Most American farmers have second jobs to stay afloat | Hacker News Reader

Most American farmers have second jobs to stay afloat

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78 pointsilamont103 comments

How much of this is because of hobby farming and kids inheriting the family farm?

Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs".

I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell.

You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that.

Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer".

With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job.

Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google.

It's never going to happen.

Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.

A lot of time businesses that farmers could do as side gigs become the primary gig over the generations but the farm just has to stay there and keep doing farming things so you don't get screwed by the municipality or state on zoning or facility related compliance BS.

Or you get to keep your agricultural property tax breaks.

"Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer"."

It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.

The vast majority of farms are not in danger of urban sprawl. Farms near cities are but there is a lot of land not close.

The easy test is ask someone who has known an area for 50 years how many new houses have gone up. You might be surprised. Even in depressed areas with some reduction in population, such as some areas of Appalachia, there are many new houses in rural areas.

"there are more houses in my area, therefore there are more houses everywhere" is illogical. i wish it were true in the seattle area. also, there will always be more houses today than 50 years ago in a society with an above zero birth rate.

"there are more houses in my area, therefore there are more houses everywhere"

Nice strawman, I never said that.

I'm talking about localized population trends, such as in parts of Appalachia. I've seen it even in my own lifetime with houses replacing what used to be fields.

The Seattle area is not rural, so I would not expect you to notice farmland converting into developments.

Most, even

My parents farmed their whole life and had part time town jobs primarily for health insurance.

>With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing.

Essentially over time you had to work more land or raise more livestock in exchange for a steady quality of life.

The cost of food people ate did not at all scale down with the profit the folks working the land. The cost of inputs went up, yields went up, prices went down, and entities higher up in the supply chain took an ever increasingly large amount of the pie.

At the same time farmland became an attractive investment vehicle to store value so prices shot up so that it will take 30-40 years to pay for the land you bought by working it, before considering interest. (which is much much worse than many other investments)

You don't want this because smaller farmers can pay more attention to their products and create food with higher quality and more variety than corporate farming with industrial methods.

As for my going back to the farm eventually, honestly just the concept of making my career producing the inputs for ethanol, feed for confinement animals, and industrial food products (soybean oil, corn syrup, etc.) doesn't seem to be of particularly high value.

Do the rates for leasing farmland go up with farmland prices?

Yes.

Media likes to lump together "farmers" and large ag companies. They are no where near the same.

I disagree with this post not because it is completely wrong but because of its dismissive tone. Many important aspects are not mentioned or detailed. Dependencies of subsidies from gov, price pressure from large supermarket chains, large farms are corporates VS small family farms, responsibility regarding soil conservation, Methan emissions, dependencies or lock in from Monsanto and similar grain and fertilizer suppliers, inability to repair modern tractors due to DRM and so on.

I think that you are comparing un-comparable. No, farmers back then, regardless of what unclear period you talk about, did not had two jobs. They had one job.

Also, I suspect you don't have actual concrete place and time in mind. How farming and economy worked varied widely between times and places, you cant just cherry pick small anecdotes from span over 500 years and two continents and create comfortable picture.

Um . . . no.

Citations needed about any historical claims.

Also, show me yours about serious farms vs hobby farms and I'll show you mine about century farms...

That's often how it goes. The market starts out with lots of small businesses, but over time it ends up up with a few giant companies. Economists call it industry consolidation. There are some interesting nuances at the beginning and the end of the "consolidation curve" [1].

[1] https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

Old joke:

A farmer wins the lottery. When asked what he's going to do, he replies, "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."

How many of these farmers are hobbyists, though? Or, use the farm land to offset their taxes (like they do a lot where I live)? Maybe farming is their second job, rather than the other way around?

If you go to the actual report, you'll see that the "very large scale farms" have the smallest percent of acres while also providing the largest value. Maybe the small-scale farms are inefficiently managed and operated.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263...

The guy running two head of cattle on 1 acre just so he can claim to be a "farmer" for the tax benefits will never have a profitable operation.

Not quite true. He can take that 2 head of cattle to the bank for a loan for 40 acres and that will make money - not a living but a profit. Then a few years latter more land and now he is a farmer.

i work with a number of people on that plan. It is an open question how many will complete it and become full time farmers.

Thing is you can't get an ag exemption without provable business. Not sure what that looks like elsewhere but here you have to do a minimum of $10k gross sales. As small as that number is it's surprisingly difficult to hit fucking around.

