Suspecting the fox family.................

...............................that summers with us, would love us to raise chickens. 

Can I get an Amen........................

 

     via

Don't shout at the crops...................

 .................and six other important pieces of advice wisdom may be found here.

Investing in farmland..................

................For the patient person, investing in farmland can be a really good thing.  One caveat:  don't do it with borrowed money.  From personal experience, that takes a lot of the fun out of it.  Back story is here.

proud property owners................

 The Peasantry:  Many of them in 1789, were still day laborers or sharecroppers, working other men's land; but by 1793 half the soil of France was owned by peasants, most of whom had bought their acres at bargain prices from the confiscated properties of the Church; and all but a few peasants had freed themselves from feudal dues.  The stimulus of ownership turned labor from drudgery into devotion, daily adding to the surplus that built homes and comforts, churches and schools—if only the taxgatherer could be propitiated or deceived.  And taxes could be paid with assignats—government paper money—at their face value, while products could be sold for assignats multiplied a hundred times to equal their nominal worth.  Never had the French earth been so zealously and fruitfully tilled.

     This liberation of the largest class in a now classless society was the most visible and lasting effect of the Revolution.  These sturdy providers became the strongest defenders of the Revolution, for it had given them the land, which a Bourbon restoration might take away.  For the same reason they supported Napoleon, and for fifteen years gave him half of their sons.  As proud property owners they allied themselves politically with the bourgeoisie, and served, throughout the nineteenth century, as conservative ballast amid the repeated paroxysms of the state.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon 

magical thinking........................

 “The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture.”

-as culled from this Matt Ridely post on "eco-extremism"

Prefering warmth to cold.......................

      A modest understanding of the dynamics of climactic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate.  If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off of the maximum elevation that crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people's actions in the future.  You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values.  You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real income and political stability.  In the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.

     For example, it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide.  A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather.  It was so cold, in fact, that wine froze on the "Sun King's" table at Versailles.  Shortened growing season produced crop failures and undermined real income.  Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620.  It proved drastically destabilizing.  The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions.  Between 1640 and 1650, there were rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Portugal, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, Sicily, Brazil, Bohemia, Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey.  Even China and Japan were swept by unrest.

-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Today's history lesson............................Part 1

      For farmers, whiskey was the only way to get full value from their crops.  Not everyone had access to markets and distribution methods, so to feed their family and keep their land, a man sought to do something with the surplus of a harvested crop.  The dominate crop at the time was rye.  They were spending time and money carefully planting and growing rye, and saw no point in watching that money rot before their eyes.

     So they turned rye into whiskey.

     What happened next would send ripples into the American future that we're still dealing with today:  it began with a man who'd become the subject of a huge Broadway musical and ended with Jefferson's Republican Party replacing Washington's Federalist Party.  The American Revolution earned the country its freedom but cost incredible amounts of money, most of it paid for by state-financed debt.  Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume that debt and impose a sizable whiskey tax to help pay for it.  He saw it as a sin tax, ignoring the economic realities of rural life that led to whiskey's distillation in the first place.  It wasn't the first time a city dweller didn't understand life in a world different from his or her own.

-Wright Thompson, Pappyland:  A Story Of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last

Why am I not surprised..................?

................Organic farming (and biofuels) are less than optimal for the environment.  Science is a wonderful thing.

"Forests sequester a lot more carbon than farmland, and this is a critical component to any overall strategy to mitigate climate change."

-Read all about it at this Steven Novella post

Fun with statistics.........................

Growing strawberries in California is 9796% more profitable than growing corn in the Midwest, Gladstone Land said, in the latest evidence of underperformance in row crop land.

"A farmer with 10,000 acres in corn in the Midwest would only need approximately 143 acres of strawberry ground in California to generate the same amount of revenue," Gladstone said.


9796% is a lot.  But seriously meaningless.  First, are we talking revenue or net income?  Should our steadfast Midwest farmer with 10,000 acres convert to strawberries?    If you will watch this YouTube video you will note that this berry farmer in California, with several hundred acres of strawberries, employs 1,200 people. That's a lot of people.  Think that is practical for 10,000 acres of berries?

The top three states for growing strawberries (California, Florida, and Oregon) have about 50,000 total acres dedicated to strawberry growing.   Just to put that in context, the Oracle Google reports:  Corn acres planted is estimated at 91.6 million acres, down 4 percent from last year, representing the lowest planted acreage in the United States since 2010. Soybean area for harvest is estimated at a record high 84.1 million acres, if realized, up 7.4 million acres (11 percent) from 2013.Jun 30, 2014.

Farming can be a tough business, but what business isn't?  Give row crops their due.  They are providing sustenance for a nation.

via

More on "us pesky humans"..............

"... it’s proving cheaper and easier to feed seven billion today than it was to feed three billion in 1960."
-harvested from this blog post from my favorite optimist

Did you ever wonder about corn..................?

..................Sure seems like a lot of plant for a little output.  Why did God design an 8' tall stalk to support one ear?   Seems like a waste of energy.  Wouldn't 4' tall have been sufficient?  How come most stalks have one ear, but some stalks have two?  Just wondering.  Corn is pretty important in the Midwest.  Fortunately, the folks at Wikipedia have done some research.  You may read more than you really want to know about maize here.  A more specific, and shorter, answer to the question of "how many ears per stalk" may be found here.

From where I was standing, these healthy looking stalks seemed about 9' tall                          

The exception to this field's one-ear-per -stalk tendency

Your basic one ear per stalk plant

Eventually............................

.......................there will be no place to hide from "Big Data."

