Rural America becoming irrelevant?

"You're clueless about supply and demand."

I'd say the same about you. How how long do you think cities would survive without fresh supplies of food and water? A few days? A week maybe?

We control the water and can get all the food we need from California or Mexico.

Fail.

You forget we just keep you hicks around because we feel sorry for you.
If no one buys your corn, you starve.

If no one buys my corn I won't starve because I can eat it myself and save all the trouble of sending it off to a bunch of ungreatful assholes. You can try planting corn on concrete and assphalt and see how that works for you

The bulk of your crop goes bad. (because you can't eat it all and keep it fresh)

Then you owe the bank a debt.

WE OWN YOU. YOU LOSE YOUR FARM. WELL PLAYED!!

FAIL ##2

Do I need to go on....

Most farmers have no debt. They have been buying land with cash. It is not anything like it was during the depression, in the late 70's or the subprime housing market. Farm land went up as commercial & housing plumited this time. It was not banks lending to farmers. It was farmers using their cash to buy land & expand their operation.

Farmers will not go bankrupt. You don't own farmers. They don't have to make payments. They own you. They can store their grain for a few years & not plant their fields. You will be screwed when that happens.

Even if some farmers went bankrupt, the field still would not get planted & you still starve.

Where do you get this?

You could not be more wrong.

Farmers are a dying breed.
 
We control the water and can get all the food we need from California or Mexico.

Fail.

You forget we just keep you hicks around because we feel sorry for you.

The bulk of your crop goes bad. (because you can't eat it all and keep it fresh)

Then you owe the bank a debt.

WE OWN YOU. YOU LOSE YOUR FARM. WELL PLAYED!!

FAIL ##2

Do I need to go on....

Most farmers have no debt. They have been buying land with cash. It is not anything like it was during the depression, in the late 70's or the subprime housing market. Farm land went up as commercial & housing plumited this time. It was not banks lending to farmers. It was farmers using their cash to buy land & expand their operation.

Farmers will not go bankrupt. You don't own farmers. They don't have to make payments. They own you. They can store their grain for a few years & not plant their fields. You will be screwed when that happens.

Even if some farmers went bankrupt, the field still would not get planted & you still starve.

Where do you get this?

You could not be more wrong.

Farmers are a dying breed.

It is true that Farmers are a dying breed. The information is from me because I am a life long part time farmer.

Most of the land is owned by heirs of wealthy Wallstreet fortunes or the remaining family farmers who slowly keep buying up their neighbor as they retire or move away. Decades ago someone would go to the bank, barrow money, buy land, equipment, farm to make payments & live off of the excess. Then when a bad market or bad weather hit, farmers fell like domino's. Foreclosure auctions littered the area. Now most land owners own it free & clear. There land will not be on the auction block because they had a bad year.

This year farmers lost their ass. I lost over $50,000 farming this year. You bet that sucked a big one. If I relied solely on farming, my wife would have left me & life would suck. But I am not making payments so I suck it up. Yet I have not seen a single farm being foreclosed on. That is because every farm land auction I have been to in the last 12 years the land was bought with cash, not heavily financed. Also most farmers are like me & work other jobs because farming alone will not earn a good living. Farming takes high stress skills like commodities futures trading, high technology electronics, mechanics, chemistry & bio genetics.

There are not a lot of family farms like mine left. I own the land, the equipment & operate the farm. My 1,000 acres is now considered a small farm. You would have to barrow $10 million to buy a small farm like mine. There is no way in hell to make payments on $10 million by farming. That is why most farms must now consist of land owners who own it free & clear & rent it to commercial farming operators. I know the commercial farm operator lost there ass big time this year. If I can't figure a way to make money operating my farm before planting season, I will rent it to one of those commercial operators. I will not be going bankrupt. The commercial farmer operator may decide to farm & go bankrupt or decide not to farm either. I don't know if most of those guys lease their equipment or get loans to farm. Some are contracted by huge corporations like Cargill or ADM. I will have to research who eats the loss for those big operators. If I cant get a commercial farm operator to rent it, I can always rent it to deer hunters to make enough to pay the taxes. I will not lose it to a banker or government tax man.

