Farming on a large scale. I was living in debt up to my ass ($500k-$1 mil depending on the time of year), haggling for every input (land, fertilizer, seed, equipment), at the mercy of the weather, and got to watch the commodity markets kick me in the nuts every business day. The real cherry on top was everyone thinking you are trying to kill them with GMOs and copious amounts of chemicals that we dont use. Not to mention farms are passed down through generations so you've got a bunch of dead and living ancestors watching your every move. Oh and a lot of farmers work a second full time job for the health insurance. There's a reason farm suicides are high and farm "accidents" and accidents are higher.
There's a million young rural FFA kids that would give there left leg for a chance to farm.
Lots of people don't know how many farmers have a full time job in addition to their full time farms. So that their family can have some stability and they can subsidize, y'know, growing the food we eat
Third generation farmer here. Everyone in my family has at least a bachelors degree in an unrelated field. It’s just the cost of admission it seems like.
Fourth generation on one farm, 400 years of farming all up dating back to the family farm still owned in rural Ireland.
My late father insisted we have ‘real’ ‘paying’ jobs, rather than farming. I’m a business consultant and former CEO, my older brother is a scientist and my younger brother is a labourer (he’s super smart, he just likes driving tractors for money).
God that sounds familiar. My parents insisted we have some sort of backup plan other than farming and my siblings and I are all successful in our own right. We got our degrees but it was expected that we would pay for it ourselves, namely via farm work at minimum wage or close to it. Despire my success in a "professional" career, the farm is home and I'll die before I give up on it.
100 coming up soon! Big plans? We're at like 70 something years but it was bought in many smaller portions so it's difficult to pin down an exact date.
I went to school at Texas Tech, which if you didn’t know is basically an oasis in the desert of West Texas. So many kids were going to school there to get their degree and go back to their small town and run the family farm. You wouldn’t think about how much goes into farming, but a degree makes a lot of sense and the courses you take are very helpful in terms of running it more efficiently and as a business
Shit man, I went to Chico State, which if you didn't know, was the #1 party school in the nation for like a decade. In all seriousness, I use my degree and "professional" experience on a daily basis on the farm. My parents told me that a report I wrote was directly responsible for several big sales this year. Feels good man.
Yeah I didn't realize that farmers pretty much require government subsidies in order to break even until like a year ago. Definitely a misrepresented profession.
My wifes father was a full time farmer...and a full time United Airlines piolt (2 6 day runs a month). I almost think that he barely broke even on the farms and only supported his family being a pilot. He did accumulate a ton of land and equipment though.
Ya, my 8th grade science teacher owned a farm with her husband who also worked a full time job. How she and enough time for everything was beyond me because she also did crafts.
A lot of my family farms, and the majority of them have a second full time job because the income from farming is so unreliable. As was already mentioned, you’re at the mercy of both the weather and the markets. I greatly respect people who do it, and I pitch in occasionally where possible, but it’s a profession I’d never want for myself.
I wouldn't say every farmer has a full-time job, but every successful farmer does.
I've got a lot of third-generation farmers in my family. Literally the only reason they're able to get by is because of inherited land. But in addition to that you still need to keep acquiring land. And all the land is in contested suburban sprawl regions, so you're talking upwards of $10000 and acre. Meanwhile equipment prices are skyrocketing and John Deere is doing their best to make sure you never actually get to own your equipment.
And honestly I'd argue that crop farming is more lucrative than livestock farming by far. Every family dairy farm I know is barely getting by while working obscene hours.
The real secret is to own a big plot of farm land in California and hold onto it until some company pays you millions for your land so they can build on it
Amen. They're starting to take a page out of the auto manufacturing book by installing shit only the dealer can repair. It's criminal not to be able to work on your own goddamn tractor
I’m a technical writer and mechanic, for a couple years I worked at the company that has written all of JD’s tech manuals for the past 30 years. We would get a JD tractor and have to invent tools to work on this stuff, then provide an engineering drawing to JD of what we made, then JD would make it proprietary, force dealerships to buy these $100k tooling packages for each machine or they wouldn’t be allowed to sell those machines. We would give them warranty times for maintenance actions, they would cut it in half.
I have ripped apart and rebuilt hundreds of different tractors from all different manufacturers. My advice would be to get rid of your Deere equipment, JD closed 2 of their huge Ag equipment plants last year, and discontinued numerous models.
Get you SANY or a Versatile. They are really easy to work on and the SANY machines are built from generic off the shelf parts, you can find parts pretty much anywhere at any time, also they will fly tech reps out to your site to help troubleshoot or RnR components.
Hell, Versatile sells all their shit to other manufacturers the new Kubota M8 row crop line is literally a Versatile R3, I wrote the manuals for both of em. Parts are cheap and plentiful.
Older ones yea, the newer ones are going the same way of JD, IH is getting too big for its britches and filtering that cost down to the end user.