What passes muster will vary between jurisdictions of course, but there are many ways of making a company appear on paper as though it has turnover.

A classic is where the proprietor writes the company a check, and then the company writes him a check for the same amount.

I certainly am no expert but Dr. Sarah Taber talks about how many farms, especially small to mid sized, are effectively tax write offs and that the "put upon" farmer is a myth [0] [1].

[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.c...

Not a myth, but likely already forced out of the industry or dead by their own hand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_the_Uni...

Again, not an expert but Dr. Sarah Taber claims that number is inflated by considering farm employees, not farm owners [0]. The claim is that farm owners are no worse than the baseline but that farm employees, often times low wage, migrant or undocumented workers, are the ones that suffer from a high suicide rate.

From the archived Twitter link:

""" In other words, the farm lobby has stolen farmworkers' deaths as their own. """

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.c...

I can speak to personally witnessing most of the ag families I've known in the last 50 years selling out to large ag conglomerates because the family ran out of generations willing to spend their entire life skirting bankruptcy. If the claim that this is predominantly ag workers and not owners outright committing suicide is accurate I'd probably counter something along the lines of in generations past before big ag strangled the life out of smallholding farmers most of those workers would very likely have been farm owners.

This has been true for many, many decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film...

Ditto Australia.

This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same.

Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc.

It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.

I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.

It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate.

The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list).

These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.

Crop farming, sure. Livestock farming? You basically can't leave. Can barely even do anything else.

Depends on the livestock - sheep, here at least, are mainly "check once a day" for the most part when set up properly.

Sure, you have drenching days, tagging days, etc but once the fences and water are in they're set and forget for most of the time in that most of the days in a cycle are mostly free to interleave in other activities.

Even cleanskin cattle (in the Northern Territory) fall into "keep an eye on them" and then there's a muster - there's work there for someone to keep the bores and yards up to spec and spending a few days here and there culling camels but, again, they tend to look after themselves on the right land - so much so that the pressing work is keeping them in check (via musters) so that they don't degrade the land.

> "Get big or get out" —ELB (ca.1971)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...

Here in New Jersey our property taxes are crippling. However if you have a big 5+ acre yard and can sell $1k worth of produce you are "farm" and taxed at a much lower rate. You might need a second job to stay afloat...

Farms are also an excellent source of losses tax for high income tax deductions that want a large plot of land in remote place.

I live in rural America. The big farmers do not have second jobs. But there are tons of small hobby farms. And there are plenty of farms owned by wealthy people in cities for tax breaks or playgrounds (hunting, 4 wheeling, camping, etc). Production would likely go up if there were a lot fewer farmers.

There has been a big change in what farmers do. Traditional farmers both raised crops (such as corn and soybeans) and raised animals (such as hogs, beef cattle, chickens, dairy cows). This is a year around operation. Nowadays there is much greater specialization. If you just raise crops you are busy in the spring (planting) and in the fall (harvesting) and do some work in the summer (controlling weeds) and very little in the winter. So this leaves a lot of time for a part time job. Raising animals has become both specialized (one type of animal) and these being mostly very large, fulltime operations.

I think the title should read "most family farmers have second jobs to stay afloat", as that appears to be the statistic the article asserts. This leaves out large-scale factory farming, obviously; the statement might still be true when large-scale factory farming is taken into account, but that's not what the article seems to assert?

To me this is as inflammatory and concerning as a title which might read "most woodworkers have second jobs to stay afloat" or "most cobblers have second jobs to stay afloat".

The most saddening story of the article is the one about that mentions the subdivision. Our free-for-all development without any real regional planning is such a negative to this country. Sprawl killing land that’s good for farms, sprawl that really shouldn’t exist when there’s so much urban and suburban infill that should be done.

As someone who came from rural Canada, and who's dad is a farmer, and whose father in law is a farmer, I don't think this is true in Canada. That being said, your smart to do something in the winter time, trucking is an easy pickup for those cold months...

you can replace “farmers” with most professions these days and this would still ring true

Less than 5% of Americans workers hold multiple jobs, so no, that will not ring true.

95% or americans are not afloat so that checks out ( https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=o... )

also 35+% of americans have a side hustle so you are taking that 5% too literally :)

Farming is one of the most subsidized industries in the US. With the rampent belief that subsidies destroy other industries and are 'socialist' maybe the experiment should be made to remove subsidies for mega farms (not small ones) to see if it could correct this problem.

