the small farmers out of business. Like most other things in our world today, there is no easy fix. When prices are good everyone gets into the business. In the 1960s the NFO tried something similar to what you are proposing. It failed miserably.

The Feds tried to cut production with the Soil Bank in the late 50s due to the rapid mechanization of agriculture after WWII that resulted in millions of acres of land that once grew hay to feed millions of draft animals being plowed up and planted in crops causing commodity prices to tank.  When prices went back up in the early 1970s it was all plowed out and everyone was farming fence-row to fence-row and the feds were even subsidizing drainage tile to put swampland into production. Then when grain prices tanked again and they tried to stem the farm crisis of the 1980s with the CRP but when commodity prices went back up in the 2000s many CRP contracts were not renewed when they expired because people could make money farming it again.   

And don't forget the dairy herd buyout to get rid of the small fellows too....
 Greed drove the big fellows bigger... and drove those that couldn't get enough down where they were to up here... and those fellows had a huge learning curve.  shorter, much shorter growing season, and many bushals less... and less profit in their pocket and higher expenses...  The one fellow after three years said he should have looked harder for more land around his area. LOL
 three big farmers up here also have cows and run their crop thru them, two semi loads of milk a day from one of the farms... and he can't get anybigger so he's starting up another...
 When is big BIG enough?
  I use to look at how so many made a living off of 25 cows, then it got to 40 then 60 and 100 then 200 500 and a thousand .... then the mega milk lots out in california, what happened... Greed underlining it all.
  Another thing that was happening in the 60's and 70's was a government involvement in a "CHEAP FOOD policy" and look at Earl Butz back then... Ag Secretary ... and the universitys helping sell that cheapfood mantras... They were screaming GET BIGGER and then the nex publication was GET MORE EFFICIENT and back and forth, then they started slipping in the slur of "OR GET OUT"... Promoted and pushed... and cam't forget that there were farm payments from the government that practicly paid for the farms if you applied... several fellows bought farms and had them paid for that way. One guy was always braging about it. But you had to sign up to be told what you could do and what you couldn't do with the signed up acerage. Well he was farming the government. If they would have stayed out of everything, it would be different to some degree for sure.  What will it be like in another ten years???will the farmers be under duress for another period that might go for 30 years? Or will it turn back to smaller farms? kinda doubt it, unless theres a prohibition on anything over 150 hp.  and zero emmision tractors.  LOL 

JC your right on the money about it being greed. There is also another thing you hear all the time now. America was once 50% farmers and now it is only 2% farmers. But there where new jobs formed in new industries the the people who left the farms. I hear that from political talk all the time as the explain how automation is the future. The point I get whenever I hear that is they don't want farmers. Farming is beneath them and in the past. The same with truck driving and any other job that can be outsourced or automated. The point being that they don't give a crap about the little guy with his small farm it isn't cool to them. As long as food is just a cheap thing you have to eat and the land or animals are just a means to an end you will see more nasty chemicals that harm the people using them and animals that are kept in nasty conditions and are kept alive by the cheapest means.
I don't know the answer but it is a mindset that has to change.

Ya I was around in the late 50's-early 1960's the only people that made money was the nfo execs. Dad never joined-fences got cut etc, had 200+ head of fat cattle ready to ship at the time, went ahead and shipped them, made money because they were contracted long before this happened.   When things got worse those clowns at the nfo would not let their members get out. Demanded they continue to pay their dues on time. Some of the guys had to get a court order to get out of the nfo. Members sure made a lot of money on that deal.    Good luck with that. Hope someone can figure out a solution to the problem.

Nobody is going to strike,unfortunatley farming has become a cut throat business at least it has here in Central Indiana...hell if I told a landord I wasn't going to pay cash rent I considered to be too high, there would be another big time operator in the drive way before I left.Prices over the last several years have been very good,all those high prices did was make land,cash rent,equipment, and inputs go through the roof...yeah we may have grossed more money but when it was all said and done we were no better off than when corn was 3$ and cash rent was 100$...u want to make a difference, elect politicians that will take the AG embargo's off half of the countries in the world. We are limited to who we can sell our product to.

Dan73, Dad and I discussed these issues many times over about how things were done and how they are done and what the future held.
 The consensus was what we have today, the big get bigger and the small get smallerand then they are gone, and the profit margins get slimmer... and of coarse, there would be a few highs and more lows in it.  And be ready to cash in on them... Well, to cash in on them, you have to know what is coming ahead of time. LOL
  He also did not like how fast things were getting done, like the big fellows pull in and spray and plant and pull out in an hour what took the small fellow a week to work. Toss on commercial fertilizer, toss on weed spray and herbicide and insecticide and geneticized seed, notill it in and pull out. We watched many times the difference between our fields and the fields that neighbored one of the modern farmers... the deer and raccoon would walk through their field nip and spit the corn out and then jump over or crawl under the fence and eat our corn. That wasn't just one time, that happened many years.  We always plowed down a good stand of grass too if it was rented ground and the fields close up got manured.
  Now that we don't milk anymore, and got unconfined beef instead, they wander out and graze and don't have any significant manure except around the feeding area to haul out.  So now the grounds gets other inputs applied instead of the commercial fert.
  The biggest surprise was when all this genetically modified seed started to show up, the first year was a very low percentage then it just blossomed and in less than 5 years, it was like 80% of the crops were gene altered grains. I thought it would take 20 or more years to get there... it was practically overnight... like pandora's box got its lid blown open, no sneak peeking in through a crack first.

+1 here, free trade and foreign market agreements have put everyone back to the 1970s. I am old enough to remember when farm after farm went into foreclosure.

One idea that I heard back in LDP days was to plant 20% less corn and plant soybeans on those same acres. The price of beans would fall and corn would go up. We would still get the same price for beans with the help of the LDP. 

I been seeing a lot of repo'ed new equipment on consignment auctions already, and the lending places are taking a BIG hit on that equipment, as in $100,000. or more on tractors and planters and support equipment, combines are more! also seeing a lot more forclosures on land and housing than before. and ya'll knew my situation thru the past 2-3 years with me being a small farmer with less than 300 acres. and last year working for nothing even with $3.90 corn, because of the greed factor that someone put into others minds! what will be their excuse now? i'm just gonna sit back and laugh at them! yep....bigger is better! (barf) 

I think generally speaking, the smaller farmers actually still LOVE the land and it'd go against the grain( no pun) to NOT farm. The 'big boys' have to as they're a 'mega business' and only look at the bottom line.
I'm fairly sure the smaller guys could ride out a year or two, 'living off the land', doing what was 'normal' back 50-60-100 years ago.
It sure would be interesting to see what would happen though....

Jay