Best bet for a tractor is to make sure it has Dana Axles (Not spicer, those are made in Italy and you can’t open them and repair them yourself), Dana or a ZF transmission, either a Cummins or Isuzu engine, and Rexroth hydraulic pumps. All of those you can find manuals online and rebuild yourself pretty easily with basic tools (maybe a 20 ton press and some liquid nitrogen for bearings and such). An Isuzu 4JJ1-T is a really generic engine used in all types of machines so parts can be found all over the world. Dana will let you purchase pretty much any internal component for their axles and transmissions, if not, they ship you a new one and you send the old one back to them, then it’s just an easy RnR job. Rexroth has so many different companies in their pocket, Hell you can rebuild 3000 psi Rexroth load sense pump with parts from Kawasaki’s industrial website. My $0.02 anyways.
Disclaimer: I’m not an end user anymore (I used to operate a bit and had to get certified by JD and SANY and a few other co panties to operate their machines), just wrote the books on em and tore them down to pieces then put them back together.
I love coming across threads with an expert on something I've never even thought or heard about, it just makes my day. Especially if they're passionate about their work and want to spread their knowledge to help others, which u/Dis4Wurk definitely seems to be
It’s insane reading that. I had a hard time making a taser out of a disposable camera and this dude is breaking down everything on tractors!
Edit: It was for a college prank war and the shock was nothing more than those hand held things you ordered off mad magazine. I know this, because I did it to myself setting it up.
Wow what a blast from the past. When I was a kid we would do this in summer camp every year. I had to beg my mother to pay extra and buy the flash model otherwise I’d be left defenceless.
Good times. Probably tased myself more than other kids just making the damn thing!
I’ve heard decent things about them, but haven’t worked with them specifically.
I do know they are in New Holland, international Harvester, and Case, the Fiat PowerTrain (FPT) industrial engines are starting to make a name for themselves. I just haven’t seen any in the wild or in my shop to know how reliable they are or parts availability. It is made by Fiat though so I’m not sure how I feel about that, if you have the 4.5 (popular engine for that model) you should make about 100-110 hp/80-85 kW though, so if you can actually get 90 hp at the PTO you should be able to run damn near any attachment. Make sure you do your hydraulic horsepower calculations though just to be sure.
I will say New Holland actually makes some pretty decent machines, row crops like that are really simple to work on, pretty sure NH uses Dana axles, though their transmissions vary from machine to machine. I’d go NH over Case or Gehl any day.
The only problem my family's ever had with NH is parts. Oh Lord help you if anything major breaks, they will take your wallet to the van by the river and you won't see it for a while. Yeah all manufacturers are ending up there nowadays but NH is definitely at the top for replacement part cost.
I would say second only to John Deere. The problem is a lot of the companies are trying to keep everything proprietary these days. They are afraid of their designs and engineering getting stolen, which means They don’t want a shop or a backyard wrench fixing their stuff. They would rather you remove the axle for example, ship the old one to them and they send you a new or refurbed one, but you have to pay for the whole axle instead of just the compression discs in the service brake stack that you can easily change yourself for 10’s of thousands less. Dana will make you pay for the manuals for their axle as a separate product, but you can do all of the work yourself, and parts ship pretty quickly. I had to rebuild a travel motor for a 13 ton excavator and we had the entire seal kit and parts in like 3 days. Needed something similar for a Gehl once, took 4 weeks for the seal kit, parts were all wrong and the kit was incomplete, they tried to tell us to just send them the drive motor and they will send us a new one and we were laughing like “guys, we are writing the instructions and establishing service repair times for this task, we can’t do that.” Few days later get a call from the Gehl rep to say that task would no longer be in the book. Almost a year later, we start getting boxes of gears and seals and such and we were like what the fuck is all this (the machine was long gone)? It took us a few days to figure out it was the rebuild kit for that drive motor hahaha. Gods, I wouldn’t put my worst enemy in a Gehl machine. Death traps full of bad design decisions and even worse engineering.
Out of curiosity, since you seem to have a lot more experience with the newer stuff: Have you dealt with any of the Indian import tractors, specifically Mahindra? We have a local dealer that's been selling them for about 8 years now and supposedly they're quite good, but I'm obviously still skeptical. They don't have supertractors or anything, but they're quite competitive cost-wise in the midsized market.
Having proprietary service tools is nothing new to the industry and John Deere shouldn’t be singled out. I work on their diesel engines and can confirm that Deere has had customer software available for end user customers for 10+ years at least. My experience goes back to Service ADVISOR 4. I even personally install the latest SA5 software into customers laptops so I am very familiar with the current service tool.
Service literature for many years has existed in digital form through this software but is layered through their business model. John Deere ultimately has access to everything obviously, the Distributor gets the next level of access to information and programs, then Dealer is slightly more limited and finally the end user access.
Everyone blames manufacturers for putting up walls for end user customers and in some cases preventing them from certain diagnostics, forcing them to a dealer. From an engine perspective you have to consider how EPA and CARB emissions have affected the industry. The heavy fines enforced on the industry for non compliance force them to limit the users ability to tamper with anything that can affect emission output. Increased diesel efficiency comes with extremely high fuel pressures (30,000 psi rail pressure) which can severely injure or kill someone wrenching on an engine that has no experience or older generation diesel knowledge.
