YES

It's so wild to me how there's all this wide-eyed reporting re family dairies closing down, and you never see "business decisions" even explored as possibly having contributed

yet every single dairy you'll see in these articles has weird shit going on btwn the lines. https://twitter.com/Plognark/status/1310563740530757632

Here's a classic example. https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/

A 70/80-something mom & pop, plus 2 50-something sons

with 45 cows

and $300K in debt

how in the fuck

2 people can handle care, feeding, milking of about 75 cows.

Their people:cows ratio is way off here. That's not a "they need to scale up" thing, that's "what are half the people on this farm even doing"

If you're gonna support 4 people on a farm, you need 4 people's worth of work. They could add more cows, *or* diversify into veggies or cheese or bottled milk or specialty grains. Or literally anything besides complain that a 1.5-person job can't support 4 grown-ass adults.

Do either of these sons have a day job? Could be! But we'll never know from this article, bc the author seems to not know enough about farm finances to ask.

Also critical here, functional families don't have their 2 50-something sons "working for them."

When a farm ain't transitioned to control by the "younger generation" by the time they're in their 50s, something is OFF. Huge red flag.

Last off, how does a 45-cow dairy farm get itself $300K in debt?

I mean I'm sure it happens all the time, but HOW.

It's hard to imagine anything besides getting really, REALLY over the top with equipment purchases that can get you that far in the hole on a farm that size.

That's $6,666 of debt per cow

the cows themselves are worth maybe $1-1.5K apiece at auction

and the article blows right past this, like leveraging yourself blind is something that just HAPPENS to people without their permission.

Guys you have to make some Incredibly Bad Decisions to get $300K in debt on a 45-cow dairy.

And the article never even considers that debt, like, comes from somewhere. As far as they're concerned debt just falls out of the sky like rain.

Another common thread you'll see is some MASSIVE casual misogyny on the part of a male farmer. Like he can't give a single quote that doesn't blame women for his problems.

You'll see this *all the time* in the "dying family farm eulogy" press.

The thing is, the more chauvinist a farmer is the worse he is at business- due to both coming from a general lack of situational awareness. A guy who really thinks his wife is mad at him all the time "for no reason" just isn't great at doing the math or critical thinking, period.

This I know from years of working in agriculture & watching how families make decisions. It's striking bc guys who yell the most about how "communist top-down decision making ruins economies" are the most adept at wrecking their own families w top-down decisionmaking.

But this is another thing you *never* see acknowledged in "dying family farm" eulogies. There's usually a lot of dysfunctional behavior on full display

and it's verboten to suggest this could have anything at all to do with the family's ass-backwards financial situation.

A good basic filter for those articles is to read all the quotes in an Arrested Development accent & see how they sound lmaoooooo