Word: lande
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...American farmer today is land happy and iron crazy. He buys bigger equipment because he figures he is going to own more land; then he has to buy land to justify the expense. Then the farmer realizes he is not making much of a living considering his capital investment, and he quits...
...plowing. For millennia, farmers have turned over the land with plows before tilling it, cultivating it and putting in seed. Now, machines are available that combine several operations in a process called minimum tillage. One machine, on which Garst and a partner hold the patent, cuts a V-shaped furrow in unplowed land and simultaneously drops in seed. Says Garst: "In a sense, we have gone back to the pointed stick...
...rotation. Insecticides and herbicides have done away with the need to rotate crops in order to keep pests from infesting the soil. No longer must a farmer periodically allow his best land to lie fallow, or plant it with unprofitable crops...