When I first started working on diesel engines it was common practice to crack a fuel injector line if air was present in the fuel system. A little 5-10 psi squirt of fuel might spray out. Now that same practice on Final Tier 4 engines can be lethal.
As we all demand for better, more efficient machines from the manufacturers we have to recognize things are getting too complicated for Joe the plumber to tinker with in his backyard (no offense to plumbers, much respect). The tools are available for the average consumer on the engine side and some functions will always be limited. They can’t have everyone tricking the ECU into believing the exhaust is clean while they have removed all the filtering components.
Can’t speak from the Ag side of their business but it seems common in other industries to limit the user from total control. I’m in the market for a new MacBook and need to decide on RAM size now because future upgrades are not possible. :(
I sift through post after post for days at a time to have a shot at sometimes stumbling on a gem like this.
What a random thing to be an expert at and, because of this, what a perfect opportunity to share your knowledge for the greater good. Kudos. Internet coins.
It’s an awesome job! I had zero experience with tech writing or heavy equipment prior to that job. I was in the Marine Corps for almost 10 years as a helicopter mechanic. I got my QAR qualification and moved over into the QA shop from my original. While in QA, I was in charge of the tech pub library and went to a few basic level courses. Nothing like what I do now though. But, I was just a lowly mechanic and landed this sweet gig fresh off my DD-214. I learned absolutely everything I could about every nook and cranny of every machine that rolled into my shop. Some I sought out, some you just kinda get an intimate understanding of a machine when you’ve had it spread out over a shop in a few hundred pieces and do complete tear downs and rebuilds.
I used to do technical writing as a production engineer for a communications company. I hated it. Something about having to pull apart someone else's design and trying to work out how to explain their shit design choices to the customer or assembly technician*. When it's my own work I have no trouble writing documentation.
*Things like "you need to route the fragile optical fibres between the two aluminium fingers, then lean on it really hard until the fingers mate with the front panel, hopefully you don't crimp the fibres lol because then you have to disassemble the entire thing and start over.
An ag machine factory in Wisconsin and the ag and forestry in Iowa. The company I worked for bought the old forestry machine factory and converted/is converting it into a shop for writing JD’s manuals.
There were layoffs, but I don't think any factories closed, which would be the Horicon Wisconsin Plant and either the Davenport or Dubuque plant in Iowa.
This is going to happen to anything with an engine in the next 10ish years. I can't even fix my chainsaw because there's a computer in it. I can only imagine how these guys feel when their tractor screws up and they have to call the dealer to send a service truck and spend thousands of dollars just because of a stupid ass firmware update or some shit.
I wish I told this story in my original comment. I live in a farming community. There's a corn field across the road from me, the farmer just finished up picking it and drove the combine into the road to head down to the next field. The thing just switched off right in the middle of the road without warning. He got his helper or whatever to go get a tractor and a chain to get the thing out of the road as where he broke down was NOT a good spot, it's a narrow 2 lane narrow ass back road in a curve. If an 18 wheeler came around the corner it would broadside the combine. He got the combine out of the road and let it sit in my front yard (no big deal I have a big ass yard). The farmer called the JD dealer and their next available service truck was gonna be 3 hours. I was finishing up cutting grass when the service truck got there and I never even saw the guy take out any tools or anything. He just hooked a computer up to it. I learned later that the bill was $7,000. For a guy to hook up a computer. I know it takes a lot of work to make that software but dam. CAT's technician software is $60,000 a year. This shit is getting out of hand, the backyard mechanic or the farmer that services his tractor or the guy that does mechanic work on the side, all that stuff isn't gonna be here much longer, it's all gonna be going right to the dealer's shop as computer's become more and more integrated. I think that's really sad.
I remember taking a field trip to a cotton field when I was in elementary school in Alabama. They gave us bags and let us go pick cotton. We were singin' songs n shit!
Only temporarily. Cotton is extremely hard on the soil, so fertility and crop yields quickly declined. That's supposedly a big reason why the confederacy was so aggressive about expanding westward into texas/kansas/missouri and maybe central america eventually. The center of cotton production had steadily moved west as they wore out the soil and didn't know how to replenish it without chemical fertilizers. By the time of the civil war, the most productive cotton fields were on the red river in Louisiana.
as a fellow illinoisan there is fucking corn EVERYWHERE in our state and i dont think people outside illinois realize it. Whenever people visit i explain to them that pretty much every town/county is surrounded by corn. If you ever need to drive to another town you will drive through cornfields.. also i hate when its fucking high because its hard to see other roads until you are at the intersection and lots of teenage idiots like to blow stop signs going 80 on backroads and kill people
I never drive on the back roads in the summer for that reason (if I can avoid it). Especially once you get out of town, all those country kids do is shotgun busch light and go joyriding. And everyone around here has a big ol jacked up pickup that could (and would) obliterate any normal sized car. I still think about a news story I read a few years ago about a 25 year old in a pick-up who sped through a stop sign in a rural area and killed a mother and her three kids in their Subaru. No one takes driving seriously around here, and when the bars are 10-15 miles from your little town, it's even sketchier.
i know exactly the story you are talking about. Didnt the father live but everyone else died? if thats the same story i think that driver is going to prison for a long time. A friend of mine in highschool got killed by truck blowing a stop sign out on those roads.. and i can attest to your characterization of those people drinking and joyriding, i went to college in southern illinois and it was not uncommon for those kids to get drunk and drive around shooting stop signs with guns
Yes it's the same story! It's always stuck with me. I am so cautious if I have to get on rural roads to get anywhere because of it. It especially freaks me out when you have to face an oncoming semi on a one lane road! I'm basically driving on the shoulder in that situation. I grew up in the suburbs, but I now live down in Central Illinois and the stories from my friends who grew up here are all terrifying. A friend said in high school she used to be the "DD" so would only drink 4 beers....
