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Comment by arbor_day | Hacker News Reader

I own the farm and farm it in Illinois. I owe the land through an LLC, because farming is dangerous and I don't want to go bankrupt if somebody sues me. Farms are expensive and hard to subdivide, so people will put them into a legal entity and pass down to the next generation via a trust. All of my neighbors are doing the same, so we're all counted as "not farmers" here

Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills. The margins get better as you get bigger but still not great.

Many of the buyers keep growing their farms because it's a status symbol. Everybody in your area will instantly know you're a big wig if you're one of the X family who has 2,000 acres all without the ick that comes with running other businesses. You can't buy that kind of status in my community with anything other than land.

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> Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit

Well, it is ultimately a real estate business. The "hundred grand" in profit is really there only to support the mortgage payments — meaning that's what other farmers are counting on, so they're going to drive the prices down to that point. It is like a tech startup. You are counting on the assets increasing in value when you exit. That is where the profit will eventually come from, hopefully. It is not a business for everyone, but I like it.

> Many of the buyers keep growing their farms because it's a status symbol.

And because the fun parts of the job end too quickly when you don't have enough acres. I'd at least like to double my acreage. That is where I think I'd no longer be in a position of "That's it? I want to keep going!" and instead "That was fun, but I think I've had enough."

That said, the machines keeps getting bigger, whether the farmer likes it or not, so perhaps in that future I'll need even more land to satisfy the pangs.

If you don't need a couple of million dollars worth of tractors, combines, and other equipment that are all driven by GPS then you don't have enough acres.

Lol, a couple million. A single combine can easily be 1mil. And when you need them, you need more than one.

right, so a couple million. you must be one of those poors that think a couple means exactly two. when you're rich AF, you toss a couple million around to mean plebe monies. too bad farmers aren't rich AF. when you have to use the farm as collateral for the tractors, you gotta ask if we're doing something wrong

Do you need to buy them or can they be hired / outsourced? I guess they all are needed at roughly same time and cannot be easily transported huge distances.

Just wondering: what are the fun parts?

I suppose it's like programming. I enjoy programming. Most people hate it. Many people simply enjoy growing things.

I'm glad there are lots of types of people!

I enjoy most of it, but, being a tech nerd at heart, I'm in my glory when I'm out in the field playing with the tech. More acres means more time to play. Something I don't feel I get enough of. I get the "I want to keep going" feeling when I disappointingly have to put everything back in the shed. Like I mentioned before, I figure doubling my acres would be the threshold where it goes from "I want to keep going" to "I'm good".

What is the thesis for speculating on farm land? Theres no reason for me to think it will appreciate any faster than inflation because demand is stagnant.

Get a mortgage on the land. Farm pays the interest. The price of the land goes up with inflation, the size of the loan doesn't. Difference is low tax profit.

> Theres no reason for me to think it will appreciate any faster than inflation because demand is stagnant.

It has in the past. I looked at a $1M (~$1.5M in today's dollars) farm 20 years ago. Couldn't figure out how to make it work at the time, sadly. Frankly, it seemed like complete insanity when I got into the numbers. But, today it would sell for ~$6-8M. About the same gains as the stock market over the same period, granted, but it's way easier to convince someone to loan you money for land than it is to buy stocks.

There may be no reason to think that will continue to happen into the future, but many are willing to place that bet.

"Agriculture use" is the zoning class of choice for developers to hold land out of town until the town gets there. They have to show some actual agricultural use, so they lease it to farmers or cut the pine trees, and in return they get the lowest tax value for holding the land.

Then when they want to cash it in, they rezone it to commercial or residential and build on it.

I was just looking at a GIS map yesterday for my area and noticed that nearly every field was owned by an LLC and/or trust. Didn't think much of it at the time until I read this.

In richer parts of town, many houses will be in trusts also.

It’s a no brainer if you have a couple thousand dollars to spare for an estate lawyer to do some estate planning and spare your heirs probate court.

Plus in the states and wealth levels that many people on this website have, it is also a no brainer to save on taxes.

> It’s a no brainer if you have a couple thousand dollars to spare for an estate lawyer to do some estate planning and spare your heirs probate court.

