What we lost in recent years was unreal. The devastated farms will begin to fail soon that will run out of water, time, money and patience. Tax burden finished nailing the coffin shut on farmers.
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A YT channel said Dust Bowl is cyclical and is due. Is that true?
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The data shows that Kansas lost small farms, but overall the number of acres under farm cultivation remains the same. Thus on the classic profitability vs size graph, the minimum size for profit has increased.
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It wasn’t cyclical until we settled in and tore the land up. Theres a lot of talk about “regenerative” methods but it still needs to be profitable for the farms. Plus the invocation of the defence production act to ramp up our supply of glyphosate is giving me mixed signals. I’m no row crop farmer though so maybe I’m missing something. Maybe we will get a new civilian conservation corps planting tree walls to mitigate it again, but hopefully with better planning and tree diversity…
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Which sucks. The level of consolidation worries me. Sucks the character and charm out of the farms.
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Profits are the problem. Greed versus need becomes an ethical / moral issue. Price gouging etc. Are being done like never before. In my religion God levels thing up at the end of life for those people ofcourse.
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A friend just called me. He lost his entire family in the last 10 years. His Mom, Dad, and sister all died. We loved those people. We traded produce with them frequently. He stores things at my house he needs, like cars and trailers. I doubt he could afford to pay anyone to do that. They are really good people.
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Yes. Everything seems to run on 7 yr cycles. Drought, bug infestations.
Here in EC SK after a 7 yr drought it’s been a tough spring. Son guesses we’ve had at least 20” of rain since snow melt, for all I know, it’s more like 30. Today is the first day it hasn’t rained in a month, minimum 1/4” per day, earlier commonly 1.5” per day.
Our only saving grace is we have thin black hummoky soil(Lot’s of topsoil, heavy in veg matter). On a more normal year it’s not uncommon to have 4” of rain in a day and 3 days later you’d never know it rained.
The current el nino is a massive one, couple that with the Massive sunspot’s we’ve had over the last couple years and frankly anyone who claims to know the results is a liar.
Edit: Crop prices have been in the toilet for the last couple years, mostly because large mulitnationals have been buying up the smaller grain co’s and are manipulating the market. Been warning son, land prices are going to drop and farms are going to fail. Here, currently while the, “gov’t” numbers may claim a percentage of land seeded as an eg; our av 1/4 with maybe 140 ac seeded has at best 90 ac seeded. The rest is unseedable. Go north it’s much, much worse.
He’s still hoping to put in 3 1/4’s if barley, a 60 day crop from germination, but it’s towards a forlorn hope.
Feast or famine. US midwest from what I’ve read mostly a drought writeoff. Nothing coming from eastern block, cdn prairies don’t count on much.
Don’t get me wrong, “we” won’t run out of grain, but a good chance many countries will.
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So sad to see and hear that. Where are we going to produce all the food we need for eating and feeding our animals for food?
The is a growing problem around my area that with the rising property taxes and farm families getting smaller ( less children) the farms soon sell out to housing developers. The children do not want to keep farming and when the parents die or become infirm and cannot take care of their farms the children sell them off. Then the prices for the land becomes more expensive for the other farms around them. Then those farms acres become more valuable and their taxes go up. The cycle is not good.
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The farms will be missed when they no longer have them I think.
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You are exactly right 100%.
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My wife is French so we are over there all over all the time. They have national laws where you cannot convert farmland to housing or commercial use. Period. End of story. Why can’t this be done here?
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Amen, Brother.
There’s all kinds of non arable land to build cities, windmills, etc on yet every year we lose precious arable land, and there is really not that much of it.
Few yrs ago came across a website that mapped arable land in the world; really surprised me how little there is.
Went back to it a couple weeks later and it was subscription only and not cheap.
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real estate developers are in charge here in the US. or pretty much the equivalent of this.
acretraders, and the like. the investment corporation dudes. so we can’t get it done here until we handle bribery and corruption and insider trading and money in politics generally
it’s kind of a battle. farmers have been on the wrong side of it for a while, it’s just now really starting to become their issue too though. i hope we can fix it before the small farms are all gone.
edit: this is also difficult as we only have two allowed parties and both have some heavy involvement in this all the way to the top
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We also need a bottom up mindset. We live on a farm that was subdivided from 120 cares or so down to many individual 10-20 acre plots. It’s used to produce cows. Now it produces nothing cause people people want to build a house and live a “quaint country lifestyle away from the city” without realizing that by not farming, growing food, having a garden, etc, they are actively destroying what they think they love. Lifestyles require labor to maintain. The country lifestyle arguably requires the most labor to maintain. If you move to a farm town, you need to farm. We grow nearly all our food on our own on this former cow farm. Not the same type of farming, but we are actively addressing the soil so it can produce for posterity. We are planting orchards, vineyards, gardens, growing chickens. In my opinion this is where fixing the conditions that cause the dust bowl starts. By growing our own food we reduce the burden on that land and more importantly the farmers in the Midwest. The whole “3% of the population growing all the food for the other 97%” is impressive to say the least, but it’s hardly good.