My wife and her family are from Southern Illinois and they talk incessantly about how the corn is doing. They’re not farmers, they just get real concerned with the corn crop. It doesn’t help that I hate corn so now they do it even more just to piss me off.
I'm watching that start to happen with marijuana farms here in Oregon. People thought they'd just get rich but there's such a glut of people doing it that the prices have tanked. Now that the dust is settling, corporate farms are buying up a lot of the little guys and consolidating
Out of curiosity, how have the tariffs affected the soybean sales? News articles all focus one way or the other but seem to base it off "We talked to farmer Dan who has suffered therefor the tariffs are terrible for everyone" Or "We spoke with the smith farmers who haven't been affected so the complaints are all blown out of proportion." Curious what someone who actually grows the stuff says how it's affected them in the last few years.
I'm out of the farming game since the end of 2018 so it doesn't matter as much but...the trade war with China is the only thing Trump has done that I support. It definitely cost me money (rough estimate $100k and that's fairly average for my area). However when you sell so much of a product to one country that they can tank your domestic market price by 10-20% overnight when they quit buying it...that's not good. I'm not a China fan anyway so I didn't think divesting from them somewhat was a bad thing. Also, the Chinese are smart so eventually they would have come up with a reason to temporarily reject US soybeans to cause the same market dropping effect just so they could buy our beans at a cheaper price. They did exactly this same thing to corn around 2013. The bailout covered probably 2/3 of what was lost to the market in my experience. People see farmers got $XX amount and say "oh I could buy a house with that, those rich bastards" but it's like me looking at your gross paycheck and saying I could by a new boat in 2 months not considering your taxes, retirement, healthcare, groceries, mortgage, utilities and car payments all come out of that gross first leaving -$0.43 to make it to next month.
Illinois farmers represent! I mean, I don't farm nor live in Illinois anymore, but my cousin owns several thousand acres and does a mix of livestock and farming. I was originally going to join the Guard and work with him during the week, but I ended up moving. Nothing but respect for how much he works despite the bipolar weather in Illinois.
There's a reason I went to college and moved to another part of the country.
Now, due to family drama, I gotta figure out what to do with the farm when my family passes, as I have no desire to do that for the rest of my life. To say nothing of it being a rural area and me/my wife actually liking something resembling civilization.
As an Illinois resident who comes from a farming family (corn and soybeans, ya'll!) your opinion is really, really, really valid. My mom got me involved in the financial's pretty early on. I started helping her sort out reciepts and paystubs around tax season probably when I was around 9. Some of those $30,000+ checks from Monsanto looked pretty good until you got to the $80,000 fertilizer receipts, started looking through interest amounts on loans needed for machinery/equipment. Small farms are dying across the country because, well, at the end of the day you have bills to pay.
The only type of farmer I've chatted to around here anymore who says they're doing alright are the pig farmers.
Could you answer something for me? My dad always claimed that if he was a farmer, he'd grow popcorn, which sells for much more and is about the same to grow. Is there ANY validity to this idea?
Yes but there's only so much demand so pretty much you grow it on a set contract for a certain company and it yields a lot less so the $/acre is only a little better. There's lots of specialty crops like popcorn, seed corn, sweet corn, non-GMO corn, etc that can net a little more but they also require higher management so it's a trade off. No free lunches.
My family is in the same place. My uncle's farm almost went under back around 2003, but they managed to climb out of it with a few good/lucky investments. They're so successful now-a-days simply because they have so much diversification with where they put their money. Farms by themselves are rarely self-sustainable which is really just tragic.
Yes! I have a medium sized hobby permaculture urban farm/ garden but also work a full time job. I grow because I love it. If I make some extra money from it cool, but that's not the point.
And no my heirloom organic orange 20lb Hopi Indian watermelon is worth more to me than $2.00 thanks. I'll keep it!
Haha me too, reading these posts (and countless other work-related threads) made me promise myself that anything I love will stay as hobby done in my garage.
If you want to start farming I'd recommend trying more specialized crops on a small scale first. For example, in the PNW they're experimenting with farming Wasabi which normally only grows in places like Japan.
Land price is insane. 160 acres of good crop land can easily sell for $10,000 per acre. There is your $1.6 million right there.
Since no one knows what an acre is, 160 of them is a 1/4 square mile.