What I keep hearing from experienced estate attorneys is that California probate court is onerous and worth a lot of effort to avoid, but other state's have reasonable probate; it might still be worth it to avoid probate, but it's not such a big deal. OTOH, dealing with assets in a revocable trust can be a PITA while you're still alive and may not give much benefit while you're living either. If you're not in California, it's worth taking stock of the situation before you use California biased advice.

Having an estate in trust may not actually save on taxes either. Yes, you'll avoid probate fees in California, which is significant. But your estate will still pay estate tax. Otherwise, if an irrevocable trust holds the assets, it pays the taxes, and trusts have very abbreviated brackets; your heirs might well pay less income tax holding the property themselves.

When your heirs/beneficiaries die and their heirs become the new beneficiary, that's not subject to estate tax, which is great, but as a result it doesn't get a step up in basis. If the trust is large relative to the estate tax exemption, it's beneficial to not pay estate tax; if not, it's more beneficial to get a step up in basis.

Certainly, in some situations, trusts are more tax efficient, but you have to actually look at your situation to see. Default everyone should have a trust assumptions add a lot of senseless confusion and delay to the people who don't actually get a benefit from it. There are asset protection benefits from trusts as well, and it's reasonable to consider those depending on the situation as well.

Holding a farm in a trust or llc makes a lot of sense to me, because it makes it easier to split ownership without dividing the farm.

"...but your estate will still pay estate taxes."

IANAL but to be clear, I'm pretty sure that CA does not have an estate tax. And the federal estate tax limit was just reaffirmed (BBB) at the prior threshold.

A lot of words to tell you that you should consult an estate attorney in your jurisdiction, but at least that advice was correct.

I liked hearing about California probate law and why it's a quagmire, despite not living there myself.

I'm in CT and was told one of the big advantages of a trust is speed. It can take 10-12 months to clear probate while the trust goes the the beneficiary(ies) more or less immediately.

My interest in having a property/home in a trust is privacy. Where I live, tax records are easily searchable online, so you can easily find out where someone lives assuming they don't have a very common name, or are renting. And if someone is curious about a specific property, most people are going to stop at 123 Elm St Trust.

> Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills.

Non-judgmental curious question: why do you keep doing it? (As opposed to selling the land and buying tbills.)

> the ick that comes with running other businesses

Also non-judgmental curious question: what is this "ick" related to non-farming businesses?

I think it's the way the original poster looks down people running other businesses.

I own both a farm business and non-farm business. I feel the "ick" he talks about.

I don't know how to exactly describe it, but I'd suggest it has to do with more autonomy in non-farming businesses, where you are always trying to balance between trying to make the business work and not taking advantage of people. Or if you end up taking advantage of people...

In farming, it is all laid out for you. Prices are already set in Chicago. The buyer is always there. You grow the product, deliver it, and that's that. These days, with the way technology has gone, you might not even interact with another person in the process.

> I don't know how to exactly describe it, but I'd suggest it has to do with more autonomy in non-farming businesses, where you are always trying to balance between trying to make the business work and not taking advantage of people. Or if you end up taking advantage of people...

What about all the non-organic farming, use of pesticides/antibiotics/etc., poor treatment of animals (sometimes), water waste in some cases (like almonds in CA), being beholden to & inevitably supporting the wonderful companies that are John Deere and Monsanto, having to use proprietary seeds and IP for such a basic human need, etc.? Some of our largest problems on the planet trace back to modern industrial farming.

To be clear, I love and respect farmers a ton, my comment isn't about them at all. They're amazing and hardworking and anybody in the the business would be dealing with the same problems. I'm just talking about the purity of the business itself that you're talking about. The idea that the job is somehow so morally pure compared to all the other jobs baffles me. Your average local job (waiter, cashier, postal delivery worker, janitor, etc.) would seem to have a much more direct positive and impact on people's happiness and much less of an opportunity to take advantage of other beings, as you put it.

> What about...

That is all much the same as the prices being set in Chicago: Someone else has made the decision. While someone else no doubt feels the "ick", I am but the customer who is being taken advantage of. (Well, except in the case of Monsanto — they closed up shop years ago)

> Your average local job (waiter...

