May 24th 2016

[OKdon]

How many farms in your area are not tilled and planted due to financial reasons?

Just wonder because we had a couple of threads posing doom and gloom!

[tree fmr]

Putting in tile this spring, tile man was looking for work = better price for me.
None of mine or the families is tilled, all no-till. One bean field not planted, waiting for tile man to finish up.
All this for financial reasons. Money saved is money earned.

[BA Deere]

Around here if you weren`t done planting April 24th, someone would knock on a landowner`s door and try and rent it  🙂  Seriously though, the experts that said "plant beans and you`ll lose less"  weren`t listened to, alot of corn on corn.   I`m sure there are fringe areas where it`s ify on a good year, they might go unplanted, but it`s only the 27th of May.  You could buy $35/bag bean seed go out with a endgate seeder and dig it in, if it looks good in a few weeks spend $20 on FlexstarGT and roll the dice for fall, new crop is close to $10.  So there`d be a "story" if something went unplanted.

This CRP sign up has some scratching their heads, some land the payment is $350..well it`s hard to get that for rent.  It seems the FSA office is accepting that prime land for CRP but the fragile stuff in other areas is turned down.  Perhaps treehuggers that now run these bureaucracies want to slow down "high input farming"?   Because of DMS waterworks lawsuit and such, they really push covercrops now.

[sw363535]

Interest rate hike won't be enough to make much difference.

You could call it a tax increase as it would stimulate income taxes and with that thought in mind,,,, the idea becomes more possible.

Some in leadership need it desperately going into the election to make the economy look less sick...

[BA Deere]

Hey SW, i`m a disciple of Peter Schiff and it`s hard because what he says would hurt many many of us.  He thinks let the market forces raise interest rates where they need to be...I think he is right, but boy oh boy, if our 3.5% money became 10% or 12%, farms, homes cars alot of stuff would get flushed out, it would be a farm crisis of Biblical proportions.  Even the smarties that "locked in their interest rates" well, if a guy is paying a locked in 3.5% on a $200,000 tractor and then you go on Tractor House and there are tons and tons of them flooding the market at a fire sale from guys that are desperate to raise cash..it could be really bad.

Even though I`d be in line at the soup kitchen with higher interest rates, I do know Schiff is probably right that we need to flush the system.  That`s the thing with these houses being artificially high, home buyers don`t even care about the price, they look at their low interest payments and that`s all they care about.

If the system flushed and we had another "Paul Volker" in, that $400,000 house might be $120,000 and a first time buyer could swing it, even with 10% interest.  I don`t want to see that though without a couple year heads up, higher interest could be fatal.

[sw363535]

Schiff --- I follow what he says as well.  But he is pretty much chearing for the wreck we should have had in 2008 and the reserection of free markets..    That will take an exorcism at this point.  Those with power will not give it up just because they have no answers.  And it would take a lot of "legal" surgery to see a free market work in any segment of the economy.

Our Leaders have chosen to  save us from the pain of healing from our miriad of self inflicted glutinous problems, by the continual infusion of borrowed cash to feed our addictions.  Ours will be a long drawn out, painless decline of a rotting courpse.   We love our addictions too much to give them up.  Power and greed take out another civilization.   Like it has for centuries...  We are half way down the slipper slide and talking about going back down the ladder...

I could, we could, most of us could loose everything is a sudden wreck like 1930.  But in the 40's and 50's the US preformed economic miracles not seen any where else in the world.  Under the current legal knot in our government and the power grab by every one elected to anything, those economic turnarounds would have never happened.  

Can you imagine any one in this society rationing their own use of toilet paper for a common economic good...?

But if we had allowed the "wreck" it would have been hard.  GM might not be there.   --- But something would be and we sold our chance to fix it for a gentle ride on a dead end road..

Now we are probably forced to start over...... or someone is.  

Good point..... The house example is right ..... there are just too many "suckers" in the US right now.....although I have a relative by marriage that builds homes and he is working on a couple of new ones that will cost under 100K at 1400 square feet.  After 40 years of building pleasure houses.  

IMO the system gets "flushed".  Like it or not.  We have waisted 8 years we could have been using rebuilding economics. Our choices are making this flush last for 50+years.  And new ownership will probably build something new in its place at that point.  That is very optomistic.  Can we build enough economic strength back to pay for 20 Trillion(and growing) in 50 years?  Payed for by profits, not just activity??  Tooooo optomistic..

[sw363535]

Don, to answer your question... In our county probably 4 entities.  But that does not count the owners who scrambled to try to pass on their inflated rents to someone else.  Not all had success..

We have a huge variation in quality of land.... Historically there have been acres that go abandoned in leaner years.

The drought brought those back into the "who farms that" category..