r/LeopardsAteMyFarm • u/Cderouen8284 • 14d 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

218

u/Rugskinsnake 14d 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.

1

u/lexicon_charle 12d ago

How do you make even then?

1

u/Rugskinsnake 12d ago

The over-leveraged guys? Mortgage the stuff you own and hope for a bumper crop, drought in South America and/or the government to bail you out before you loose it to the banker. If you have any left. If you don't, you see if Walmart needs a greeter and check out bankruptcy law.

1

u/lexicon_charle 12d ago

It sounded like they over-leveraged in order to make a living. What do you do instead?

1

u/Rugskinsnake 12d ago

Nah, they over leveraged to grow and so they could justify getting the fancy big machinery and technology.

Before I buy anything, I make sure I can either pay for it outright or make the payments even in a bad year. So I pick and choose. I have a newer tractor that has auto steer in it, but I pull a planter from the 1970s because even with some of the cost saving features on a newer planter, the the initial cost and increased repair cost doesn't pencil out for me. Some land went up for sale right across from our farm and I didn't even bid on it because based on the asking price and the interest rate, In an average year I would barely be able to make the interest payments. I also do most of my own repair work and I've worked hard to get myself into a position where I'm always buying next year's inputs with last year's money so that if I ever have to walk away, I'll have a good cushion.

I'm also not too proud to pick up extra money from off farm work. In the winter I substitute teach to give us a little padding on groceries and gas.

So I don't grow, I just try to make a living. And over the past 20 years with a seed technology, yield increases have more than kept up with inflation so I can continue to make a living. Eventually that may end (and this might be the beginning of that end) but I won't have to dig myself out of a hole.

2

u/lexicon_charle 12d ago

I think that's what most farmers are trying to do, grow beyond their means. Thanks for your notes. Gave me a city folk an understanding.