Word: patly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...Pat extended vertical integration to wheat. He was miffed because the operators of a country elevator refused to buy part of his crop when he judged the price to be right, but told him to wait several weeks while they worked out storage and transport snarls. Benedict got nine other growers together to put up $1.5 million, buy an elevator and incorporate it as Northern Grain...
...interest big corporations. The fears that the family farm would be taken over by "agribusiness" have proved unfounded. Corporations with more than ten stockholders account for less than 2% of U.S. farm sales. Even farms large enough to incorporate themselves generally operate as a family affair?emphatically including Pat Benedict's. His farm, like many others, has been incorporated only to save on estate taxes for his heirs...
...Pat employs two full-time hired hands, and during peak planting and harvest periods a dozen migrants from Texas or local high school students. The primary work force is the family: Sons Michael, 20, Blane, 18, Kurt, 13, and Daughters Stephanie, 19, and Lisa, 16. Even eleven-year-old David drives a tractor pulling a harvester that yanks three tons of sugar beets out of the ground every minute. All earn $3 an hour. During the wheat harvest each of them worked eight hours a day in staggered shifts so that some member of the family was in the fields...