This is really disappointing and something I've thought about for years. One of my first website ideas was a platform to help connect communities with the local farmers. I've sat on a domain for years that I thought was really fun (farmersstand.com).

I've finally gotten around to working on this as my Thanksgiving "Bolt.new" project - it's all mocked data now but feedback on the direction this could go is much appreciated: https://www.FarmersStand.com

I think it's a great idea - decentralizing food production and distribution networks, building lateral connections in communities etc. is definitely to be encouraged.

One thing I would change is the domain... the double ss is no good: you want it as phonetic as possible so people can type it as they hear it.

Here I was thinking about buying a farm to live on as a second job that would also be a potential safety net if something major happens to the power grid or internet as I don’t see myself trading snippets of code with my neighbors for supplies…

I always say that as a developer, I'll be one of the first to die come the apocalypse. I'll be the useless guy with nothing to trade and no survival skills.

Keep yourself fit and at least you’ll be a good laborer.

Until I crack a tooth or something and go mad from the constant pain.

Ok, I'll need coders after the apocalypse and you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life, that's not how that works. No gym fit is farmer fit enough.

Go to gym during the week and do gardening/landscaping work on weekends. Should get you a good portion of the way there.

>you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life

You can, my brother and I worked on my Uncle's farm over the summmers for at least ages 14-18 and had no special "laborer" training, we went from high school classes to slopping hog, feeding cows, stacking hay, etc. Sore muscles and blisters are the norm for the first few weeks, but it doesn't take long for muscles to adapt and callouses to form.

> you can't just make someone a laborer that hasn't done that their whole life

Pretty sure all slavers from the last 10,000 years would disagree. It doesn’t take that long to get used to manual labor.

No reason you can’t do both.

Subsistence farming without using modern amenities is a whole different ballgame from the sorts of farms in the article.

I would do it as a second income, it only becomes subsistence if the need arises.

Farmer will be just a fucked if the power goes off and doesn't come back on. Obviously not all of them but they are by no means just going to survive something like that.

Friends parents have a 14 acre plot of land with chicken and a pretty sizable garden. They have to give away their eggs in the warmer months as there are too many. Unfortunately they haven't been gardening due to health but the chickens are still going. Most of the lot is wooded and is not difficult to maintain. It's no farm but I imagine it could support a few people.

Edit: forgot to add they have about 25 or so chickens as of now. They have lost one to a fox so have these weather proof radios playing talk radio which keeps them away.

Is farming their "second job?"

Protect the farmers.

Explain how

I guess buy their crops.

Honest question. Why?

Clearly we need a food supply but why do we need to prop up unsustainable businesses that are over-producing demand? Farmers are massively subsidized and still barely make ends meet. Is that actually beneficial?

I ask this as someone who paid for books and beer in college working on farms.

Still need to eat tomatoes when we are at war with country we buy tomatoes from.

Those farmers with second jobs would need protection from local megafarms who are outcompeting them, not other countries - it's not about location, it's about size of the operation.

My reply was in relation to the comment "Protect the farmers."

I assumed that included local megafarms too.

Because it's objectively cheaper to outsource food production to countries with low cost of living. In an economically efficient world, all food in North America would be coming from Africa instead of going to Africa (see Dead Aid).

But if that ever actually happened, those countries could blockade the United States and cut off the food supply. It would be a shitshow. Imagine the 1970s oil crisis, but instead of being unable to drive anywhere, mass famines occurred.

In Canada, we don't use subsidies for the dairy market. We use "supply management" where we make it difficult to import butter or milk and ban farmers from producing too much of it. This keeps the prices artificially high which allows for farmers to continue domestic production in a HCOL country. However, 4 sticks of butter costs $6.

Yes we obviously need domestic food production. But do we need small farms that are essentially a hobby? “Supply management” as described is a subsidy because it artificially increases prices.

We should be encouraging small farms, hobby or not, because diversity breeds innovation and durability. We have propped up big ag too much. Subsidies, to any sector, should always trail off as size increases to encourage diversity and durability of that industry.

It’s objectively cheaper to outsource software development to countries with lower costs of living too. How’s that working out?

It's working out great for me, actually, as the entire Canadian tech industry is based on outsourcing. We're less of a national security risk as an American client state.

