Makes you wonder, doesn't it, if Progress is all that great. My husband read your post and remembered the corn crops down here in his boyhood. Hard, hard work, but somehow or other, they made it.

Of course, there is no way we could feed all the people in the cities today if it weren't for the machinery, fertilizers, and hybrid seed. I can't decide if that's good or bad!! It sure beats sharecropping.

Like Agnes, I'm not sure that the industrial style farming is an improvement, in today's view it is still a small farmer, unless the operation is owned by a corporation.
Seems the farmer today doesn't wear out his back, but instead needs to watch out for ulcers and such because of what it costs him to farm and the uncertain return.

According to something I read,in a few years something like 85 per cent of all the corn grown in Nebraska is going to be used for ethanol.

Not just in Nebraska.

While agreeing with Agnes that industrialization seems to be needed to feed the multitudes... but that doesn't apply to ethanol, does it?

Sometimes I've wondered, on a bushel to bushel basis, if industrialization actually makes the corn any less expensive. As Gandle pointed out, a hundred bushel in 10 minutes looks awfully impressive compared to a hundred bushel in a day, but there is a tremendous cost differential between a horse and wagon, and a quarter-million $ combine. And the difference between feeding the ground with chemical fertilizers or feeding the soil with compost seems negligible until one compares the chem-fed dirt with the compost-enriched soil after ten years. Nature seems to want all those trace elements not included in the pure chems. And that of course, is the ancient difference between industrial-type farming and OG-type farming. The one feeds the multitudes today and tomorrow, quickly. The other feeds no more than the soil can support, but the soil will continue supporting as long as it is nourished, improving over the years.

I always think there should be some sort of happy medium, quite possibly not affording a million $ of machinery, but certainly providing enough for the farmer to have a good income while growing enough for mass marketing, if that is his inclination. My brain always ponders the budgeting of paying for the machinery: to what extent is the big machine helping the farmer compared to a small machine... and is that difference real in either dollars-and-cents or in accountable time? If the machine is 20% more efficient and/or permits the agriculture of 20% more land, does that improve the farmer's life by 20% or is that 20% going to the bank to pay for the machine? Some people see green-and-yellow when they see a John Deere; I see an accounts book.

Well, this is the type of progress we get from having a population that is ever increasing, increasing...

In Iowa we fatten a lot of cattle and hogs....and they all poop and that goes back onto the fields.
Farmers now practise minimum tillage, one pass harvests the corn, shells it and leaves husks and cobs in the field. Most people don't burn the cobs for fuel any more.
The small farmer just can't make it unless he/she's growing a specialized crop, like herbs or flowers for drying...or grapes for wine.
Many many fewer farmers, farming many many fewer acres are feeding many many more people, and they have to find ways to do that more efficiently.
But growing corn for ethanol has become a 2 edged sword. Farmers were convinced to increase corn acreage, but because of a lack of ethanol processing plants, that was not always a wise decision.
About 35 years ago, our house abutted a corn field. The man who rented the land also worked in the Maytag factory and harvested his corn at night. back in those days there weren't those early dry down hybrids so it was close to Thanksgiving by the time all the corn was in.
Many times we were kept awake at night by the combine and the lights of that combine and the stereo blasting from the cab at midnight.
Farming is different now...that 60 acre plot is now houses.
Linda C

Gandle, I really enjoyed your comparison of corn farming from 60 years ago. I was musing, though, we often lament the fact that todays' kids don't know where their Cheetos come from, but I myself have never known a farmer or visited a farm. About the closest I've come is buying peaches or pecans from roadside stands.

I did go to a small junior college where lots of kids came from farm families but they were studyig like mad so they could get off the farm...Perfect example: Jimmy Carter went there before transferring to USNaval Academy but that was before my time...his father was a peanut farmer nearby.)

Anyway, I'm glad to meet a farmer family thru the GP and learn more...josh

Gandle! What a study in contrasts....

But I have a tale that will make you glad you had your way in your day. Incidently...that's how we picked corn in my day too.

This year we had a late summer..80's and 90's up into October, seems like... dry and dryer..then a bit of rain about mid September... in no time every field from here to
northern Illinois, then across the Mississippi into Missouri and down to St. Louis and back again across central Illinois...every field we passed, blanketed with corn growing knee high...not a few, not just where the combine was unloaded, not just at the turns...the fields were a blanket of knee high corn.