It seems you, deep down, even understand that. Comparing farming to being a waiter as opposed to the restaurant owner, I feel, is a pretty good portrayal of the difference and it is telling that you chose that point of comparison. Technically farming is like owning the restaurant, but in practice, because everything is laid out for you and decisions are made elsewhere, it feels more like being the waiter. You are layers removed from the "ick".

To the whataboutism, at the end of the day a farmer has a physical product they can look at, and they know the land it came from.

There’s a certain satisfaction there that most people don’t get out of their ‘cog somewhere in the middle of a machine’ jobs.

Both my farm and non-farm businesses have a physical product, though. In fact, in both cases the product is food, as it happens. I expect the farm business is less "icky" because it is entirely dehumanized. You don't set the price, you don't have to win over customers, and increasingly with more and more automation you don't even interact with the customer at all. There is no "Poor service. 0 stars." or "Too expensive! Scam." to contend with.

> Technically farming is like owning the restaurant, but in practice, because everything is laid out for you and decisions are made elsewhere, it feels more like being the waiter. You are layers removed from the "ick".

To be blunt: I don't buy this... at all. Farmers have (in theory, and to some extent in practice) choice in (a) what they grow, (b) whether to grow organic/GMO/etc., (c) what pesticides/fertilizers/etc. they use and how much, (d) how they treat any animals they have, (e) whom they sell to... I could go on. Of course competition and supply and demand constrain what they can do, but that's true for most if not all business owners, including restaurant owners.

Waiters are not* like this... at all. They have -- by definition of their jobs -- zero control over the dishes, the recipe, the cooking, what is ordered, whom to serve, etc.

Therefore the idea that "technically" the farmer is like the restaurant owner but "in practice" like the waiter therefore makes no sense to me. They are (extremely) more similar to the restaurant owner in basically every dimension, not just "theoretically".

There’s something righteous in farming where it’s really hard to feel like you’re doing wrong even if you’re getting rich — you are just feeding people. It’s like being a doctor.

its why farmers are always such jolly folk

Many if not most businesses involve lots of ethical decisions where you have to choose between taking advantage of people or making less money.

Depending on one's values though I'd see something similar in some modern conventional farming where the land is being degraded, but there's still the righteousness that you are feeding people so it's justified.

There are ways to farm and some other kinds of businesses too that are win win for everyone involved. They're generally not the most short term profitable. Or even in-one-lifetime profitable.

I should clarify that I mean directly financially profitable. Obviously growing good food even if you lose money at it means people including your family and friends get to eat good food which has other benefits than cash.

I'm from Illinois at the edge of farmland, which rotates corn and soy.

I therefore wondered if it refers to this, a disease of corn...or if it was just a coincidental use of the word.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep43818.pdf?error=cookies_...

I imagine there's some satisfaction in feeding people that money can't buy.

There’s an exceedingly strong cultural drive to keep farmland “in the family” even if it impoverishes or otherwise inconveniences the descendants.

I had a coworker once who lives in this region and owns some amount of farmland in a similar situation. He could have sold it and moved his family to <insert modest paradise here, in his case Florida> at any point; even now I think it would be easily done, if not as easy as in the past. But of course he still lives there, immiserating himself to keep the farm barely viable and working a second job to provide a livable salary.

Why? Because selling it would offend his dead father’s pride.

I know someone in a similar position. Had a spirit more meant for tech, pursued it, but has to keep thinking about what to do about the family farm business. I think it's the same for any kind of family business, there's a sense of failure if you're the generation to close it down.

There's opportunities for the right person out there, I've seen it a few times - young man (or woman) who wants to run a farm or rural business or whatnot, either marries into the family or becomes "basically adopted" and inherits the business or farm.

You have tons of businesses that are viable (produce enough money to support a family) as long as you never load it with debt; because they do NOT produce enough to support a family and the debt load that would come from buying it.

So they're unsaleable.

> You have tons of businesses that are viable (produce enough money to support a family) as long as you never load it with debt; because they do NOT produce enough to support a family and the debt load that would come from buying it.

