Sorry I should have mentioned gasoline. and diesel.
As for the time frame, a long long time ago on the Saskatchewan prarie. I think it was to take out a red colourant.
And why in hell
Because it worked. (??) My Grandmother ran a grocery store and probably wouldn't understand (or approve of) your city words.
Those were lean days.
Those flatland farmers will never understand hill country Charlie. Western NY dairy farm, about 200 acres, rolling hills, milking about 30-35 head. Uncle's first tractor was a Farmall Super A about 1950, later a Super C, biggest tractor he ever owned was a Super H. His son did move up to a Farmall 650, later a mid size Ford diesel, but nothing over 100HP. There were times a little more HP would have been "nice", but not necessary for day to day usage.
Uncle Sam retired me in '97(type II diabetes on needles). Seems the big switch was in early/mid 90's, and that's when they were checking.
There's an old(very old) joke they like to tell at the tractor pulls about some city slicker getting stuck, waking up a farmer for a tow, then telling the farmer 'now be careful you don't damage my $15,000 Cadillac". The farmer responds "Well, you can be damn sure I'm not going to damage my $80,000 tractor"!
That sounds reasonable to me...I suspect only in cases where they've already got a renegade that they're looking for even more against or in cases where there's information a particular outfit has been using off-road fuel. There have been, over the years, a few instances where ag distributors have been hit because their delivery units were left in rural areas out here. W/ fuel prices the way they have been over recent years, we don't leave the bulk tanks unlocked any more, either.... :(
Actually, that's true at all...in actuality, other than the corporate hog and chicken producers, most are still family-owned businesses...of course, they have gotten larger...
True...it takes more than 40A and a mule these days, particularly in commodity crops...
However, it's like any other industry in some ways...the higher productivity of the larger equipment and improved agronomics is the key. Recall I mentioned in '63 I planted four rows at 3-1/2 mph. Now it's 16 at about 7-1/4 mph. That's a diferrence of roughly a factor of eight. That crop in '63 might have yielded 60 bu/acre (milo, dry land (non-irrigated)). Today, assuming similar growing conditions, I'd near 80 to as much as 100. However, the recent spike in fuel costs is definitely a hit--I'm studying carefully what to do for next spring. Winter wheat, of course, is already in and up (and looking good, here, too!) :)
Has to be waaaaaaaaaaaay old! When was the last time you heard of a 15K Caddy?
Charlie Self "It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." Eric Hoffer
Norm Crow responds:
I lived in south Wisconsin for a few months. Still dairy country, but no more
30-40-50 cows. More on the order of hundreds. Single corn fields were 200+ acres. I rented a farm house and barn on a larger place. The land was leased out to a cattle farmer, who planted God alone knows how many acres in corn over a countywide area. THhir operations in harvesting kept me awake for something like 5 nights. I mean, they went for 24 hours a day, with 10 wheelers hauling the corn to silos in a steady stream.You don't see that around here, or in upstate NY...or any of New England. The Northereastern fields are simply too cut up, so farm size is about what a field size may be in the midwest flatlands. Rolling lands, really.
I had an uncle--by marriage--whose family had a farm that amounted to two sections, up near Charlottesville. 1300 acres, IIRC. Sheep, cattle, chickens, truck farming. The fields were made too small for huge tractors by dozens of small streams, hills, minor ravines, similar features. Great place for a kid to play if he could sneak away from chores and was smart enough to watch for snakes. Besides, back then no one had huge tractors on today's scale.
I get a little nuttier than usual with too much exposure to flatlands. About all I want for flat is the above area, the Virginia Piedmont. Absolutely gorgeous country, almost as pretty as where I live now, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, but out of what is formally called "Piedmont".
Lots of woods. Lots of wood at rational prices. I'm going to check on some local QS white oak next week. I'm told white oak, flat sawn, is in the two buck range. I'm hoping the QS variety is not more than four bucks. I'll be really, really happy if it's three bucks, but I doubt it.