I am aware that many Illinois farmers were banking on higher prices due to competition for ethenol production, and here several bushels per acre had been left on the ground, germinated by light rains, and warm temps. It seems, from a composite of old timers who I asked and who offered an opinion, that the long dry spells had made the grains loose in the shucks, so that the bumping and jostling of being picked broadcast grain
as thickly as if you had walked the field casting it by hand. What a waste!

Well, guess what...the combine mfg. calibrate max performance at a very slow speed, one the farmer ignores...so they say. If the corn is dry and loose
in the shuck, slow or fast would not seem to matter.

I think its an 'oops' for which they failed to properly engineer the machine...and losses that don't show up except if you get extremely dry weather, a good crop, a bit of rain, and a long hot fall.

It's not so much the population gain making intensive farming necessary.......or at least wasn't when the practise started, it was economics, and being taught in agricultural universities like religion.

The concept of an acre's production or even a tree's potential production seems like such a simple concept, but it isn't. It should seem to be a no-brainer that a hundred bushels off a plot, verses ten, should be a good thing.....right? Well, it depends on what and how you do it and concerns an issue of burning bridges behind you.

Agriculture is big business. Big, big multi-national business and it overlaps other industries in conglomerates and it funds all sorts of grants and grows all sorts of research and essentially has directed what has become of our farming sector. I was studying agriculture when the tide was turning in that direction and was being embraced at university level without question towards intensive farming. Not because it was necessary in our country, but because it was profitable (more so to the supply, seed and chemical business, than the farmer, btw)

I think of Orwell's "Animal Farm" and I think of the horse. That is what we are doing to our (family farmers) and farmland. It was not done out of necessity to feed the starving multitude like seems to be the general concensus here, but choice and is profit driven. You all have heard of farms being paid not to produce to their potential? It wouldn't exist if we had to use intensive production to feed our people.

What has happened to farming is exactly parallel to what has happened to every other business in this country, and that is the failure of myriads of smaller independent producers who simply could not compete with the capital and backing of corporations. In this case the factory farms.

If you look to other countries in Europe, you will find they have finally awakened to farmland protection and trusts to keep arable land in banks for future needs. It's not so popular here. When a small farm starts struggling and throws in the towel, they don't have any incentive to put it in a trust to keep the land value cheap enough so another farmer can buy it. It's sold to a developer and fertile farmland ends up under macadam or McMansions. It's a very short-term and nearsighted choice.

Think monocultures and think the lack of genetic diversity. Think the Irish potato famine. Then think of what will become of our food suppliers who are obliged to plant the latest seed provided by one or two companies who produce it for half the world, who have it under patent, and who comes up with things like terminator genes to protect their profit.

We need to be independent with our food supply. We will lose that capability one day, just like we lost the ability to be independent with our energy supplies. When we do that, we depend on "developing" countries to supply us and then whine when they cut down rain forests to do it. What's going to happen when there are no more countries to develop?

I think he is going to take the plunge and make an offer on this machine.

Gandle, I'm sorry I and a few others took your thread off course. Farming and land issues alway hit a nerve with me anymore. My son shares some expensive equipment with other farmers. They don't jointly own them, but one seems to buy one piece of expensive stuff, and lends it out and vice versa. Not that his farm doesn't look like a machinery warehouse anyway.

Hope he gets his equipment.

I shuddered the topic's rudder too, I'm sorry.

If he really wants it and can afford it, then I hope his bid wins. Bid? Offer? Does this stuff go on an auction block or advertised or rely on word-of-mouth?

I just had a vision of a humongous tent with combines all tethered in a circle; a bemused gentleman (have you ever noticed how detached auctioneers are?) standing at a podium and going "Abbadabgogudabadoboydo... 200. Abadabgogudbebabagdoboyoboyodo 210, 225...250... do we hear more, more, more... going once, going twice, sold to number 1313 for a mere quarter-million dollars!"

The equivalent of a house. A very nice house on a nice lot. A nice house on a nice lot, even in my overly inflated area. Riding around a field. Gotta say, I'm not sure I can really understand the merchandizing concept, especially the paying side of the concept. Not to worry ~~ I have the same incomprehension about the Tesla. Not going to get one of those, either.