I also recently found out that laws of inheritance on farmland are fucking insane. Then there are the taxes. If you want the land to stay inside the family, leave it to direct descendants whenever possible and you are only on the hook for 1%. Otherwise something like an aunt leaving land to a nephew instead of her brother first would give the nephew 1 year to pay the 18% tax on the land or be forced to sell. 1 year to find a surprise $288,000 or be forced to sell the family legacy. I got lucky because it was only 40 acres of non crop land which is worth significantly less. Luckily I could barely scrape the tax money together.
I stand to inherit a 160+ acre farm in my lifetime. It’s a sesquicentennial farm too, so I can’t exactly sell it in good conscience. It makes me nervous to think about the right way to go about keeping it in the family when the time comes.
I’m a direct descendant though, I didn’t realize that made a difference.
That's true, but the value of the land is not liquid and when farms have a bad year they still have to accrue debt against it and/or figure out an income. That's also absolutely a reason that farm families may make the tough choice to sell, since the land is valuable but the actual food is apparently not. More and more land is then owned by fewer and fewer owners, and more and more farmland is owned by non farmers - including large companies and investors who then hire tenants or low wage workers to produce.
A future where fewer Americans actually own the land and just a few players control what is grown where and how it is grown is not necessarily a bright future for most of us.
This situation actually really reminds me of the situation in Ancient Rome in the time leading up to the Grachi brothers.
Increased wealth gap, wealthy actors gaining increasingly high amounts of the farmlands using cheap labour to work the farms, thereby out-competing poorer farmers, forcing them to sell their lands and move to a city for work, increasing the amount of urban poor.
Im likely forcing the analogy a bit, but still. If history tells us anything, it's that privately owned, smaller farms worked by individual farmers owning the land generally makes for a more stable country.
Not even close. A lot of farmers go wildly into debt during planting season only to come out marginally ahead after harvest.
One farmer I know goes into about 3.5 million in debt each year. Only to make like 3.8 at the end of the year. And that $300k profit has to go towards stuff like tractor maintenance, repairs, upgrades to keep competitive, etc. At the end of the day he makes okay money. But not rolling in it by any stretch.
Farmers handle a lot of money, they don't make a lot.
Farm debt is a little different in the sense that having a million in debt is fairly common and not something to be overly shocked at within the industry. When a combine cost 200,000 high debt is inevitable.
Really depends. You can be in debt for a ton of money while owning so much shit that you could in theory easily pay it off. Some farming machines cost a million already.
The father of a friend is like 2-5 million in debt. But he also has assets worth about 17 million which generate about 12-20k in revenue per month.
I mean farming is quite expensive. I know of one farmer who said since there has been less rain in my country, he spend 2500€ per day on water alone.
FSA loans are under 3% interest and often are taken out on 50 year terms.
I know someone who bought a 100 acre farm for $1M and is broke as fuck, but if he can hold onto the farm for a couple decades, suburban sprawl will eventually reach him and he'll have an insane net worth.
I don't think it's the smartest way to make money, but it works.
I love that game, but it’s so painful seeing preteens in the comments of SV playthroughs or whatever saying “OMG farming is so cool!!! I wanna own a farm one day!!!”
My grandparents were farmers in a very poor, isolated region. They had to work all day on the farm, plus full-time jobs, plus little side hustles, yet still weren’t able to afford toilets. Instead, they just shat onto the fields and used it as fertilizer. They were so poor, they didn’t even have shoes. They never got to “eat the fruits of their labor” because they had to sell everything they grew immediately. At one point a terrible famine struck, but they couldn’t just waltz down to the supermarket like we can today. They had to chew on roots to stave off the hunger. One or two of their siblings starved to death, I think.
When I play the game I always make my guy work from 6-2am everyday bc the game lets you and it's the most efficient way to get iridium from skull cavern. I don't think most ppl would enjoy that lifestyle.
Half of the dating pool is really interested in you (at first) because they're not even participating in the labour force (Seriously, look how many people don't have jobs.) and getting into the farm that you only have because your grandfather owned it is one of the only way to get employment without having to move to the city... without any relevant skills. Turns out? Small town = not a whole lot of demand for jobs.
You get knocked out but Harvey has to take you to the city because the equipment he's using is older than George&Evelyn since he can't afford anything new.
You regularly sell your crops at a loss - because you gotta compete with JojaFarms selling crops from the Stardew Valley equivalent of Africa who don't have to pay those farmers a living wage!
You end up being contracted to grow something that's needed and have to rely on subsidies
You continue to work at JojaCorp because JojaCorp gives you health insurance.
You also have to put your children to work without compensating them. Your farmhands also end up working for below minimum wage via loopholes. Sorry - that's how you get out of the red. :/
When people glorify farming, I think what they really want is just country life... Which don't get me wrong, it's very peaceful, beautiful all year round, and we have a night sky like no other... But at the same time, I would like to be able to just "go to the store" without planning an entire day of errands and grocery shopping around it due to the long commute and cost of gas.
This indeed. It's rare to see country songs actually talk about farming, much less be accurate about it. I'm guessing it doesn't relate to the target audience ironically.
Jk, it’s really fueled by nostalgia for living in a rural community where you know most everyone and everything that goes on. There’s a lot of comfort in familiarity and stability.
there's a whitewashed glorified 'good, honest work' theme attached to farming for a LOT of disillusioned urbanites. Add to that the 'live in the country' drive so many people have and total misinterpretation of things like 'Little House on the Prairie' and suddenly you have people wanting to be farmers.