I've been thinking about this situation as "the bakery trap". The labor dimension here is that the best possible career move for the person you've spent the past n years training is to immediately leave once they've mastered your hot-cross bun recipe.

"The E-Myth" books talk about this (which is the worst name ever because the E is Entrepreneur not E as in email or emachines lol) - many small businesses are NOT small businesses, they're a job you own, and you can't sell a job.

First accountant I met with a year or so after a friend and I started our business 25+ years ago said: you guys don't have a business, you have a paid hobby.

Jokes on them because it's even less of a business now.

I used to date a woman in Germany who was trying to shake her farm roots for corporate aspirations. I didn't understand German that well but apparently other Germans could tell her accent. No different than someone from Appalachia being assumed to be uneducated, and how we debate the validity of poor English versus "dialect". It seemed like an unnecessary distraction to her life.

Eventually I met the father, and he was big into the farm life. running a small but industrial farm. I still didn't understand, he mentioned a love of feeding people, why is he doing this and why is he putting his family through this, my girlfriend was translating the things he said but I didn't get it, so I assumed language barrier. They did seem to be respected in the town though by all the shopkeepers. But given the options, they were quite liquid and wealthy, it seemed contrived.

Then I met the grandfather, now, I liked that guy. The grandfather had a diversified portfolio, golf ranges, restaurants, farms, different siblings and children running them all. There was no "I just love feeding people" bullshit, just revenue streams and property. The farmer son just got the short straw and had to adopt that persona.

>The farmer son just got the short straw and had to adopt that persona.

Deluding yourself into believing in what you do is easier than getting up every morning knowing it's bullshit.

Certain areas of government, debt collection companies, insurance industry, there are literally high rises full of people who live that existence every single day.

Yeah, that rings true. I assumed when asking my question that this was something to do with culture, identity, and social status within a particular community. In this case the culture (rural America) is alien to me. But I can understand the idea of making economically "irrational" choices for reasons to do with pride or culture or identity, though in the world I grew up in it's more things like become a classical musician, environmental scientist, or spend 6 years doing a humanities PhD. On the other hand, none of those things involve the allocation of $5M of capital, so there does seem to be something different about this kind of life choice.

> none of those things involve the allocation of $5M of capital,

they might if you count opportunity cost (ok not $5M but you get my point)

Maybe a nit, but In Illinois it's unlikely that what's being farmed goes into people's mouths generally. Corn (not your sweet corn, but field corn) and soy mostly go into other industries e.g. biofuels, animal feed, chemical industrial inputs etc.

Land can be financed over long periods and held forever. So a few hundred grand will pay off $5 million in about 20 years and then that's steady income forever after (as long as you keep farming).

Land can’t be financed, businesses can be financed. Businesses that own land are much more easily financed, with the lowest interest rates.

When you buy land to develop, you have to pony up cash for it. I have never heard of a lender lending without a cash flow producing asset as collateral.

You've got it backwards. Hard assets like land, buildings (aka. your house), machinery (a tractor or your car) are all much easier to finance than businesses. A simple Google search gives a wealth of resources for someone looking to finance (aka. mortgage) land and/or property for a farm.

https://www.farmcreditil.com/Products/farm-loans

There's even government grants and loans to help:

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/farm-loan-programs/farm-o...

Edit - we're on HN. If you'd ever tried to get a business loan you'd know it's near impossible for a new business without 100% collateral, which is why the entire venture capital business, and HN, even exists...

My point is those hard assets have to be used for a business, not for price speculation (as far as I know). Your second link says:

What is "assist with land tenure to save farmland for future generations"? Is that speculating for future price increase?

> My point is those hard assets have to be used for a business, not for price speculation (as far as I know). Your second link says:

Banks will let you finance any land if you have a way to pay for it. They'll let you mortgage some plot of land in the middle of nowhere if you have the income to pay for it.

A farm is income. A future farm is a business plan. But if you want to speculate on land from the city and work an office job, yeah, they'll give you a loan for that too.

> What is "assist with land tenure to save farmland for future generations"? Is that speculating for future price increase?

Pretty much yeah.

