Word: benedicts
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...past era are fast selling out to the farm "manager" who "reflects wistfully" that he spends more time in a three-piece suit than in his fields. The new archetype of the farmers "who make U.S. agriculture the nation's most efficient and productive industry" is Pat Benedict, who has $3.5 million in assets, 3,500 acres planted in wheat and sugar beets, and who averages a return of 3.5 per cent on his investment. Pat runs his farm with calculators, computer print-outs and "precise operating schedules...
...concluded that most economies of scale "are achieved by the one-man fully mechanized farm. While the most efficient farm size has increased in the last decade, due mainly to tractor improvements, this 1973 report found that most farmers need a much smaller acreage and capital investment than Pat Benedict. For instance, a vegetable grower in California produces at his maximum potential on a farm of 200 acres with less than one-fifth of Benedict's investment in machinery, and a corn farmer in Indiana on a farm of 800 acres. This point is born out by the "postage stamp...
WELL, you might ask, if small farms are actually more efficient than big ones, why are they being gobbled up by the likes of Pat Benedict, who in the past few years has aquired four farms? The article reports that "in three cases, he razed and burned the houses, uprooted graceful shade trees and returned all the land to crops." Time might call that progress, but the dispossessed farmers probably called it robbery...
...predicts that by 1985 corporations will control 75 per cent of our food supply in one of these two ways. And even the USDA admitted in a 1973 report that only cash grain and forage crops, and range livestock will be controlled by independent family farmers in 1985. Pat Benedict, a wheat farmer, is the exception, not the rule...
...wife Fran, 43, is somewhat in the background; the Benedict family is a decided patriarchy. A farmer's daughter, she worked as a stewardess for Braniff Airlines and met Pat during a layover in Fargo, N. Dak.; a sister of Pat's who worked at the hotel where Fran stayed introduced them. Fran is the secretary of Benedict Farms and does the bookkeeping. During planting and harvesting seasons she also runs the farm's communications network, relaying messages by private FM radio band between Pat's pickup truck, the other machines in the fields and the outside world?meanwhile whipping...