For critical infrastructure though, outsourcing is the wrong move. This is because the consequences of failure are borne by society instead of the corporation.

If Americans were banned from all social media tomorrow, realistically there wouldn't be mass rioting and civil unrest. Contrast if you found out tomorrow that the USA only has 7 days worth of food for all its citizens, and no more is coming. Are you going to start killing people to boost your odds of survival?

No, I’m going to eat one last steak, look lovingly at my supply of bulk dried beans and rice, thank goodness for the enormous amount of shelf-stable food sitting in storage across the supply chain, and wait til somebody dusts off their plow and uses that vast quantity of good land that, in this counterfactual, has been left fallow for some reason…

Labor is far from the only input into agriculture. The US’ advantages in arable land acreage, agricultural technology, and chemical inputs seem sufficiently efficient that the US is (and long has been) a net exporter of agricultural commodities.

One guy in the air-conditioned cab of his fancy tractor hauling his 40-meter-wide planter or 186-liter-per-second combine [0] can do the work of hundreds of his manual-farmhand counterparts without even taking out his earbuds.

Do you imagine that you would start “killing people to boost your odds of survival”?

[0] https://www.deere.ca/en/products/planting-equipment/db120-48... and https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/x-series-combines/

I would imagine people would go into your house + every warehouse, and just start looting everything. Most people do not have a large supply of non-perishable goods and will likely try to take yours.

My point is the "vast quantity of good land" the USA has would be useless in a short-term famine scenario. It takes months to grow food. If there's a scenario in which the USA has outsourced its entire food supply overseas, and that food supply is cut off, unless there's a 3-4 month stockpile of food for every person in America and the USA figures out how to restart its entire farming system in a week, people are dying en masse.

Even if that occurs, there's still going to be riots like COVID-style runs on toilet paper.

That's why food self-sufficiency is critical to national security.

What are the current farm subsidies?

Many people "know" this but have zero idea what is actually in the Farm Bill.

Check your understanding. Threads like this on many kinds of topics are full of debate between people who barely know anything beyond vague facts absorbed through osmosis over the years.

The first two that pop to mind are CRP and Ethanol fuel. According to [1] 20% of farm profits in 2019 were from subsidies.

[1]: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

Honest answer: because forcing folks to move to major urban areas to avoid crippling poverty causes at least as many problems as having some economic opportunities continue to exist in rural areas.

It looks like most American farmers don't want socialism (looking at the recent elections). Why is socialism, collectively protecting farmers, OK? Shouldn't we instead implement the ideology that America voted for and actually start dismantling the socialism inspired protections that are in place?

It’s only socialism when someone else benefits.

I don't think the recent election results will tell you much about farmers, specifically. Even in the states with the densest concentrations of farms, only a small percentage of people are farmers.

you didn't vote for it either. the only vaguely "socialist" candidate in the recent history was Bernie Sanders, who got passed over in favor of bland, faux-progressive neo-liberals both times he ran.

Yeah. I know a beet farmer who struggled a lot with his farm to the point that he had to start selling paper at some point. Poor Dwight...

> Even if cherries don’t pay, Hallstedt is determined to keep his farmland from becoming yet another subdivision. But to keep the orchard, Hallstedt said he needs to be able to stay in business.

Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development.

Anyways, it's probably a good thing that food is so cheap that you need to create it at large scale to make any money off it.

Food production exists to feed people, not prop up small contributors to the food supply because their goods have been made too cheap and affordable for everyone.

New residential development and purchasing recently had numbers come out, they’re pretty bad.

If someone is buying land to subdivide, they would be better of not doing so.

Great. We are 8 million homes behind - I love that people get rich real easy is reason enough for people to go without homes.

Smh for this world we've made.

Are the land developers supposed to lose money and be charitable? Costs for both materials and labor have up due to inflation, Covid, etc. How could you expect something different?

Am I missing something?

Whether the developers would be profitable or not building housing on a given tract of land doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the article or quote.

The quote is presumably someone who doesn't want to sell their farm to residential developers period.

> Please tell me that "subdivision" here doesn't mean residential development.

Probably. I can't speak to the person quoted in the article, but for many owners of agricultural land, selling to developers for building tract housing is actually the goal. Farming is treated as a capital business, not a labor one, and any profits from agriculture are the intermediary dividends paid out while waiting for the land to appreciate enough to be valuable for another purpose (usually suburban housing developments).

