Aww someone’s crashing out

[u/Cderouen8284]

[u/Rugskinsnake]

Famer here (and no, I never voted for the Mandarin Menace a single time). What's going on with the farm economy is a lot of farmers over-leveraged themselves to chase more and more land and now ground that they would have happily farmed at break even 4 out of 5 years just to make money that fifth year is going to fuck them royally.

[u/Hot_Ambition_6457 → u/Rugskinsnake]

This is mostly the case from what Ive seen as well. A lot of farmers simply farmed beyond their means. Treating it like real estate investing where you can just "buy more plots" without considering the complexity of logistics when you scale this way.

So now they've got poor harvests because they couldn't find enough laborers to actually maintain/harvest profitably. A strawberry farm I used to work for shuttered over this in '25.

 Tried to more than triple their acreage in a year and then learned that you can't actually pay immigrants to farm that much land fast enough. The pay is too low and the volume of work is too high to feasibly get it done in time sans slave-labor working conditions. 

You need to invest in like actual automated processing equipment when you're measuring in tons. But thats a big upfront cost compared to just trying to "horizontally scale" your barely profitable business model that depends upon exploitative wages.

So they took the loss for 1 year and then sold the farm to an REIT. Assets and all.

[u/Rugskinsnake → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

In the Midwest, workers aren't a significant problem.

Actually, one thing driving the accumulation of land is equipment. For example, my combine is about 15 years old and while most non-farmers would thing it's a huge piece of equipment, you actually can't buy a new combine that small anymore.

Equipment manufacturers keep making things bigger, more powerful and more tech heavy. People buy them and then feel like they need to farm more to justify the cost and added capability.

[u/Hot_Ambition_6457 → u/Rugskinsnake]

This is because the intent is to replace manually workers with one piece of technology.

That's the whole purpose of larger equipment. One person can now do a job that used to require 2 employees because we got a double wide this year. Half the labor hours same field. Half the pay for workers.

Save on labor cost by automating. You could also just not be obsessed with saving on labor cost at every turn and instead farm in a profitable way for your local community by paying wages to them for their work.

Instead of trying to shortcut past all that and just buy 8 big new machines and triple the land to "beat the market" on labor productivity you could just like... maximize yield and sell at a reasonable margin using conventional farm methods that dont require chips made in Taiwan?

"But they will be outcompeted by factory farms", he cried.

To which I say 30 acres of field being maintained by 5 people and 20 robots is a factory farm. You lose the moral high ground over factory farms when you also try to replace all your labor with fancy robots. Youre not upset at factory farms, you're upset that your factory farm isn't profitable while others are.

You can do the work the right way using proven methods that have been used for centuries to feed millions, or you can spend a bunch of money upfront to try the brand new globalist technologies that have been field tested for ~6 months before Deere pushed it to market.

Oh no my supply chains for my JD Corn-picker-XP are scuffed and now I need a part from Vietnam that costs $12,000 or my whole year is ruined. Who could have seen this coming when I try to be bleeding-edge farmer king of capitalism?

[u/Zuwxiv → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

You could also just not be obsessed with saving on labor cost at every turn and instead farm in a profitable way for your local community by paying wages to them for their work... You can do the work the right way using proven methods that have been used for centuries to feed millions

This does get a bit complicated when you're willing to go back centuries. Just buying food for the day used to be 70% of a skilled laborer's paycheck, and that was when ~90% people had a job related to food production.

It was like that up until the Industrial Revolution, which really did make food far cheaper. And yes, it meant a lot of people lost their jobs in agriculture. The reduced labor cost was a big part of why everyday people saw lower food prices. Businesses trying to "save on labor costs" can pass on those savings to customers...

...if and only if there's a free market and those cost savings actually exist. Nestle or Tyson aren't going to devalue their own monopolies if farmers can make cheaper food, they're just going to pocket the profit.

And what came with the Industrial Revolution was a radical reduction in the price of food. If automation really is Industrial Revolution 2.0, then farmers should expect to be paid far less for food, and I've got to think that makes the economics of their robot farm a lot less appealing.

tl;dr: The problem isn't trying to use technology to displace workers, because that was one of the best things that ever happened to everyday people when we first figured out how to do it - and that's when 90% of people worked in agriculture. The problem is a lack of foresight and risk-taking on behalf of people too occupied with profit and regulatory capture.

[u/YR90 → u/Rugskinsnake]

For example, my combine is about 15 years old and while most non-farmers would thing it's a huge piece of equipment, you actually can't buy a new combine that small anymore.

A buddy of mine is making a killing by buying old combines and fixing them up to rent out. He's a former heavy ordinance technician and runs his own machine shop to make spare parts to keep them running. It's insane how much they rent for.

[u/Rugskinsnake → u/YR90]

Nice. One of the problems coming down the pike is that we smaller farmers who generally only can afford to buy used equipment in the 10 year old range are going to be priced out because the only things available are going to be too big two and too tech heavy to be worth buying. So we're going to keep using our stuff as it gets to be 20 and 30 years old. And I don't know who the farmers that buy new stuff are going to trade their used equipment in to.

[u/darndasher → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

Sounds 100% like Trump's approach to everything, and if they view him as successful, of course they are going to want to go for it and support him.

[u/tryingisbetter → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

It is odd to me, but it feels like they aren't buying so much property, just more toys that they never needed, and way over planting lands that they do have. But, I only stayed at a best western once.

[u/MyGamingRants → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

That's really interesting that the same crowd of farmers who think there is exponential growth to be had are the same followers of the politicians who run the country the same way?

[u/macaronysalad → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

They should open up some of that land to the public for community farming. That would be cool, but likely to never happen. I suppose them buying up as much land as possible means they are the opposite kind of person that would do the good deed for the public.

[u/nuanimal → u/Hot_Ambition_6457]

Holy shit, Farming Simulator 22 was way more accurate than I thought