Posted by rrlund on February 17, 2023 at 05:03:01 from (173.225.203.213):
In Reply to: price of farming posted by r.w.b. on February 17, 2023 at 01:22:51:
Well, yes, parts are high, but relatively speaking, haven't they always been? I don't know your state of mind when you wrote that. It might be tongue in cheek, but without some perspective, some folks are going to take it wrong and think, once again, that us farmers have it rough.
Would you want to go back to the 70s? I remember one day in the spring, probably 1975 or so, I honestly had to make the conscious decision whether to buy three plow points of buy groceries. In 76, I saved all summer to buy a new pair of 15.5 38 tires. If I needed a pair of them today, I'd call the tire guy and have him come out to put them on. I wouldn't think any more about writing the check than I would about the wife going grocery shopping.
You can't just tell one side of the story. I remember being at an auction in the mid 70s. We were all standing around commiserating about how the price of gas had doubled to 60 cents a gallon. Somebody said it was supposed to be a dollar by the end of the year, I said I'd have to quit, there was no way I could farm if it went that high. We all know it did, but milk went up just as fast, so it covered it.
If anybody had told me at any time in my life, that it would ever cost me as much to plant a corn crop as it did last year, without telling me first what my income would be, I would have hung it up before I had to dump that much money in the ground, but, I made a lot selling cattle over the winter leading up to it. I wrote checks and paid for inputs just like every year, and all the big cattle checks from selling the rest of the year went right in the bank and piled up fast.
Compare that to just three years ago when everybody wants to use as a comparison. Gas at the pump dropped to a dollar five here in town for a short time. Big deal. Cattle prices got so low that for the first time in my memory, maybe for the first time since the New Deal in the 30s, the government cut checks to cattle producers. It wasn't enough to stick in your eye, but even the government could see that it was so bad, that it had to be done. It barely gave me two nickles to rub together, but at least it gave me two nickles.
So ya, we can always cherry pick facts and come up with things to complain about all in fun, but people can take it the wrong way if you don't throw in both sides of the equation for perspective.
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