Why do you want people to be homeless and overpaying for housing just to depress the price of food?

The person I quoted presumably wants both increased food prices (so they are profitable) and less housing development (their unprofitable farm doesn't become a subdivision).

And the opposition to their position would be someone who wants more housing (just sell the unprofitable farm land) and increasingly cheap food (the reason they're unprofitable).

So I'm not sure where you're getting the position of less housing + cheap food.

Nobody wants to address the real problem here, just like with homelessness where the biggest contributor to and solution for is housing affordability. Why? Because that goes against vested interests in raising house prices.

Marx created an analytical framework that perfectly describes what's going on here. Specifically, we're talking about the workers relationship to the means of production.

A family farm is an inherently socialist construct because the workers, being the family that works that farm, is typically the one who owns that farm. They own the means of production. Consumers love this too, generally. Farmers markets, local produce and so on.

So why don't we have that? Because of capitalism. Giant agribusiness corporations are set up to make family farming impossible to force consolidation. It's every aspect too. Seed subscriptions (essentially, GM crops), farm equipment maintenance (eg John Deere), even the lack of accessible healthcare.

I'm really not sure people think about the impact on farming of the US not having accessible and affordable healthcare. There are many negative effects. This is just one of them. But farmers will often work a second job just to get insurance.

Giant corporate farms? That's capitalism. Family farms? That's socialism.

Walmart? Capitalism. Local mom-and-pop stores? Socialism.

Comcast? Capitalism. EPB Internet in Chattanooga? Socialism.

That may confuse you. You may be tempted to object because we've been sold on this idea that small business, in particular, is capitalism. It is not. If you still want to argue with that, why? Again, Marx describes this perfectly through the workers relationship to the means of production, regardless of your position on capitalism or socialism.

Our entire economic system wants to coerce you into working for as little money as possible without you owning anything. That's the end-state of capitalism.

If family farms are socialism why did the bolsheviks kick family farmers off their land and collectivize the farms?

That’s communism not socialism.

Well, maybe most districts where the no1 employment sector is agriculture should stop voting Republican. /shrug

No the GOP is practically socialist when it comes to farmers, they just throw subsidies and tax breaks at them - Dems do that too but the GOP pretends they exist for the people in the Heartland, the farm folk just eat that up

The Democrats have done a surprising job of losing the working class over the last 30 years. The voters haven't lost their minds, the party has.

Both can be true.

Like most articles on American farming, this article doesn't actually specify what constitutes a farmer[0]. Oftentimes, "farmer" is used to refer strictly to the people who own arable land, not the people who actually work the land. In this context, the word "farmer" would be more akin to a farm landlord, in which case working a second job would not be surprising. Or to put it another way, for them, farming would be better described the second job - a source of passive income that supplements the income from the primary job.

The language used in this article and the accompanying USDA report implies (though does not explicitly state) that it using this common definition of "farmer" - that is, referring strictly to the person, family, or corporation that owns the land, but not to any other laborers who work the land.

This problem extends to most public discourse about farming and the politics thereof. Unfortunately, many folks have a very inaccurate picture of how agriculture works in this country, and the way it is discussed is a big component of that.

[0] The USDA is similarly inconsistent with this language in its own reports, which only exacerbates the problem.

And with the Estate Tax (the 'death tax'), if you don't have significant savings (most farmers do not), when you die, your kids will have to pay the tax on their inheritance.

And since it's really hard to sell just part of an estate (and especially a farm), that usually means selling the whole thing, just to pay the taxes on the thing you left behind for them.

The estate tax should be repealed, not just at the federal level, but in the twelve states that also have an estate tax of their own, or we'll lose the family farm, and the family farmers, forever.. killed by taxes.

Doesn't the estate tax only apply to farms worth more than $27 million?

Less than one percent of farm estates owed any estate tax in 2020. It's probably about the same in more recent years.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/april/less-than-1-...

Where do you live that it's hard to sell a few acre parcel? That is not my experience at all in multiple states I have knowledge of.

Also, most people have little sympathy for someone who just inherited assets worth more than $13M (and likely double that if married) before you owe a penny in taxes. If it's a legitimate business, get a loan to pay them and continue getting even wealthier. If not, sell it all and never work a day in your life again. In fact, option two sounds pretty good to me either way :)

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