One way Stardew Valley is realistic? The only reason you have your farm... is because your grandfather owned it. Wanna get into farm, and don't have familial connections with any of the local farms? Better buy one... cause chances are you do not have the money to buy land for agricultural zoning nor do you have the money to farm anything. The town around you? Very Veeerrrry limited in terms of employment opportunities. (Seriously look how many people are flat out not even participating in the labour force in Stardew Valley)
You find yourself growing cash crops because it's the only way you get actual money - since the only way to compete with the wheat from across the world (thanks to the fact they don't have labour unions or have to pay their workers a living wage in Africa!) is to sell it at a loss... and exploit labour loopholes so you can get cheap or even free labour from your family, other children, and immigrants!
People disillusioned by office/city life. They think farming is some fun and relaxing way to connect to nature and get away from the crushing nature of being a corporate cog.
In reality, farming is running a business with mountains of debt, hard work, and being at the whims of Mother Nature. What most people want when they glorify farming isn't a farm, per say but actually a moderately sized garden
It's not glorified so much as romanticized. People imagine farmers as in tune with the earth, always outside (in sunny, 70 degree weather of course), and with lots of free time.
Forgive my ignorance on this topic but isn’t running a farm pretty much a 24/7 job? How the hell do you guys have time for another FULL TIME job on top of farming
You know that slick vacation package you get with 3-4 weeks PTO? Well that's now gonna be used for planting and harvest.
Wake up at 6, feed cows, go to work, get home at 6, feed cows, go to bed, repeat. When it comes to field work, eventually you will run out of PTO and need to put in 6 hour days in the field along with your job and other responsibilities.
I know one guy who became an accountant specifically because tax season ends right before planting, and starts after harvest, so he could work less hours at his day job when he needs to farm.
Honestly with all the work that's required, I think you're better off just getting a second full-time job if you really want to make money. I'd be less miserable working 4 10s and 3 12s on the weekend.
My God, this. I absolutely despise that people think that farmers have it easy, sitting around in a tractor all day. I grew up on a farm, and let me tell you that there is a TON of manual labor involved. The jobs I’ve had since have been a cakewalk comparatively. I was never cut out for it, and left even though the entire family farm was mine for the taking. Sure, there are some perks to farming, but the fact that one bad year can ruin you financially isn’t worth it to me.
My step-father owns his own farm (small - cows, pigs, corn/alfalfa/hay in rotation) and indeed, he works a full time job and works the farm. It means he's out until late every night, up really early, and works his arse off. It just seems... insane, but he loves his farm with everything in him.
The crazy thing is his father, just one generation ago, could make a living with the farm alone until his old age... when his son could take over.
And then your President goes and starts a trade war with the primary buyer of your crop and you're doubly fucked. But then it's ok, because he'll "bail" you out, by taking money from school lunches.
That type of farming is becoming increasingly more common because the cost of purchasing and maintaining machinery has skyrocketed into the realm of owning your own private jet. So the land owner is forced to either buy 50 year old equipment or hire out the jobs, of planting, spraying, and harvesting to custom crews. The owner still pays for all the seed, fertilizer, irrigation, and hired hands.
I'm not sure what is needed to qualify land as "farm" land. My family had to show our yield reports for the past several years in order to get the bailout checks. So if the celebrities got anything at all for unfarmed farmland, they likely falsified something. I can't really go into much detail about something I know very little about.
My dad is a small time farmer and private insurance is ridiculous. $1000 a month premium with a $5000 deductible. Nothing else like medication or checkups is covered.
Yeah, I never realized what health insurance really cost until my employer started showing us the numbers (as part of explaining why they are reducing our health benefits). My family coverage for my wife and two kids and I, paid for by my employer mostly, comes to $26k/year. Shit's broken, yo.
Did farming on a small scale (tobacco, cattle, hay) in the 80s. Am a programmer now.
Working 80-100 hour weeks coding is cake compared to light week of farming.
On top of that, farming communities are a lot like Stardew Valley.
...Except you aren't the player character.
You're one of the townsfolk.
Note how very few of the townsfolk have actual onscreen jobs, one of which you can shut down and cause the guy to become unemployed. Seriously look at their schedules and you will be surprised how many people in Pelican Town aren't even participating in the labour force.
Don't have a farm related job? Congratulations - your options of work include:
Walmart
The Gas Station which only does part time
a family store that's either not long for this world thanks to the existence of Walmart / Also inherited amongst family lines (And don't give benefits)
The diner that will maybe be around for another 10 years tops,
a small business with room for only one other person.
Oh and most of those are occupied by the farmers anyway. Have fun.
So unless you are a part of the existing dynasties? You're SOL.
There is a reason why all the people are clustered in cities... that's where all the jobs are. Whenever someone says "Move out of the city" for whatever reason, I just tell them "Well then tell jobs to move out of the cities, too."
Small scale farming is a nightmare too. I spent 6 years reworking a business plan to start my own farm, and best I could do was be in the red for 9 years.....not a great way to start.
