THREAD: So, this is an interesting object lesson on a number of things going on in conventional ag... https://twitter.com/Agronomyjay/status/1210608359352741888

First of all, it quietly sets a stage that people outside of ag don’t really see. You hear things about America’s aging farm population and are left to believe that it’s because those old timers are so hardworking and millennials don’t want to farm...

But the reality is you have the great majority of land owned by older, larger (but “family”) producers. Some plan to pass their holdings onto their kids, while others plan to rent their lands after retirement to the highest possible bidder...

And then you have plenty of younger people who want to farm, but can’t. They old folks won’t retire, and when it comes to striking out on their own, land is too expensive to buy, and in grain country, it’s even to expensive to rent...

Rent is high because everyone wants additional ground (since top line is everything). Younger people can’t compete money-wise against older people who can leverage their assets...

The farming population is, therefore, aging because a.) old people won’t retire, because grain farming is actually fairly easy, physically speaking, and b.) a lot of the older guys are insanely greedy...

They’d rather make $350/acre from an established farmer than lease it at cost to a younger relative, or even an heir, in their prime. And there’s an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance about this within the farming community...

See the OP’s comment that specifically calls out farmers as being greedy; then moments later defends farmers as being the most honest people he’s ever met...

Young farmers who can’t get land (and this is nearly all of them, because most don’t inherit land until their pop dies on an autosteer at 85, at which point those “kids” are pushing 60) have a number of options...

And usually it involves something other than grain farming on the family plot, like raising livestock or growing hay. But as you can see from the thread, what most of these guys want to do is farm grain; it’s fun, straightforward, and mostly involves playing with big tractors...

You’ll see some of the guys in the thread mention these non-grain side businesses as “mortgage lifters”, which is a g—damn hilarious term. “Mortgage lifter” refers to a high margin enterprise that actually pulls you out of debt...

In other words, a mortgage lifter is something a farmer grows that’s actually desirable in the free market. What’s amazing about this thread is that these young farmers describe it as a means to an end...

In any other business, you’d want nothing but “mortgage lifters.” But in farming, the promised land is owning a big chunk of ground, renting some more ground, and having an operation massive enough to throw off a full time income on the low-margin business of riding a tractor...

You have young farmers bemoaning the high prices of land while full-throatedly aspiring to the model of volume-oriented farming (where everybody’s after land for revenue instead of mortgage lifters for profit) that drives up prices in the first place...

And as one guy in the thread astutely pointed out: it’s all because people want to play with tractors, not pull calves and raise hogs. In other words, they don’t wanna do the hard stuff when they could just work another sit-down job in town...

The “hard stuff” = farming profitably: diversifying, pivoting, or integrating. Farmers have a mindset of a God-given right to make a living from whatever they choose to produce, regardless of supply and demand; a weird mindset for people that claim to favor free markets...

This attitude exists outside of staple farming, and is currently wrecking the dairy industry which doesn’t enjoy the same degree of socialist protections that allow staples to be massively overproduced with no consequences to anyone but the environment and the taxpayer...

Dairy got in trouble several years ago when overproduction caused prices to lower. Farmers responded to this by leveraging assets to produce more milk, hoping to cover the lost margin with increased net income. Which is categorically insane...

B/c any 1st year business student will tell you that loading debt onto appreciating assets (like land) to chase a depreciating market is the dumbest thing in the whole damn world. It’s like mortgaging your house to sell silver coins on eBay while silver prices are in freefall...

And yet, that’s exactly what they did, with tragic consequences. This is what happens when the nature of farm succession is feudal rather than market oriented...

People get it in their heads they should produce something because that’s the way it’s always been done, not because anyone wants it. Things that people actually want are just your side piece; your mortgage lifter. Or you just work off-farm or collect funemoloyment...

The collapse of dairy is the free market at work; the cruelty of it all being the tell-tale sign: free markets don’t give a sh— about your 100 year legacy of milking cows. The upshot is the arrested growth of dairy, which would be unnecessary and environmentally harmful...

And which dairy producer advocates are actively trying to undo by introducing parity pricing. Because farmers love free markets until it means they don’t get to do what they want. Somehow, this won’t turn America into Venezuela, but universal healthcare will...

Meanwhile, the failure of staples to collapse in the face of constant overproduction is command and control economics at work; the kind that you’d generally associate with straight-up communism, the kind that results in things like ethanol...

And ultimately, the kind that keeps young farmers from accessing land and being able to farm full time, as so many world like to. It’s rather ironic: the system they aspire to is the very system throttling their aspirations.
/THREAD

For anyone interested, we’ve submitted for the Food Future Vision Prize. Have a look. And feel free to point us to your millionaire friends :-) https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/food-system-vision-prize/open-submission/sylvanaqua-farms-democracy-in-agriculture