Wow, dead on; I live in PA and have seen the shale boom come and go in this area in the last 5 years. Saw lots of farmers use their gas money to pay down debt, make improvements to the homeplace, buy land, or start a trust for their kids. I've also seen guys who blew it as fast as they made it on new combines and 200 h.p. tractors and it's them I have no sympathy for now that the money faucet is off. I'd also like to add that economically, what we're dealing with here is the downside to what most of our farms have become - non-diversified producers only capable of growing one or two different crops, subsidized by banks and the american taxpayer and when those crops fail to be profitable, they don't know what else to do but keep on plantin' corn and beans. Sounds harsh I guess, and lots of guys don't want to hear it but it's true.
A quote from the article that just kills me: "With few appealing options, David Seil chose to expand corn planting on his 1,300-acre farm near Gowrie, Iowa. Rather than sacrifice productive land by using it as pasture for his cattle, he’s cutting back on spending for seed and fertilizer and hoping that weather damages crops somewhere else so that prices go up. The arrival of La Nina weather patterns may increase the drought risk in the Midwest, and the government is forecasting higher temperatures this year."
Sacrifice productive land to make more cow pasture??????? SACRIFICE????? Dumbest sentiment I've ever read. Productive pasture land with good cattle or sheep on it will give him more profit per acre than any cornfield he'll grow in the next several years. So, in his mind rather than make a change in his operation, it would be better to EXPAND on a crop he KNOWS he'll lose money on before it even goes in the ground, cut back on seed and fertilizer, grow a half-fast crop of corn, and hope for a disaster somewhere else in the world to make the price go up!!?? Jeez. It's exactly this kind of backwards thinking that has guys up to their a@@ in debt and up to their ears in a crop they can't sell. AND it's the reason that this guy will probably be having an auction sometime in the next decade.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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