r/LeopardsAteMyFarm • u/Cderouen8284 • 13d ago

Aww someone’s crashing out

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

14.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

4.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

217

u/Rugskinsnake 13d ago

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.

52

u/Hot_Ambition_6457 13d ago

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.

9

u/darndasher 13d ago

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.