Combines What s wrong with this pictureIJ

Now let's talk about parishable goods, that have a shelf life, not cars and trucks, blue jeans, and oil that can be stored for years. Apparently you don't farm much and realize that livestock hits market weight and must be sold for slaughter and grain and fruit and vegetables have a shelf_storage life and have to be processed or go out of condition_ROT. Therefore we are somewhat over a barrel as to a marketing strategy, and we are limited as to who we can sell to, we feed it or sell it to the local elevator or large grain corp(Cargill).The local elevator also has to sell to the large grain corp., again CBOT and deregulation is in control since the big grain corps control CBOT. This was not so prior to President Reagan. Just bring the SEC into CBOT and run in to Wall Street standards and we will be OK.

Now before yall... thats right... I`m from the south..yall start throwing stones at me, hear me out. I have never been in favor of strike. In fact I really believe it is wrong. But I lost every thing I had tring to live the american dream. I was born on a farm, worked there all my life and when I finished high school ,, you guessed it .. I was gonna farm. But even working 12 to 18 hours 7 days a week was not good enough. I lost every thing but the shirt on my back, just because i came up $3000.00 short at the end of the year. ( first time)... and he wanted that too. This country has leaned to bigger is better so much that there is no way a small farmer can make a living. But do you all think the city folks can grow a garden on cementIJIJIJ Follow me if you can.. Put your equipment under the shed for 1 year and let the city folks go to the grocery store then and see what happens, when there is no food on the counters , this ol` country will listen. Everyone then can grow 20 acres of vegatables and let the folks come to you. I know this is far fetched. but it will take some RADICAl action to get them to listen. just for kicks---- i was going through an old house on my grandfathes place 2 years ago and found a ticket where he had 5 tons of 5-10-15 corn special delivered on March 5th 1972 for 175.00 total. And in the same bunch of tickets he sold 100 tons of corn for 2.00 per bushel, I don`t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure it out.. have we let our calculators over load our buttsIJIJ just for thought.

Gator and myself grew-up on the same farm. I left home to open a small farm and garden supply in 1980. I've since jumped out of the frying pan into the fire with my own farm. But just to add to his thought, If you park thoat equipment under the barn, don't worry about paying the bank the payment due. Then when they talk about repossion, ask them which of the parking spaces in front of the door do they want it delievered and start filling up their parking lots. I think if every farmer would stick together in such an effort, that the lending industry would beg us to come and get our machinery and may even forgive some of the debt owed on it. Just a thought.

Prices sure don't seem all that cheap in my area, at least not land prices. Saturday 3 small farms, part of an estate sold at auction. They were 32,34,39 acres in size. The smaller tracts brought 3250 per acre and the larger one brought $4450 per acre. They were all bid on and bought by area farmers. Farmers here must be sitting around on boxes of $100 dollar bills!

No body is over a barrell until they plant or breed. I gurantee Ford, Wrangler Exxon know within reason what percentage of their product they are going to sell and for what price before they ever produce the product. The farmer should be no differnt but we are. We don't know becuase we don't control the price but we can control the demand but we won't do it. We have too much reserved commocities. If the price of oil goes down the oil companies don't produce more do theyIJ The governmet intervention has caused this dependency unfortunatley. I don't have many answers either. But I do believe if we set out a year we would reap the benefits for the next 3-5 years.

That is a good idea. But there would be someone that would be growin corn on his back 40. So the next guy would go plant his back 40. If we did stick together, it would work.

Seen it posted on another board. Need to get the corporate control out of Goverment.And remember when they start quoting statistics, on how good we have it.( "Figures never lie, but liers sure can figure") I heard that from a coworker, whse dad was a "succesful business man".

This banter about which president put more money in your pockets is missing the point. It is not the president it is the market. The president just influenced the welfare. That does not address the market and our over production and lack of ability to deal directly with overseas markets. Until that gets resolved and changed the factors that drive the agricultural ecomomy will continue to be short term bandaids without stopping the bleeding.

It seems that prices were better when equipment was smaller, and things were better for dealers too. What would it be like now if the largest combine was an F3 and the largest tractor was 120 hpIJ

Dave, let's look at it a bit differently. The value of the corn in that 20oz box of corn flakes = $0.0466. Doubling the price for corn would make a box of corn flakes worth $3.20. Give the producer $6.27 for his corn and a box of corn flakes retails for $3.25.