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I think the problem is going to be hard to reverse. When I was a kid 50 years ago, the farmers with 100-300 acres could make a living on it, whether they were raising cattle, orchard trees, or vegetables.
The U S farmers supplied the U S demand. Now the majority of produce is grown in other countries and shipped here and sold at a cheaper price than the farmer down the road can even grow it for. What new generation wants to be a farmer when they have seen their parents struggle to make ends meet by farming.
We need to stop buying imported produce and start giving our local farmers a job at farming again.
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This ^^^ exactly.
I grew up in a community that was rural in nature when I was a kid. Our neighbour raised sheep and had an orchard. We raised beef, ducks, geese, chickens, and turkeys, as well as some others I’m sure I can’t even remember.
Our current local community planners claim their agenda includes promoting farming, while at the same time passing regulations outlawing noise from roosters or having a farm that creates noxious odors.
So basically this community has been turned into a suburb of our province’s Capital and our largest city. People move from the cities to get away from the the rat race, then the first thing they do is complain about their neighbors rooster crowing, dog barking, or some smells from raising cattle or horses. Now these “transplants” have turned this idyllic country lifestyle into exactly what I left the city to get away from. Traffic snarls, lack of parking, and more regulations than you can shake a stick at.
Fortunately, I have good neighbors that would never think of complaining about me, but still I got rid of my chickens and roosters because I started to worry about some a$$hole complaining about the noise. The next thing some inspector would show up at your door and ticket you for your rooster exceeding the decibel threshold for a violation.
This all in an area that is still almost all zoned agricultural or rural properties. Stay in the cities if all you want is city style regulations, don’t import your city issues to those who left to get away from all that crap. They all gotta have the “country lifestyle”, but heaven forbid hearing any noise or smelling an odor from any pre-existing farms. Reminds me people who buy their property cheaply located on the flight path to an airport, then all they do is bitch and complain about how the airport needs to be relocated to suit them.
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Really wish I could remember that website that mapped arable land in the world without the cost or accessing it.
Read awhile ago that Saskatchewan has the bulk of the arable land in canada; ya, really..
Honestly, I suspect if the majority of the population realized how truly little arable land that is in the world they’d be terrified, and justly so. (maybe then they’d get off our backs?)
Understand there is No world stockpile of grain.
Countries/traders have relied on, if the cdn pairies have a crap crop, the US midwest will make up the shortfall, or AU, or the eastern block, and it’s worked, so far.
Again, “we” won’t run out of grain. Other countries? That is above my paygrade so to speak.
What I Can honestly say is here in EC Sk it rained every single day the entire month of June. Son farms and is still trying to get in 3 - 1/4 sections of barley(a 60 day crop from germination.
Was told today one of the, “big” farmers in the rm still has 4000 ac to seed. Go much N of us and it’s underwater, same to the S/SE and into MB. It’s July 12.
My understanding is the American midwest right down to TX is a writeoff due to drought.
Nothing coming out of ukraine, Poland, russia. Other side, read today china had a dam break that flooded thousands of ac of rice land.
Understand not being chicken little here, not at all. Just suggesting stop paying attention to msm, do some research and plan as you see fit.
edit: July 12, not june
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We got lucky we got wheat out in Kansas which means we double crop with soy beans on neighboring farms. I’m doing hay, oats for cattle and the crop is good. Beef farmers in Kansas are OK. That covers bread and beef but not exports. The aquifers are low on water in the west from the drought we had. Water table is low here also. The water table is beginning to rise again in this part of Kansas. El Nino has arrived which means other parts of the world will go into drought as we enter our wet cycle typically. Is it going to be soon enough to make a big difference for farms still trying to recover from the drought I don’t know. I suspect they have little water to water crops out in western Kansas.
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On the bright side at the rate the planet is warming, Canada will be able to grow grain in the North West Territories before long. 
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