Charlie Self "It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." Eric Hoffer
"Norman D. Crow" wrote: ...
Well, not necessarily... :)
I got an engineering degree when got out of high school (for complex reasons relating to the state of farming in general and the particular state of the family farm at the time) and spent 10 years in Lynchburg, VA, and then another 25 or so in the Oak Ridge, TN, area so I know the "hill country" there pretty well... :)
In TN, I serviced our line of online coal ash analyzers at mines and prep plants all over coal country in TN, VA, WVA, and KY. I know most of eastern KY and SW VA pretty darn well. We had fewer in WVA and most TN mines were surface so I had less direct interaction there. I got to know and like a tremendous number of miners over the years. It's a great portion of the country. I always told others that sitting around w/ the miners after shift was essentially the same as sitting around at the Co-op elevator scales w/ the grain farmers or the sale barn w/ the cattlemen--just a slightly different set of topics for each.... :)
My biggest complaint was that servicing of the analyzers was always left for night shift when running gob and it never failed but to be a cold rain or snow at 2 AM on the outside belt in KY in Feb... :( :)
There really is very little difference in the themselves between the regions, it's all in the crops and ground they're farming. Out here where it only rains 18" or so a year, it is simply not possible to grow most things that are grown back there and the yields of what does grow are not sufficient on small acreages to make it. There are still a number of smaller operations in central and eastern KS, OK, NE, AR, etc., that look much more like what you're familiar with and where, unfortunately, the economics are such that it does require a second (or third) job. Here on the high plains, it has mostly been a case of the second and third generations mergeing (sp?) two or more operations together as the parents retire. In most cases in at least one of those families all children will have left so there is no one else to take over. It wasn't until Dad died that I decided to come back and that was not planned ahead--I discovered when he passed very unexpectedly that I had such emotional ties to the place I could not think of letting it pass out of the family. Since my kids were all raised in VA and TN, they have rememberances of their grandparents, but no real attachment--I don't expect either of the boys will have the same realization when I'm gone so at that point it probably will also be merged in w/ one or more of the neighboring places and someone will probably put a town-farm on the home place itself... :( I've a few more decent years, but certainly in 10-15 I'll be thinking it's time to try to arrange for something not so demanding... :)
Undoubtedly far more than you wanted to know... :)
Enjoyed the interaction, guys, thanks...
-dpb
The majority of the farms in NYS are run by people with other sources of income: there just ain't enough money in it.
Charlie Self wrote: ...
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It pretty, I'll agree. I spent 10 years or so in the Lynchburg area, then 25 in east TN.
I missed the flat country the whole time, however. I like seeing the far horizon, but it (like anything else) isn't everybody's cup o' tea.
Don't forget blue Sunoco.
You know more about it than I do, surely, but it certainly looks to me like what I said above is true. Driving through the rural Carolinas, for example, it seems like just about every patch of dirt that doesn't have a strip mall on it has a sign in the corner saying something like "This Property Owned and Operated by Agri-Mega-Corp."
It also seems to me that efficiency or no, it must be much easier to go broke than to turn a profit in that business. I guess that's true of any business, but it just seems to me, as an outsider, like the deck is stacked against farming all around. They want your land for strip malls and yuppie gated golf communities, so they can get higher property taxes.
Or an $80,000 tractor. Probably multiply this by 2.5 or so I'd say.
"Norman D. Crow" wrote: ...
Cousin's place was outside Bergen--enjoyed getting to know several of the locals there over a number of summers...
