Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...home, the necessity for the successful farmer to become a financier-salesman-engineer-scientist has accelerated a rural social revolution. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz vigorously preached the virtues of large-scale efficient farming, a message often translated in the croplands into five blunt words: Get big or get out. The decline in U.S. farm population that has been under way at least since 1910 has speeded up in recent years. By April 1977, only 1 of every 28 Americans lived on a farm, vs. 1 in 21 in 1970 and 1 in 3 early in the century...
...from 23,000 in 1960 ?partly by swallowing up the lands of less successful farmers who sold out. Though these very large operations still constitute only 6% of all farms, they take in 53% of all farm cash receipts, almost double then-share as recently as 1967. These big farms are on the cutting edge of the marketing and technological revolution, as exemplified by the operations of Benedict Farms Inc. and its president and sole stockholder, Patrick E. Benedict...
...offered, you might as well give up. Eliminate uncertainties, that's the golden rule. You eliminate uncertainties in production through technology and very careful management. You eliminate uncertainties in price by controlling the marketing as much as you can. That leaves demand and the weather as the big question marks, and you don't worry about them unless you want stomach pains...
...prices were lower, his return on original investment is substantially higher; nonetheless, in theory he could enjoy a larger income by selling out and putting the money in bank certificates of deposit paying around 9% interest. Such profits on even the most efficient farms are too meager to interest big corporations. The fears that the family farm would be taken over by "agribusiness" have proved unfounded. Corporations with more than ten stockholders account for less than 2% of U.S. farm sales. Even farms large enough to incorporate themselves generally operate as a family affair?emphatically including Pat Benedict...
...sometimes is for Pat. She goes along on most of Pat's frequent trips to meetings of farm organizations in big cities, but she is most at home in her kitchen, where she is a master of the Pillsbury Bake-Off school of roast-beef-and-apple-pie cuisine...