Word: farms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Enough food is left over to make the export capacity of American agriculture the hope of the have-not world. Farm-product exports tripled in the past six years to almost $27 billion, helping mightily to offset the cost of imports. The U.S. exports more wheat, corn and other coarse grains (barley, oats, sorghum) than all the rest of the world combined. Pat Benedict and farmers like him are America's best hope to counter the trade challenge presented by the oilmen of Araby and the energetic manufacturers of Japan. U.S. food exports would be higher still were...
...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...
...farms classified as medium-sized or large take in no less than 90% of all cash receipts from agriculture. At the top of the scale, farms grossing $100,000 a year or more are increasing ?to 162,000 last year, 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...
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Pat and Edwin kept reinvesting their profits and borrowing to acquire more land. Today the family owns 1,900 acres and rents another 1,600?underscoring a surprising point about modern U.S. farm economics. Tenant farmers these days are no longer the classic Southern sharecroppers, who have almost disappeared, but are often expanding agriculturists like Benedict who own land too. As it grew, Pat's farm absorbed four others; in three cases, he razed and burned the houses, uprooted graceful shade trees and returned all the land to crops. Says he: "Those farms had lived...
...past five years Pat has been expanding, and trying to beat the wild fluctuations in crop prices, in another way: bringing to the farm lands the concept known in industry as vertical integration. Like other growers, he resented having to take his beets for milling to the nearby American Crystal Sugar Co. plant. One reason: the company's officers, then based in Denver, insisted on shutting down the mills on weekends, even during harvest time when beets must be ground up quickly before they rot. Recalls Pat: "We were at the mercy of people a thousand miles away who just...