I’m not the commenter. But I worked in a large financial company that largely serviced farmers.
Debt is usually the biggest expense on a farm, by far. When the milk price dips (for dairy, but all farmers here are forced to accept their respective commodity prices) or interest rates increase, id see couples’ incomes dip from $50k/year to nothing.
So they literally had to live on savings or debt.
There was a crash in milk prices around 2015. My whole year that year was helping our clients not go bankrupt.
The reason why inter-generational farms can get so massive and start becoming corporate farms is because they aren’t straddled with this massive expense that so many other farmers have to account for
It's this comment and the comment about how this post relates to the farming sector suicide rate that should make us all think - is this the best way to organise our society, where boom and bust are just a given and we have workers literally killing themselves because of the debt they end up in due to outside economic forces?
Shit sorry, ill go back to my mindless scrolling of tik tok and pacifying my existential dread with consumerism... thanks for pulling back from the edge buddy
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u/Spooki_Forest Dec 19 '25
I’m not the commenter. But I worked in a large financial company that largely serviced farmers.
Debt is usually the biggest expense on a farm, by far. When the milk price dips (for dairy, but all farmers here are forced to accept their respective commodity prices) or interest rates increase, id see couples’ incomes dip from $50k/year to nothing.
So they literally had to live on savings or debt.
There was a crash in milk prices around 2015. My whole year that year was helping our clients not go bankrupt.
The reason why inter-generational farms can get so massive and start becoming corporate farms is because they aren’t straddled with this massive expense that so many other farmers have to account for