One major difference here was that it was settled so late and the open country encouraged large-scale farming from the beginning. Our town wasn't founded until 1888 when the railroad ended here before being allowed to cross into the OK Territory. Grandad came out from central KS in 1914 and started w/ mules, but got first tractors in the 20s. Unfortunately I do not know what the very first was, but an early Twin City was the first "large" one--it was about 30 hp I think. By the 30s they used Cat Twenty-Two's for the flotation, one of which is still operational (although I don't have it, sadly). I first drove the Farmall M, then we got a 400 and 560. Our first big tractor was a Case
930 wheatland model. Grandpa bought a AC WD45 when he got older to have something he could handle a little easier...it had the snap-coupler system and we had so many implements for it that Dad upgraded it to a D17 (about 50 hp, I think) when I was in high school. I did a of row crop on it. When we went to six-row planters we got the first JD 4020. Dad then gradually stepped up over the years as it became necessary to add acreage and as it became nearly impossible to get good reliable help. He progressed through JD 4440, 4640, 4840s. I still have the ('79) 4440 (w/
There's such a wide selection of starting models plus options these days it's essentially meaningless to put out "averages". Most would be in the factor of 2 or less multipler a few, of course, can be even higher. A major difference from olden days is the cost of implements owing to all the enhanced features. A 12- to 16- row planter can push $100k.
The insurance/replacement value of my old '79 4440 is greater than it cost new, of course, to put some perspective on $$...
Not around here, no, but you do see a little of that in Virginia. I ran down into the far southeastern corner once, near the Great Dismal Swamp. They had fields that gave me some inkling what it must be like out west. Trees on the far side far enough away that you could see the curvature of the earth in between.
I think I run through a fair amount of that in the Carolinas too, but they have the good sense to hide it all with trees, so it doesn't unsettle the hillbilly stomach so badly.
Me too. Think about where I run. It's good running, but I'd go nuts if I had to live there, I think. Some places you can see where the road is going 15-20 miles ahead of you, with a big straight slash right down the middle of the gently rolling Jummy forests. It just doesn't feel right without those big green humps surrounding you
The only time I can tolerate flat is when there's an ocean at the far side of it. I try not to look back the other way. :)
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There are certainly local differences...and, yes, NC (and perhaps SC, I don't know as much about it) are quite different from the midwest. Corporate farms are, in fact, illegal in most of the high plains and have been so for decades. It's getter harder to preserve these regulations, but so far, they've managed to keep them at bay. As I said, our major vertical integration here is w/ Seaboard and their type w/ the hog farms. We do have some commercial dairy operations moving in from CA owing to the regulation and expense they're running into there. For the most part, they're much smaller operations than the hog production, however. For what it's worth, other than the "close to end market" argument, I've always thought the large hog operations in NC were a bad idea. Out here where it's arid and there are areas which can be far removed from residential areas it's tolerable but even here they're not universally welcome. I, for one, would be pleased to see Seaboard forced to diversify but it will never happen--it's the same as WalMart--the consumer these days is only interested in the minimum cost, despite their protestations otherwise. If costs rise, production will go to those places where it is less regulated (read expensive).
It's certainly an apt summary...out here on dry land, we figure on one or two good years out of five, hopefully two others will be break-even and the fifth is almost guaranteed to hurt...it takes excellent management and cash flow (and an understanding banker) to survive. It seems every year there's a raft of new challenges...this year it's rocketing fuel prices and soybean Asian rust or the BSE panic to name just a couple you've certainly heard of...
We fortunately don't have the population explosion here as in some areas, but it is an issue indirectly. Population shifts have concentrated power in the urban areas here as well so that the cities dominant policy to the detriment of rural. Our state senator, for example, has a district that represents 61 of the 105 counties and the average geographical area of the western counties is significantly larger than that of those farther east. Something like 80% of the counties in the western two-thirds of the state are actually declining in population. Only the half-dozen with a local community-college and/or one of the packing plants are either growing or even holding their own... :(
Flatland farmers understand "A developer wants to buy your land" quite well.
Barry
Certainly and issue around the larger cities/towns, not nearly as much so in more rural areas...see my other post on demographics...our little town is no farther to the south or east towards us now than it was when I was in high school in the 60s. It has moved north by about 1 mile in that time. The big expansion is the flood of trailers before there was any county-wide zoning at all... :(
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