> Land can’t be financed

Doesn't seem accurate. See:

https://agamerica.com/land-loans/real-estate-loans/

https://www.farmcrediteast.com/en/FINANCING/Land-Loans

This is factually inaccurate. The land is the collateral. If you don’t service the debt, they take back the land. 75-85% loan to value, 2-4% interest over treasury rates. Underwriting guidelines for the loan will differ if this is for speculation, development into housing, or agriculture.

You're being pedantic.

Land not occupied by some money making asset also being financed or used as collateral in the deal cannot be financed at rates that are not the lending equivalent of a "we really don't want this job so we're bidding high".

This is simply not true based on the interest rates and underwriting guidelines, and I own raw ag land that has been financed with nothing else besides a down payment and the land as collateral. Words mean things my dude. These are not hard money rates, these are credit products specifically for land with no business, cash flow, or other income stream at time of transfer. Being ignorant or unsophisticated is a choice.

"Ag" is the keyword there and I suspect it roughtly translates to "somehow tax subsidized by the rest of us". Go try and get a loan on residential/industrial or otherwise non-ag land and get back to me. Everyone looks (i.e. does their due diligence) and nobody ever goes for it because the rates or terms are always laughable.

Since you're an expert link poster why don't you cherry pick us all up some of those underwriting guidelines you cite?

I look forward to learning about ag specific loan products.

I can have a wholesale originator (UWM) extend me credit for those use cases in ~15 minutes up to almost $1M at 7% (conforming, ready for sale into the ABS market), which is very reasonable imho. I can get up to $5M within a few days if it’s commercial through one of the commercial banks I work with (Wintrust). 80% LTV, most of the time.

Guidelines are openly available at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and USDA websites (unless there are specific overlays a bank is using, which is typically proprietary).

What does "conforming" mean here? Because I suspect there will be a reference in there that is a pointer to something involving government subsidy. Everything ag related is rife with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conforming_loan

I love government subsidies through implicit and explicit loan guarantees. It’s the reason a 30 year mortgage exists. It’s the reason one can default on an FHA mortgage with almost no consequences (while being almost impossible to default on student loan debt).

To your point this is “subsidized by the rest of us,” the bottom 50% of American earners only pay 2.3% of total federal income tax collected, with the top 50% paying the rest. The poor folks are not on the hook for subsidies when they come out of general federal gov revenue (FHA loans charge an upfront and monthly mortgage insurance premium, and there are similar costs for USDA and VA loans but lesser so; we can consider those costs “cost recovery” for the purpose of evaluating self funded vs subsidies via transfer from the general fund).

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

>I love government subsidies through implicit and explicit loan guarantees

Like student loans?

>It’s the reason a 30 year mortgage exists.

Which is a large part of the reason houses cost what they do.

>the bottom 50% of American earners only pay 2.3% of total federal income tax collected,

"Well the poors aren't paying for it, you are" isn't the endorsement you think it is. And the poors still get kicked in the dick by spending driven inflation same as the rest of us anyway.

This is news to me. Are you saying you can borrow money with the stated intention to speculate on future sale price, from the government no less?

I have no experience with farmland, but for other purposes such as building hotels/retail/etc, you can't just get a loan for the land, you buy the land with cash and then get a construction loan to start development. I assumed you would have to at least need to have a plan to operate a farm to get a loan.

One example:

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/farm-loan-programs/farm-o...

100% financing government backed:

> Farm Ownership Loans offer up to 100 percent financing and are a valuable resource to help farmers and ranchers purchase or enlarge family farms, improve and expand current operations, increase agricultural productivity, and assist with land tenure to save farmland for future generations. With a maximum loan amount of $600,000 ($300,150 for Beginning Farmer Down Payment), all FSA Direct Farm Ownership Loans are financed and serviced by the Agency through local Farm Loan Officers and Farm Loan Managers. The funding comes from Congressional appropriations as part of the USDA budget.

As long as your intent was in good faith at time of origination, you’ve met the burden.

Okay, but as mentioned, 5 million also buys 20 year treasuries that yield 4.90%, or about 245k a year. I probably wouldn't buy them on margin tho.

