Word: farmers
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...farmer to complain that he does not get to spend enough time in the fields must be something new in the 10,000-year history of agriculture. But in the U.S. of 1978, Pat Benedict is archetypal of the farmers who make U.S. agriculture the nation's most efficient and productive industry and by far the biggest force holding down the trade deficit. Revolutionary changes are sweeping the croplands, making agriculture an increasingly capital-intensive, hightechnology, mass-production business. As a result, U.S. farmers are dividing into two distinct classes. Small farmers, who do not have the technical expertise...
...changing, low-margin business, a fellow has to be nimble. Says Jack Neuman, 45, who raises corn, soybeans and hogs in Sangamon County, Ill.: "It used to be that if you had a child who wasn't too bright, you'd say, 'Son, you're going to be a farmer.' Nowadays, if that dumb kid comes along volunteering to farm...
...already put a ceiling ?in most cases $40,000 a year ?on the target-price payments that any one farm can receive. It could go further and establish a sliding scale, with full target prices applying only to the first 50,000 or so bushels of a farmer's production. That would funnel a larger portion of the payments to small farmers who have less ability to survive a one-year loss...
...always in agriculture, a diverse industry, one farmer's good fortune may result from another's pinch. An agricultural-loan specialist for California's Bank of America asserts: "You'd have to be pretty incompetent not to make money in cattle this year." Reason: a combination of high prices for meat and relatively low costs for corn and other feeds that has corn growers grumbling. Vegetable growers in central Florida are selling big crops of lettuce at prices that have been pushed abnormally high by the winter-spring rains that made California lettuce scarce and unappetizing...
...sure, he talked about Gary Gilmore and S.I. Hiyakawa and Darryl Stingley and Karma and becoming a subsistence walnut farmer when he retired, but all in all the refresher course in introductory Bill Lee was short and not directed to the real topic at hand...