D24—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, June 25,1982
No tears as giants fall
Some farms have failed during
the past few months and no doubt a
lot more will go before the
agricultural economy picks up
again And some farmers may be
able to hang on just because their
lenders are reluctant to shove
them out.
Tunes are tough on the farm,
there’s no doubt about that. But it’s
hard to paint all farmers with the
same brush. For some, this
economic squeeze is unbearable;
for others it is little more than an
inconvenience.
Se whey you hear someone say
that farmers are in trouble, you
should ask some questions. Some
farmers are in trouble. Some
aren’t.
Financial ups and downs are
nothing new to farmers. Any of
them more than 50 years old
remember the really hard tunes of
the Depression, the boom years
surrounding World War 11, and the
surplus-building period of the
sixties. Even the younger ones
know that farming has good years
and bad they just weren’t ex
pecting so many bad ones. And
especially, they weren’t expecting
Farm
Talk
Jerry Webb
so many commodities to be in a
down cycle at the same time
The consensus among
agricultural economists seems to
point to the big gamblers as the
ones most vulnerable right now It
has little to do with size of
operation, age of farmer or type of
farming.
Rather, it seems to be more a
matter of how long a fellow has
been farming and how big a chance
he’s willing to take.
The fellow who started in the
boom years of the mid-seventies,
who borrowed every dune he could
get every year smce then and who
has grown by leaps and bounds, is
probably in trouble right now. He
took a big chance and he may
suffer a big loss.
A more conservative farmer who
started 10 or 20 years earlier paid
off his low-interest mortgage with
hard-earned dollars and who has
been unwilling to take bold steps is
probably still farming a pretty
small operation, but he’s solvent
and in no danger of going under.
Successful Farming magazine
ran some stones recently about
some of the high rollers of the
seventies who are now in big
trouble. You should read the
reactions in a subsequent
magazine from some of their more
conservative counterparts.
“The only thing those men have
in common is greed,” wrote a
South Dakota farm wife. "They
didn’t need to control that much
land to start with, and I personally
hope they do go under,” she said
A Vermont farmer reacted this
way: "You make no mention of
* any concern they might have had
that continuous gains in production
' would eventually, if repeated often
enough and by enough of their
admirers, glut the market. They
seem to have operated with a belief
( that they had a right to market at a
profit every pound they could
produce ”
There’s a lot of farm policy
frustration m that last sentence
Perhaps most farmers do feel they
have a right to sell all they produce
at a profit, but they’re finding that
Uncle Sam doesn’t see it exactly
that way. The cries for parity have
gone unanswered and farmers
have been left in the difficult
position of producing more and
more and getting less and less for
it.
It’s no secret that some of the
older, well-established, more
conservative and probably small
farmers, are standing around
waiting for some of these giants to
fall. They enjoyed farming when it
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was more of a family affair
They’re not gloating over the
demise of another farmer, but they
are made to feel a little more
secure in their judgment process
when it happens.
Large farms are a fact of life in
American agriculture even if some
of them are in financial trouble.
Nobody doubts that. But lots of
folks, including farm policy
makers, are beginning to doubt the
wisdom of the all-out, go-for-broke
philosophy that has dominated
farming since the mid-seventies
As one farmer who wrote to
Successful Farming put it
“Unless we wake up the almost
deafening message that we cannot
overproduce meat and grain, and
over-consume fuel and soil and
have a healthy industry, we are all
m for very, very rough sledding.”
That is a very profound
statement one that could well
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over the next couple of decades
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There is a growing hue and cry
over the depletion of our natural
resources to supply world
markets There is growing
dissatisfaction over the boom or 1
bust farm economy of the past
several years. There is a national
alarm over soil erosion and its
impact on future generations
The question could be asked,
“Are we exchanging over
children’s birthright, a productive
agriculture and a bountiful food
supply for some short-range
profits and a better balance of
payments 9 ”
The Arabs and other oil-nch
nations have said they will produce
only so much oil per year for
foreign consumption. Maybe it’s
time the United States to do the
same thing with food to set some
limits on how much food will be
shipped abroad and subsequently
how much food production
capacity will be lost to meet this
demand.
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