Word: farms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...children all seem to enjoy farming, but Pat insists that they not make up their minds about careers until they finish college. Says Pat: "I've seen some families come to blows because a son was forced to farm when he didn't want to." But last year, when he bought still another neighbor's farm, Pat for the first time left the house standing because "it would be perfect for one of the kids...
...kids should choose to leave the farm, where is the next generation of Pat Benedicts to come from? That is perhaps the most important question in American agriculture. High interest rates, soaring prices for land, machinery, fertilizer and pesticides, and the very fact that farmers must operate on a large scale to be fairly confident of regular profit, make it difficult for operators of small- and medium-sized farms to expand and even tougher for young farmers to get started...
Says John Strickland, a veteran of 25 years of farming and service as a county agricultural agent in Georgia: "Four or five hundred acres is about the minimum farm from which a decent living can be made. Buying that much land would cost between $400,000 and half a million. No young man, no matter how much initiative and savvy he has and no matter how hard he is willing to work, is likely to be able to raise the capital needed...
Iowa's David Garst, one of the biggest U.S. farmer-businessmen (see box), argues that a young farmer can still get started if he is willing to rent land at first, buy used instead of. new machinery, and take a part-time job off the farm to supplement his income in the early years. But that requires a devotion to back-breaking labor and to the rural life that even many youths raised on farms no longer display...
...right down to it there's a closeness to God that farmers feel." But will Sons Mike, 19, and Gary, 18, share his beliefs? Says their mother Viola: "All I can tell you is what I hear them say: 'Mom and Dad don't get to go anywhere. The farm is their whole life...