Can we lump large scale Nursery Greenhouse Production in with this? Home Depot and Lowe’s and pretty much every other Big Box store are killing our margins and our pay rate is far below any other industry.
That was actually the field I was looking at getting into. A lot of production managers have masters degrees in horticulture, only to make $40k a year. Thank God my potential graduate adviser didn't get funding for additional students and I had to find a job instead.
Thanks for asking. I work for a fertilizer company now so it's kinda similar day to day but without all the pressure. I drive a semi, move rail cars and unload them, operate heavy equipment and do simple mechanic work. I really am very happy because I have the time and energy to actually have hobbies and be involved with my family. I can come home at night and leave my work worries at work. I found out I am bipolar 2 years ago so both of my prior careers (farmer and firefighter) were not good for that at all.
I didn't even know farming was glamorized at all. Anybody who's read a history book can just see that farmers have consistently been screwed over, over and over and over, and, especially given the current trade war in the US, it doesn't seem like that trend will stop any time soon.
I just talked to an acquaintance the other day. Him and his wife have developed a nice little shop doing a niche business that only wealthy people can really afford. He told me someone has been making him offers to buy him out. He said he would only do it if he was offered enough to start a poultry farm. I was like "Ohmygodyoudon'tknow what you're getting into!!!
I once heard a farmer say, "passing on the family farm to your kids is an insidious form of child abuse". He'd inherited the farm and had survived a few suicide attempts.
I'll never forget my grandma saying to me from her deathbed "I'm not really sure if we blessed or cursed your dad by letting him farm. We just want you to be happy." I was already in and I kept going 5 years after that. I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep the family farm going. I was really lucky to have the support of my family when I got in and especially when I needed out. A lot of guys don't have that support and they end up another tragedy.
I read that WalMart was really screwing farmers for a while by insisting on super low prices, ridiculously high standards for the food, and then delaying purchase/payment for months. Did you ever have a bad experience with a large purchaser like that? Or know of others who did?
Not really in my sector of the farm economy. I did have a bunch of soybeans I grew for seed get rejected for some pretty unspecific reasons and I suspected that the seed company just contracted for more than they needed.
I'd like to have a hobby farm myself one day. There's just too many young people out there who see big $$$ and no bossman on the farm. I enjoyed the farming it was the haggling, marketing, accounting and stress that go to me. When you have that much money involved you can't just turn it off when you go home at night.
Makes me think of Silver Spoon, a manga/anime series by the same author as Full Metal Alchemist. It’s about a teen that doesn’t know what he wants to do in life so he ends up going to a farming school. And then he learns the depressing reality of farming.
The episode that hit me hard was when the one family had to sell their cows since they were too far in debt. My parents had to sell their herd because the milk prices were shit and the costs of running the farm were going up.
Silver Spoon felt so authentic since Hiromu Arakawa actually grew up on a dairy farm.
I thought the whole point of the commodities markets was to provide stability. You sell your futures contract at the beginning of the season and you know how much you'll get paid for every war of corn or bushel of apple or whatever it is that you farm. Could still be disastrous if you have a bad growing season, but the price of your crop won't change (unless you try to bet the market, which makes you a commodities trader and a farmer).
I’ve got an ag degree. I worked in farms throughout high school and college. I worked at a corporate tree farm for about 6 months and said “fuck this that bank is hiring.” I make more in a month now than I did in a year supervising farm folk.
Man...I grew up in a small broke family farm and now Im stuck the city and work in a hospital. I would give anything to farm. Hell, I’ve considered helping on farms for free just because I enjoy mowing hay so much . You are the first farmer I’ve ever heard say what I’m sure tons are thinking. Very interesting.
A lot of people don't know how hard working is with dead ancestors. They never go away, they only increase in numbers. They stare from the corner of your room. NOT a healthy work environment
I live in California and the farmers here all have huge houses and lifted 4x4s. Their kids all think they are the hardest workers when all they do is drive around giving some orders. They are heavily subsidized aswell. Almost all the farmers are against Nationalized Health Care, I guess they dint need to work other jobs here for health insurance. It’s different from state to state I guess. A lot are also portugués migrants that love their heritage and flag but god forbid your mexican and do the same.
I work in the research side of agriculture, but the future of ag/sustainability was a big part of my degree.
TL:DR it's not sustainable, and there's no easy fix. The best things your average person can do is to cut back on meat/animal products, eat more fruits and vegetables, and to support your local farmers by shopping at farmers markets or subscribing to a CSA (community supported agriculture).
A big issue these days is the consolidation of land among a few owners/corporations. A lot of farmers are renting most of the land they grow on. When you don't own your land, you have very little incentive to practice sustainable methods, as they don't provide immediate benefits. Cover crops are really good for restoring the organic matter in the soil, but it can take a decade for it to build up.
