My folks helped me get into farming, there is no question. At the risk of sounding like (Staci Appel here) but if you have kids, you help them all that you can. I mean if I didn`t have kids my Wife and I would probably retire and travel in a Winnebago. Most people that I meet think they are self made, but I know their pedigree, all farmers had help at sometime from someone. There`s only one person that I know was selfmade and that was my Dad. he saved and bought his 1st farm and paid $90/acre and that was bought with money he saved. I own the farm now and last year I spent $120/acre for seed.
What you`ve got to realize is people in this country inherit fortunes everyday and lose those fortunes. People pick winning lottery numbers everyday and become rich and spend and lose it all in a year or 2. I can show you one guy that come from a rich family that set him up farming, he was big in cattle had the first cattle confinment in the county, married a rich cattleman`s daughter...they could`ve retired on their honeymoon and wouldn`t have had a problem in their lives. But they lost everything. He went to the factory and died in a couple years and the wife had to take a job clerking at the Dollar Store.
My point is, parents help their kids and want a better life for them. I think once society loses that sacrifice for their own kids that is a sign of a society in decline. One of the planks of the communist manifesto is to "do away with inheritance".
There are farmers that the government helped, many in the 80`s taxpayer funded debt write-off got more from the government than I inherited from my folks. The "direct payments" and such are capitalized into the land rent bids...yeah it helped me a little cause I own alotta land, but it didn`t make or wouldn`t have broke me without it.
With the "cheap" crop insurance...it`s been a flat out cost to me, the premiums that I pay are a contribution to the insurance industry that enables them to sell insurance to the fringe areas cheaper than without my contribution. And the only thanks I get is the fringe plows up floodprone riverbottom and land in the shadow of the Badlands to put more corn on the market, lower prices for me. Those on the fringe used to raise cattle on that ground and that economically and environmentally is the BEST use for it. But cheap crop insurance has made it a part of the cornbelt. I`m not complaining, if I lived there I`d probably do the same thing. But that said, this is how the "game" is played and make no apologies for signing up for what the government feels is my reparations for my being a critical spoke in their cheap food wheel.
The US has the least expensive and safest food of anywhere on the planet. US farmers are government subsidzed...the bigger you are, the BIGGER the check you get. ....you connect the friggin` dots!