I have also been experimenting with several small plots of "Sustainable Agriculture". If it works out I will not have to replant the fields annually eliminating input cost. It will be labor intensive to harvest but I would only harvest if the market paid me to. That should lower risk of weather, futures prices & rising input cost. It will diversify my production. I will no longer be at the mercy of only Corn, Soybeans & Wheat prices. The GMO seed advantage is coming to an end. 10+ weeds are now glyphosate resistant just as the GMO Corn, Soybeans & Wheat plants are. It is suddenly costing more to kill weeds with an increasingly hazardous complex cocktail of weed killer instead of the low cost safe glyphosate only weed killer we have been using for the past 16 years. This is getting to be a huge problem. I had not tilled the land for over 16 years because I was using the GMO no till farming method. Last year I had to go out & buy a disk to turn the weeds under because I could not kill them cheap enough with chemicals. It is going to drive up food prices unless a new GMO along with a complementary new low cost safe weed killer is introduced. I tried many plots last year. Liberty seed & herbicide beat the shit out of Monsanto's GMO/glyphosate combo. Farming is an ever changing evolving operation.
 
The main reason for U.S. farmers' unlikely recovery is increased foreign demand. Wealthier consumers in places like China and India are eating more, and in particular they are eating more meat. The average American consumes about 250 lb. (113 kg) of meat a year. The average Indian eats less than 10 lb. (4.5 kg) a year. In China, it's more like 100 lb. (45 kg). Which means there's a lot of room for growth. Their diet was mainly grains (ie: rice) & vegetables. It takes 10 times the calories of grains & grass to produce 1 calorie of edible meat. Every time an Indian or Chinese person starts consuming meat instead of rice, they are increasing their food consumption 10 fold.

Half of U.S. corn production goes to feed cattle, pigs and poultry, which drives up demand for grain. Animals were not naturally grain fed. They can't utilize much of the corn that is being fed to them. The production of Ethanol & it's co-product - Ethanol Distillers Dried Grains (DDG) solved this problem. The ethanol extraction process breaks down the protein & starch for them. Livestock gains weight 30% faster with 15% less feed. Livestock producers can no longer compete unless they feed Ethanol DDG feed.

Farming is not yet steadily profitable enough here in the US to make a good living at without another job to support you. But it may be someday soon. Demand for farm products are on the rise. Subsidies for Corn Ethanol & Farmers have been a thing of the past for 4 years now. Unlike before even this devastating drought that has caused massive losses, has not caused Farmer bankruptcies. Brazil has been expanding farming like crazy for 10 years. Land is cheap making farming very profitable there. In Brazil you can afford to hire good labor to farm for you, allowing you to farm 10 times more than here. You could start a small farm in Brazil for under $2 million. Here in the US it cost $10 million.
 
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In our culture buying power and political power are closely entertwined.
I suspect that one day city slickers will wake up and find that bread is $50/loaf, water $20/gal., and that electricity has become affordable by only the wealthy.

Urbanites may need to be reminded that they are dependent on rual areas if they want to continue to eat and drink.

You're clueless about supply and demand.

If no one buys your corn, you starve.

If you natural gas is cheaper than coal, then coal miners better learn a new trade, or go on welfare.

Get it?

If you don't give us what we want at the price we want to pay, we'll go elsewhere and you'll die.

No, that's where you're wrong. We'll just feed our corn to our cows and get along quite nicely. You, on the other hand, will find there's no food to be had, no wool to be woven, no cotton, no wood...at least not from us. I'm not sure how you will earn money to buy the more expensive stuff. If you are able, you'll buy from China and Russia and your precious ghetto dwellers will starve. When they try to flood the countryside, they'll be picked off.
Shame, that.
 