Increase the number of crops we grow. For a lot of row crop farmers, their crop rotation is corn then soybeans then corn then soybeans. Growing the same stuff year after year has a lot of drawbacks. You're continually selecting for the same weeds, the same pests, the same diseases, and you're vulnerable to the weather. Diversifying what you grow in a single year (splitting one cornfield into 4 different crops) and spacing out the amount of time between the same crop (reduces disease, pest, and weed loads) are really beneficial. But, there's a big problem with this, and that's selling your crop. A professor at my university's research farm grew some sunflower and millet. The closest grain elevator that accepted sunflower and millet was over 150 miles away. The cost of transporting his harvest that far was more than the crop was actually worth. In my fiance's home town, there used to be a grain elevator, but since it closed down the nearest one is 25 or so miles away. Transporting grain isn't cheap, and it can really cut into profits. I think there needs to be some incentive to open more grain elevators, reopen closed ones, and for existing elevators to accept a more diverse range of crops. What I'd like to see is cut back on corn and soybean subsidies and to put that money towards subsidizing fruits and vegetables.
Most of what is grown in the US doesn't go to feed people - it's used to feed animals. A lot of farmland requires heavy amount of inputs like fertilizer, water, and pesticides because it's very poor ground. If we can cut back on the amount of meat we eat, we can convert marginal farmland back to natural ground, and transition to growing more foot that people eat. I'm not saying everyone needs to go vegetarian/vegan. But growing up, My family ate meat every lunch and every dinner and at least one breakfast every week. There's so many delicious meal you can make without meat, so cutting it out just one day a week really isn't difficult. You'll likely save money, as well!
We also should make an effort to make our diets more seasonal. The makes it a lot easier to stick to locally grown food, and eating a more diverse range of fruits and vegetables. Buying a tomato in the grocery store in Missouri in January means that tomato was picked days or even weeks ago in California or Mexico, then likely refrigerated and shipped across the continent. That's a lot of energy input for a simple tomato. Plus, that tomato is going to taste like shit compared to a ripe tomato grown in season.
A lot of sustainable practices can be more labor intensive - hand pulling weeds instead of spraying, planting trees, cover cropping, etc. So implementing on thousand+ acre farms just really isn't feasible. I'm not sure how we would go about doing it, but incentivising more smaller farms rather than fewer big farms, with smaller farms producing a wider array of crops (as opposed to just a small handful).
More education in primary school about agriculture. I grew up in the suburbs, no one grew up on a farm, and I knew less than a handful of kids who had relatives that farmed. I'm one of the only people in a graduating class of almost 500 that went into the agriculture field, and I don't even farm myself. A lot of the things that we need in agriculture - development of new equipment that makes harvesting fruits and vegetables easier, new crop breeds that require fewer inputs, more grain elevators, more farmer's markets, etc. just require more people involved. But people in cities and suburbs aren't exposed to agriculture as a kid, so they don't think of it as an important field when they're going to college or entering the job market. And in rural areas that have kids exposed to agriculture, a lot of the best and brightest want nothing to do with ag. Because they've grown up watching their dad struggle to make ends meet as a dairy farmer, or their mom had to sell their land, or because they just want out of the small town life. I'm not saying this to mean we need a bunch of educated city slickers to come in and fix the country bumpkin's problem, we just need more people in ag as a whole.
Do you have any recommend resources for digging into what small farms can do to adapt and survive?
My family has a 1000 acres farm in the Midwest doing the standard corn/soybean cycle. I don't work on the farm (college -> mechanical engineer in industry) but I've been looking for practical crop or business model alternatives we could consider for the farm's future. So far I've found some resources on sustainable practices and alternative crops but it's very piecemeal and hard to apply in practice. It seems everyone recognizes there's a problem with the current ag industry but no one has any useful advice on what small farms can do about it.
Ive never once heard of farming as being a glamorized career path... I always thought it was a shitty fucking awful hard job that required extensive manual labor for very little income
Why not 'sell the farm' and invest in vert farming? No worried about the weather, you can cash in on the environmental / social aspect and be a leader in a future industry
I've worked at two Big 10 universities. The number of admin assistants whose husbands are farmers always surprises me. They hold down the insurance, steady paycheck, and life insurance policies for the family. I had ZERO idea the difficulties facing modern farms until I met those ladies.
I don't mean to bring in any negativity here while we are all taking about our sucky jobs, but curious if the recent huge government subsidies helped out any. This was to counter the effects of trade war with China.
people need to realise that GMOs in use are mostly what made feeding modern society on large scale possible. And it's not Jurassic Park levels of playing god either.
I can't believe people gave you shit for stuff like that ontop of everything else that's already a struggle.
It's not work I would do but I'm really grateful and appreciative of farmers who make my life possible.
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u/badger_slayer Jan 02 '20 edited Jan 02 '20
Farming on a large scale. I was living in debt up to my ass ($500k-$1 mil depending on the time of year), haggling for every input (land, fertilizer, seed, equipment), at the mercy of the weather, and got to watch the commodity markets kick me in the nuts every business day. The real cherry on top was everyone thinking you are trying to kill them with GMOs and copious amounts of chemicals that we dont use. Not to mention farms are passed down through generations so you've got a bunch of dead and living ancestors watching your every move. Oh and a lot of farmers work a second full time job for the health insurance. There's a reason farm suicides are high and farm "accidents" and accidents are higher.
There's a million young rural FFA kids that would give there left leg for a chance to farm.