> I probably wouldn't buy them on margin tho.

Yeah, this is the pertinent detail. The whole point is putting down only a fraction of the amount.

When you calculate the rate of return on a financed property, the rate of return is versus the capital you put down, not the value of what you financed. Plus accruing equity in the property is part of the return.

If you put down $1.25 million and you get a $5 million property paid off after 20 years, that's double the rate of return on your bonds.

thank you

You say you only calculate rate of return on the "capital you put down"...Im not following here, do you think because youre spending profit from the farming operation that loan for the farm is paying for itself? The tbills pay for themself.... you have to work the farm for 20 years to pay back that 5 million. Its an apples and oranges comparison there.

You're right, it's not an apples to apples comparison, just like running any business will yield more than straight investments.

But opportunity cost is a thing. No land equals no farm and no opportunity for that return.

If not farming, what kind of job can the would-be farmer get and how would they accrue enough capital for their return on T-bills + income to equal their farming income paying off the land? Also my calculations didn't consider that the land value would rise, which it almost assuredly would.

he could spend 90% on tbills, 10% on a small farm, and then each year take the 2.5% the tbills generate and buy more farm fields, working the farm as it grows, or something like that, a mix of finance and farming

If $1 million in cash means you can get a $4 million plot of land, spending 90% on T-bills means you have only $900k in bonds and a measly $400k farm (25% down). So you have 1/10th of the land and your bonds are yielding $22,500...

What really happens is as you pay off equity on your land and equipment, you leverage that into buying more land and more equipment.

Successful restaurateurs buy more restaurants, successful tech startups hire more devs and buy more servers, successful farmers buy more land.

Actual (successful) business activity yields more than investments, which is why they reinvest in themselves over stock markets.

youve not accounted for the interest on the mortgage, which is probably double the initial figure

I mean, you _can_ buy 20 year bonds on margin. Reg T just limits you to 50% in most (all?) cases. And it doesn't buy you a job or a demand mountain of insurance contracts!

After The inevitable collapse good luck eating worthless T-bills! Ehehe

> that's steady income forever after

Let me tell you about farming... this isn't true.

Hah fair. Year to year is crazy but long term it smooths out.

It's buried in a figure legend, but the Tribune does acknowledge this too:

> Note: The 12 selected counties had some of the highest cash rents in the state. For the purposes of this analysis, a business entity was defined as an organization with an LLC, Inc, LTD, Co, Corp, LP or LLP tag. This land is not necessarily owned by large conglomerates and investment firms. Corporate structures are also attractive vehicles for family businesses.

Edit: apparently not that buried...

It's not buried anywhere, it's literally the next paragraph after the lede.

> These acres are not necessarily owned by large conglomerates and investment firms. Corporate structures are also attractive vehicles for family businesses because they offer tax benefits and externalize losses.

So it is... Chalk that up to my science reading skills -- I skimmed the text and skipped quickly to the charts, figures, and legends...

This is a use case where I think a current LLM shines. Ask it to summarize the important points of n papers, and slow read only the ones that pique your interest. It won't be perfect, but it will save you a ton of time while letting you focus on the things that need more attention.

I'm not anti-LLM even if the following statement sounds like it.

I don't trust LLMs, even to summarize for me. I have to fact-check every single statement. For instance, if I ask ChatGPT, "Is PLA more dense than ABS?" it answers, "No, PLA is not more dense than ABS." Those are direct quotes. In the third paragraph, ChatGPT says, "So technically, PLA is denser than ABS, not less — I misspoke earlier."

I find LLMs good for using words that I didn't think of. I can then reword a search to get better search results.

To be fair, the cherry-picked example I used above sounds a lot like a human. Humans make such mistakes and corrections. If a human had given me that response, I would shrug and ask more questions. But it would make that human not be my go to source.

It makes me shudder to think about code that is written in such a manner.

> It makes me shudder to think about code that is written in such a manner.

Often it has the property which was good enough for generations of C and C++ programmers, it compiles. Does it work? Eh. Do the tests, if there even are tests, check anything useful? Eh.