     "Monsanto's prescriptive planting system, FieldScripts, had its first trials last year and is now on sale in four American states.  Its story begins in 2006 with a Silicon Valley startup, the Climate Corporation.  Set up by two former Google employees, it used remote sensing and other cartographic techniques to map every field in America (all 25m of them) and superimpose on that all the climate information that it could find.  By 2010 its database contained 150 billion soil observations and 10 trillion weather simulation points.
     "The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance.  But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1billion - one of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen.  Monsanto, the world's largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds, and terabytes of data on their yields.  By adding these to Climate Corporation's soil-and-weather data base, it produced a map of America which says which seed will grow best in which field, under what conditions."

-Here is Schumpeter's full essay, "Digital Disruption on the farm"

Opening paragraphs.............................

      Ptolemy Proudfoot was nothing if not a farmer.  His work was farming, his study and passion were farming, his pleasures and his social life occurred in the intervals between farm jobs and in the jobs themselves.  He was not an ambitious farmer - he did not propose to own huge acreage or to become rich - but merely a good and gifted one.  By the time he was twenty-five, he had made a down payment on a little farm that he husbanded and improved all his life.  It was a farm of ninety-eight acres, and Tol never longed even for the two acres more that would have made it a hundred.
-Wendell Berry, A Consent

"Hard physical work is still a requisite for a sound outlook on an ever more crazy world."

Victor Davis Hanson ponders the societal meaning of the disappearance of the yeoman farmer:

"I worry though not about the way we look or talk, but rather about the use of the land. It no longer grows people, or produces for the nation a 5% minority of self-reliant, cranky and autonomous citizens, who do not worry much about things like tanning booths, plastic surgery, Botox, male jewelry, tattoos, rap music, waxed-off body hair, or social media. I think our impoverished society reflects that fact of agrarian loss, in the sense that never have so many had so much and complained that they had so little while being so dependent on government — and yet they are so whiney and angry over their lack of independence. The entitlement state is the flame, the recipients the moths. The latter zero in on the glow and then, transfixed by the buzz, are consumed by acquiring what they were hypnotized by."

His full essay can be read here.

Opening paragraphs....................................

The year of John Pierpont Morgan's birthday, 1837, was a year of panic for the infant economy of the United States.  God, greed, and inexperience seemed to conspire against the new nation,  The crash has its withered roots in a crop failure two years before.  The heavens had blighted the grain on the prairies.  The farmers of the West had become dependent on the spreading web of canals and railroads to send their produce to the factory cities of England,  Without those shipments, the European money that had financed the new transport systems could not be serviced.  This was the ominous act of God.
-Andrew Sinclair,  Corsair:  The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan

Why Is There Corn in Your Coke?

Here is another one of the fun videos from LearnLiberty.org. This one takes on the unholy alliance between sugar growers and the government.. One thing she leaves out - these regulations must make the corn growers pretty happy too.

 

Trying (hard) to make sense of it all..............

Victor Davis Hanson rambles on a bit about the state of agriculture, land values, real estate cycles, cynicism vs optimism, immigration, and California.  The man always has an interesting point of view and can cover a lot of ground in a hurry. VDH asks the question, "Does anyone still believe in the old idea of labor laboris gratia?"  I'd say he does.  A few excerpts:

Central California is also a magnet for very rich Punjabis. Their three-story gated castles of 6,000 square feet are suddenly commonplace. For every copper-wire thief, there is an immigrant agribusiness man who smiles and says: “No problem. I just got more barbed wire, more video cameras, more lights” — such an impressive confidence so characteristic of the immigrants who have always energized America.

The Sikh community arrives with capital, English, and education — and wishes to become even richer, better spoken, more highly educated, and more successful. In this nexus, land is not just a wise investment, but immediate proof of visible, tangible success, in the manner of the old idea of a landed aristocracy.

So California is both more poorly managed than any time in its past, more divided between rich and poor, more fragmented by opportunistic ethnic identity politics, more impoverished by massive illegal immigration — and never more naturally wealthy. The other day I drove through the verdant Central Valley on Manning Avenue. Each acre I zoomed by is producing thousands of dollars in global profits. At I-5, I looked out at fracking country, before descending into the land of Facebook, Google, and Apple — all on mostly poor roads, with terrible drivers and third-world public rest stops, and now and then passing inferior schools.

California may be in awful financial, social, civic, and political shape — but it is far, far from broke.

Why living through change is so difficult..........

If a really smart person, like Victor Davis Hanson, as quoted below, can't figure it all out................

"In other words, the world gone by of my youth and early middle age — small 40-acre and 80-acre orchards and vineyards, farmhouses with real owners living in them, three or four children working with a dad in the fields, a mother overseeing the books and taking her turn on the tractor in the hectic season — is dead. That agrarian culture is gone, vanished, kaput."

"Yet with agrarian demise, food production soared with economies of scale and decisions that were entirely market-based and not culturally predicated on tradition and morality. Is this good or bad news, both or neither — you decide; I cannot any longer. I know a nice guy who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars speculating and merchandising land to pension funds, EU expatriates, and celebrity investors. He does not know a spring-tooth from a flat furrower, and is richer for the ignorance. And I know a cranky, obnoxious old-timer holdout who still farms his small acreage and snaps at his workers. I want to believe that the latter is superior to the former, but I have seen too much in the last thirty years to be able to tell any more. Does someone in Africa who eats cheap U.S. wheat or rice say, 'Thank God for mass food production?'"

Full, read-worthy, essay is here.

Sadness....................

"Agriculture is booming; but farming is long dead. The land grows food as never before, but no longer families."
-Victor Davis Hanson, as excerpted from this essay