Posted on 05/19/2011 7:51:55 AM PDT by OB1kNOb
On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it's usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he'd met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. "A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay," said the hedge fund manager. "He's a year older than I am. We're somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now."
"We," as in, his hedge fund.
It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone's thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there's something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad.
The pattern began to emerge sometime in 2008..........
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.com ...
Thanks for the links. I’m always interested in what Jim Rogers has to say about these related issues.
I agree with you. I never got the obsession with MREs. Stock up on the basics instead, like you said, and then you can do a thousand things with them. Every one of the things you mentioned can be combined and prepared into a thousand different things—so you won’t get tired of them.
I’m not a self-appointed “survivalist expert” so what do I know, but my parents lived through WWII in Italy as the Allies were fighting their way up the peninsula. They always told me that their neighbors who did the best during the war were the farmers—they had everything they needed right there.
Nobody got through 10 years of the Depression depending on K-rations. They gardened and stored food.
Don't stock up on brown rice, it may be more nutricious, but white rice has a much longer shelf-life.
You’re welcome!
Thanks for the advice!
***”Additionally, there isn’t much arable land out there, it’s not increasing, and the quality of the land varies from parcel to parcel.”
I radically disagree with the article’s quote above. There is tons of available arable land, once we stop wasting it.
The suburbs here in the Northeast are filled with acre upon acre of grass. Grass that no animal will ever graze on. And people fill their yards with ornamental, not edible, trees and flowers. Many people will specifically cut down food-producing trees because they hate to have walnuts or black cherries or mulberries or whatever dropping their fruits and making a mess of the precious lawn.
So we give up some degree of self-sufficiency to look pretty.
This behavior is just plain dumb, I’m sorry, and wasteful of what the good Lord gave us on this earth.
Now imagine if we all had a change in mentality. Imagine if we saw our homes as little homesteads, like this:
http://www.dervaesgardens.com/
Hot sauce is the key lots and lots of hot sauce!
Not a lot of difference in a hedge fund manager and a pimp and a bookie, except with the pimp you get someone that will not lie to you about screwing you out of your money.
I radically disagree with the article’s quote above. There is tons of available arable land, once we stop wasting it.
I agree with you for the reasons you enumerate.
Now imagine if we all had a change in mentality. Imagine if we saw our homes as little homesteads....
I have noticed a marked rise in interest of growing one's own garden in the last year or two, by a number of acquaintances that in the past have not raised anything. I suspect as times get tougher and food prices skyrocket higher we'll begin seeing a large increase in the number of individual home's with "Obama-depression gardens".
No so hard since my heritage is steeped in agriculture although, now I am more a gentleman farmer.
Don’t forget the oil and the salt and more spices wouldn’t hurt.
Absolutely. I’ve heard it from a couple of garden stores—people are really looking for edibles.
I’m kinda glad we never got to move into the acreage we wanted, because I’m learning a lot pushing the limits of what I can produce in my tiny backyard. It’s really opening my eyes about the productive use of space.
I have 3 freezers and all are full to the brim and my husband took a beef to get processed and he’s going to kill me when I tell him that we have to get another freezer.
And in the West they have sewn up millions of acres of “wilderness” where no one can go unless on foot or horseback. It used to be grazed by cattle until then, now it burns because the underbrush is so thick it kills the trees and the habitat.
Grain, yes, much of it for animal feed. Most other edible foodstuffs, no. The dollar balance on HUMAN FOOD has been negative since 2000. I've been on this for a while:
Want a REAL source?
Here is a 100 pp paper on the topic prepared for the Millennium Round of the WTO by the Center for North American Studies.
Here is the PowerPoint slide presentation that goes with it.
We are a net agricultural exporter. We are a net FOOD importer. (You can't eat cotton, tobacco, catfish, animal feed, and soybean meal).
Yikes. Sobering. So if the dollar tanks, we are in huge trouble?
In the transient case, yes, because the nation only has a few months worth of food stores (JIT you know). We have plenty of productive land that can be converted to food production, but whether the tooling, knowledge, labor, and distribution exists to make that change under the duress of chaos is unknown.
Comparative advantage has its unaccounted and socialized risks.
National security starts with food security, but is founded in human relationships based in a common morality. Somebody taught us how to manage that risk 3,500 years ago, but nobody seems to have listened.
tooling, knowledge, labor, and distribution exists
I am of the opinion that we don’t have the above and you left out financing.
The American farmer’s average age is 57 and farmers really need apprenticeships rather than a formal education. It is hard to impossible to grow up in a city and decide to farm, even if you have the financial backing. It is even hard to come from another part of the country and try to farm, you have to learn what works with each crop, the land and the water.
I’ve seen many who tried and many who failed. One notable example was the guy who inherited 7 Million and within less than 7 years was broke.
What we export is not necessarily what we can’t eat—we raise 77 million acres of soybeans and export 35%. The 35% could come close to feeding the entire population of the US for a year. WE can also eat catfish, and most of what is in animal feed too. I use the USDA Stats. And finally, we can grow a lot more food if need be. Parts of Iowa and Illinois have the best test soil in the world. We are scheduled to grow about 90 million acres of corn this year.
See post 37.
I use the USDA Stats.
IMO, they my be truthful, but they are also full of spin. I found the TAMU stats sufficiently detailed and trended to get an honest idea of what portends.
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