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Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well

As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt.

The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.

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Yeah, there's this whole YouTube genre of fairly unassuming farms showing off millions of dollars in the latest and greatest John Deere equipment and coming up with rationalizations about how it's going to pay for itself very soon.

But the bottom line is that there are fat years and lean years in agriculture, but if it gets really bad for a sufficient number of farmers, the government bails you out because the alternative - no food - is recognized as worse.

Thanks for weighing in here.

> we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years

Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers? From TFA:

> This is the worst agriculture economy of my lifetime over at least the past three years

Thanks again for commenting.

> Could you offer some color on the prominent narrative from farmers (even in this article) that the last few years have just been terrible for farmers?

I honestly have no idea. Three years ago in particular is when the perfect storm lead to historically high commodity prices. If that's what they consider the worst time in agriculture history, I have no understanding of where they are coming from. The problem right now is that the input costs are still trying to act as if it is still three years ago, which is a problem, but the cure for high prices is high prices. I see no reason to think that will last.

As suggested before, it is likely that they are overleveraged and the loss of profitability coupled with higher interest rates is what is killing them. That's the trouble with trying to be a mid-sized player.

The comments/narrative in TFA don't line up with FRED. 2022 was like 3x more profitable overall compared to 2016, and 2023 wasn't much worse. It's definitely coming back down.

From TFA though, 2400 is like 2x-2.5x median farm size. That's not a small farm size. It's not a massive corpo farm, but it's not a small farm. So the segment quoted in that article might be under some pretty specific pressures (other commenters alluded to - they may have bought some very pricey equipment during good years - an actually small farm will get by on shittier equipment or just rent for a brief harvest)

Because no farmer ever will tell you he had a good year. He should have sold a month earlier than he did, or held on a week longer. Just the way it is, I guess.

In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some things are more volatile - dairy can swing between losses and significant profits. Layers are pretty steady if you are on a contract, as long as you don't get the avian flu. Produce farmers rarely have a loss year, but their high income years are generally not as high as crop farmers, who sometimes do show a significant annual loss. More risk = more reward.

The last few years have been pretty good overall, for my clients.

> In my business I see their books. Good years and bad years. Some

Can you share the typical interest rates for these "family farm" (2000 acres?) ?

2000 acres! That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.

> In 2024, there were over 100 sales of excellent productivity farmland in Region 6. The sale price per acre ranged from $11,000 to $22,508, with an average value of $17,210 per acre.

[1] https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/farm-focus/2025-04-18-2...

> That’s only worth $30+ million up here in the corn belt.

And more like $60 million (USD; $80 million CAD) in the Canadian corn belt, which is not even nearly as productive. It is astonishing how cheap US farmland is.

Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.

I recognize that harvest windows are restricted, but a coop of local farmers having shared ownership in the bigger toys seems like it might make some economic sense.

And a quick web search shows that some are doing it: https://www.roguefarmcorps.org/equipment-sharing

You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?

There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers.

There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.

> You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“?

I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different?

> There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech.

Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual.

> And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up?

I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.

> There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.

I don't doubt it, but the main person quoted in the article is sitting on like $20 million to $30 million of cultivated land and $??? of additional land (Could be hundreds of thousands, could be another 8 figures).

To the extent there is a separation of wealth problem, it's not at all clear where that person is in the separation. Maybe they debt financed the whole thing plus equipment under ZIRP with a non-fixed interest loan, and are now staring down the barrel of $1M-$2M annual interest payments, with very little capital of their own. Maybe they have a total net worth of $10M+ even if they had to sell, and are actually fine if they just quit the game right now. I dunno.

My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.

Farmers that learned the lesson didn't have their kids go into farming.

This sounds like victim blaming.

Sometimes "victims" have been looking for some consequences for quite a while. Poke a bear long enough to be hurt, don't be surprised people blame you, "the victim".

When other businesses can't hack it, we let them go bankrupt and do something more productive. Why do farmers get treated any differently?

Because it's in the national interest to not let them go bankrupt (because without food you die).

This is scaremongering. Oh noez, we'll all die unless this group gets a bailout from Uncle Sugar.

That sounds like the anti-vax argument that's so used to having the thing they forget the realities.

The difference being that viruses exist, and the scenario in question with food is ridiculous nonsense.

> The difference being that viruses exist, and the scenario in question with food is ridiculous nonsense.

Its not, famines are a real thing and many people die from them. They only way money can prevent famines is by making farmers grow more food last year.

So its just as important to pay farmers with government money to keep growing food as it is to pay hospitals to keep treating people.

Countries don't want to be too reliant on food imports if/when they go to war with their neighbours

Do we? What we saw in 2020 and 2008 suggests otherwise.

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