Word: landed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...commute to town to work as factory hands or clerks; others are mainly fertilizer salesmen, rural storekeepers or the like who raise, say, a few hogs as a sideline. "Farmers" in the $20,000-and-under class get 80% of their income from off-the-land jobs...
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...
...down and you're taking on debts to expand." But in his view expansion is the only way to make money: "Each acre produces so little profit that all you can do is go for bigger acres and make sure that each acre produces more crop." So, besides buying land, he has purchased so much machinery that it requires a football-field-sized yard just to park it. A partial inventory: four 15-ton trucks, three pickup trucks, seven tractors, three center-pivot irrigators and three wheat combines that cost $30,000 each, yet are used only about two weeks...
Over the years, Benedict has averaged a return of only 3.5% on the $3.5 million present value of his investment. Of course, since he bought much of the land and many of the machines when 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...
...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...