The focus on "it doesn't matter so long as it compiles" justifies everything up to IFNDR†, the explicit choice in C++ that if what you've written is nonsense but it would not be easy to modify the compiler to notice, just don't worry about it and say it's somebody else's problem.

† "Ill-formed, No Diagnostic Required" these words or near equivalent occur frequently in the ISO definition of the language.

A human that makes a mistake, catches it, corrects it and apologizes is someone I'd much rather interact with than someone that makes a mistake, catches it, and doubles down on the mistake that I then later discover the issue would be the person I would not be my go to source.

Mistakes happen. If they are honest mistakes, then we can deal with it. If they are deliberate mistakes, well, we can deal with that too but in a different manner. The problem that I have is answering something in a confident manner when it's really a hedge to not sound unsure. People apparently have issues with an unsure bot. I'd much rather have a response like, "I'm not positive, but I think PLA is less dense than ABS" for the wiggle room of being able to come back later with "So technically, PLA is more dense than ABS". Even if the bot doesn't figure it out, by phrasing that way, you're clued in on what to fact check

I am researching LLMs as a summarizing tool for medical research and early results show that LLMs do a better job than the current status quo of volunteer doctors. Pre print hopefully coming soon, until then youll just have to trust me that they are really good at summarizing and critiquing research.

It might surprise you, but copy-paste coders have always existed, LLMs are just making them more obvious, like "vibe coding". I don't use AI code assistants, but I can see why they could be valuable autocompleters in contexts where the user is knowledgeable.

It also makes me shudder to think of people who know just enough to compile and fix glaring mistakes, but largely trust the overall AI output. As if commercial software quality hasn't gone downhill enough these days.

I don’t know how to say this without seeming rude, but a few hundred acres is very small. 500 acres is less than a square mile. Is there something about your community that makes farms of that size more common than normal?

Edit: my (extended) family has a farm, and they cultivate X0,000 acres every year, though they own far less. They do plant a larger area than most for their community, but they’re not planting 20x their neighbors.

You're projecting "western desert but we pretend like it isn't" norms onto "eastern rich arable land" areas.

Interesting! It shocks me that you can run a farm on less than a square mile, I can practically plant that by hand, lol

On a recent Odd Lots episode, they interviewed a Canadian lentil farmer. His claim was that a family of 3 (Father, Mother, Daughter) could farm 1200 acres of lentils with time left over due to modern automation.

So I guess it would depend on the automation level of the kind of crops you’re planting.

Yeah, it's sorta both big and small.

It's small in that you can't support a family farming 500 acres of corn/beans. It's big in that buying 500 acres would cost $5M - $10M, that's real money!

If you don't mind me asking, how do you make it work for yourself? Are you single, so you don't need more? Or perhaps you're closer to a 'hobbyist' farmer? (although 500 acres is also well beyond a hobby haha)

I've been a FAANG engineer for the last 15 years, tech pays pretty well. The things you see on the news about "farming subsidies" often show up as government subsidized loans (lower rates and higher leverage) which has helped.

It's somewhere between an extra job and a hobby. It's just touch for planting / harvest season -- lots of nights / weekends / day job PTO along with getting help from relatives.

Oh wow, you're FAANG _and_ you're farming? lol that's impressive. I hope you make lots of jokes about how the F no longer stands for "Facebook", but rather "Farm" :)

Ouch. Better in some ways and worse than others than the restaurant business, I reckon.

My mom's relatives have a long horn "farm" complying with the minimum requirements to claim various tax exemptions. :sigh: Their family business is aviation real estate, services, equipment, and aircraft.

I can walk to where sorghum and field corn is grown here in hill country because that's the major trade in these parts, apart from selling land for new housing developments.

> all without the ick that comes with running other businesses

can you elaborate on this perception?

As a farmer my customer is the grain elevator, co-op, or sale barn. I don't have to hustle for sales, just play the market.

At least when I still farmed that's what it was. I answered to myself, not to customers or clients.

All commodities extraction/producing businesses are like that

And there are more outside of the commodities space

Well, thanks for pointing out what may be a common perspective amongst farmers, I think I prefer other businesses without the ick of running a farm

its ignorant slop.