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Back when the first presidential election was held in 1788, the United States was an overwhelming 95 percent rural. That number today is around 19 percent, with rural voters constituting an even smaller percentage of the electorate in the 2012 election than that.

This week you've got the Secretary of Agriculture warning that rural areas are becoming less relevant, pointing to the failure of Congress to pass a farm bill as evidence of rural America's waning political power.

WASHINGTON — Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has some harsh words for rural America: It's "becoming less and less relevant," he says.

A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm belt leaders this past week that he's frustrated with their internecine squabbles and says they need to be more strategic in picking their political fights.

"It's time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America," Vilsack said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the Farm Journal. "It's time for a different thought process here, in my view."

"Why is it that we don't have a farm bill?" Vilsack said. "It isn't just the differences of policy. It's the fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it."

For the first time in recent memory, farm-state lawmakers were not able to push a farm bill through Congress in an election year, evidence of lost clout in farm states.

The Agriculture Department says about 50 percent of rural counties have lost population in the past four years and poverty rates are higher there than in metropolitan areas, despite the booming agricultural economy.

Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks found that rural voters accounted for just 14 percent of the turnout in last month's election, with 61 percent of them supporting Republican Mitt Romney and 37 percent backing President Barack Obama. Two-thirds of those rural voters said the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.

It's an interesting trend to think about, given how rural areas shaped American politics for so long. From Jefferson's yeoman farmer to Lincoln and the GOP's Homestead Act (even as industrialization was winning the war for them) to Bryan's prairie populism. Even after the country became majority urban in the early 20th century, rural America continued to be politically important--think of the importance of farmers to the New Deal coalition.

But rural American has continued to shrink. And now we've even got a genuine "urban" President (wink, wink). Times change.

Agriculture makes up less than 1% of the workforce! A big problem (if you want to call it a problem) are the large corporate farms. The mom and pop farms can't compete. They are like the Walmart to the country store.

So when people talk against subsidizing the agricultural sector they are talking against corporate welfare!
 
When did cities gain control of all the water?

LOLOLOLOL...I live right on a river, next to the ocean....I don't think cities control the John Day river, or the Columbia, or the Snake.. In fact, I know it. They take the water, and we let them...but that's easily rectified.
 
I haven't seen this much stupid in one short thread in a really long time. I can't wait to see what comes next.

I love hearing how the limp wristed, pasty skinned, clammy palmed progressives *control* crops and rural America.
 
Rural areas that Progs despise also have all the oil and gas. Can you imagine how much we can lower the urban carbon footprint

Save the planet by refusing to sell them oil and gas, it's what you call a win-win
 
I do think it's coming to that.

I'm ashamed to say, I hope so. I think it needs to happen.
 
The Farm Bill isn't about "rural America". It's about a complicated international effort to balance gigantic agra-business with the tax code. So far we have a treasury secretary who doesn't even understand the standard tax form and an agra secretary who seems to think agra-business is accomplished with hay wagons and mules.
 
Liberals have taken advantage of the herd mentality of ghetto trash being crammed into cities, so they sell out to them for votes. Welfare payments and other goodies go to the ghetto trash that many times don't pay taxes, while hard working ranchers and farmers are ignored in general by most politicians.

The lone politicians that care about farmers and ranchers are from their district. Obamination thinks these people all have gun racks in their pick up trucks. You'll find more crackheads in the ghetto than you will find trucks with gun racks in a rural area per se.

Liberals only care about farmers and ranchers when the food runs out or gets too expensive.
 
The farm bills main goal is to track & tax farm production. They want to subsidize crop insurance so farmers will buy it. Then all annual yields must be reported in order to be insured to prove a loss when it happens. The small farmer exist only by the margins of tax free barter. They do not want to be boxed in, controlled & subsidized by the government.
 

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