Yeah, I think it would have been more useful if the Tribune had been able to determine "how many people are farming on land which they do not own" whether directly or through an LLC/company.

The amount of land owned by "out of state" owners may help answer this question but they don't give a number for that either. (A local farmer could also register their LLC out of state though I'm not sure whether that's beneficial or not.)

Setting up an LLC as foreign to the state you're living in likely won't save you on fees (since you'll register it as a foreign entity in your own state, especially for holding title to real estate), but it can open up additional features not offered by your state's laws, like series LLCs. Although as far as I know it's an open question as to whether the protections of Series LLCs will be respected by other states or just discarded when you try to use them.

(I'm not a member of any guilds)

This is probably similar in UK - although this is pure speculation.

A limited company owning the "land" which is then leased to the "farm" business that works it.

Possibly a "group" parent company is owned by the actual farmer.

I'm sure there will be good tax and legal protection reasons to structure farms in this way, not forgetting various government schemes which bring in revenue via grants and tax breaks.

My dad also had a farm in the UK owned through a company for tax reasons. Farming was a loss maker, land appreciation made loads of money.

How does vertical vs horizontal integration work? I imagine most of specialized gear doesn't make sense to acquire until you are at some scale.

Cute it's a status symbol. But that just screams market inefficiency ergo everyone worse off.

Yep I own one rental house and it's in an LLC. Very common for any property used as a business to have a business owner of record.

This is a critical insight - the statistics likely count many actual farmer-owners as "non-farmers" due to LLC/trust structures, which significantly distorts the narrative about ownership concentration in agriculture.

Land does weather inflation quite a bit better than T bills do, though.

Some land does. A lot of land does not.

I think this is strictly not a true statement?

Land value can decrease in real terms at the same time inflation is happening, sure. But it isn’t revalued by inflation in the way that a contract denominated in the inflationary currency is.

Can you explain more about what you mean?

I don’t understand what your comment could mean.

You buy land at time t for price x. You sell land at time t+1 for price y. If (y-x)/x is is less than the same calculation for whatever other asset you would have bought (I would use sp500), then you lost money.

I didn’t say that land was as good as the s&p at appreciating in value. That is a completely different claim which I wouldn’t assert. S&P has appreciated considerably more than inflation, right? So saying that something does or doesn’t track inflation is completely different from whether you lost money compared to if you’d instead gone with the s&p.

Agricultural land you can cultivate certainly does, particularly irrigated land.

Land in the desert with zero economic value (think Slab City) probably does not keep up with inflation.

As a land owner you should be much more worried about state and local laws than what goes on at the fed.

There are millions of Americans who own what would otherwise be "developable and valued as such" land that became basically worthless with the state passage of various environmental laws (particularly wetlands setback stuff) that make the juice not worth the squeeze except if the location were to become "major urban area" level dense while the municipalities passed zoning laws making it all but impossible for that to ever happen.

I guess when you think about it it's not that the land is less valuable. It's that there's no value left after doing what you'd need (endless engineering and construction hoops, lawyers, court, etc) to extract the value without the government just unilaterally deciding you no longer own the land and backing that up with violence.

I find Illinois taxes to be scarier for land than other investments.

Illinois state is in a bad financial position, they can't inflate their way out of it. Financial assets are easier to move than land if things get bad.

there is no type of farming that will beat t bills? none? people arent working on ideas to make farming more profitable? i just dont believe that american farms, which cover unimaginably vast areas and are unimaginably numerous, could be continuously funded by banks if they were losing money. thats impossible. subsidies cant explain it. i think youre lying or leaving out some context

> there is no type of farming that will beat t bills? none?

There is no type of farming that beats t-bills today if you buy the land today. There is a saying in farming: "Buying farmland never makes sense the day you buy it." The land you bought 50 years ago is looking pretty damn good now, though. The economic bet farmers not cashing out (or buying in) are making is that trend will continue.

> so we're all counted as "not farmers" here

Reminds me of when, a few years ago, the outrage headlines were "half of all US corporations didn't pay income tax last year!"

When one dug into it, it was because half the corporations didn't make any money that year.

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