Posted on 07/11/2013 10:17:02 PM PDT by george76
House GOP leaders took a big gamble Thursday in bringing a farm bill without food stamps to the floor, and it paid off — just barely.
The House passed the bill 216-208, inching across a 213-vote threshold without a single Democrat supporting the measure.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.rollcall.com ...
That was a gamble?
ONE BIG WIN!
In their defense, putting a soybean crop in costs about $130/acre. Corn $400/acre. cotton I don't know but high.
Then hope and pray for favorable winds, rains, and no natural catastrophes.
Next combines and tractors and cotton pickers costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. cost of land unless your great grandfather got it and kept it during the depression or the dust bowl.
Farmers make a lot of money but keep very little.
My Caterpillar salesman said he planted two too many cotton crops on his father's farm in Mississippi in the 80’s and lost the farm.
Asset rich, cash poor.
I farm because I enjoy it. I plant soybeans because I can afford to plant this crop. We buy second hand older equipment. I have a fellow who can fix anything. Know how many parts on a combine can break? All of them.
Mark Twain: “No man can stand success, another’s that is.”
Christmas Tree tax!!!
In their defense, putting a soybean crop in costs about $130/acre. Corn $400/acre. cotton I don't know but high.Uh huh and your crops are probably already sold before you plant them.
What does an acre of soy yield? At what price?
A bill loaded with subsidies. That this is viewed as a “win” by the GOP tells me what I need to know about the party.
….LET the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forevermore. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he ever suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.
No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad be comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interests, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking–that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John Baptists–these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only one issue ever fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.
Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the Ur-burgher, the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the state! And why? Because he produces something that all of us must have–that we must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing by paying him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. But the farmers carry it on incessantly, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cottongrowers in the South. Back in the 1920’s they agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price–and instantly every party to the agreement began planting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up –and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury–in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us.
The same demand is made sempiternally by the wheat farmers of the Middle West. It is the theory of the zanies who perform at Washington that a grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal art in a philanthropic and patriotic spirit–that he plants and harvests his crop in order that the folks of the cities may not go without bread. It is the plain fact that he raises wheat because it takes less labor than any other crop–because it enables him, after working no more than sixty days a year, to loaf the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising could be taken out of the hands of such lazy fellahin and organized as the production of iron or cement is organized, the price might be reduced by two-thirds, and still leave a large profit for entrepreneurs. But what would become of the farmers? Well, what rational man gives a hoot? If wheat went to $10 a bushel tomorrow, and all the workmen of the cities became slaves in name as well as in fact, no farmer in this grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily to a reduction of as much as 1/8 of a cent a bushel. “The greatest wolves,” said E. W. Howe, a graduate of the farm, “are the farmers who bring produce to town to sell.” Wolves? Let us not insult Canis lupus I move the substitution of Hyæna hyæna.
- H.L. Mencken
Cost of putting in a crop of Mencken bloviation: approaching zero.
If the feds were not sucking the life out of the economy at every level and turn, you would have a wealthier market buying your produce at higher prices.
Taxes and subsidies are equally evil — stealing and receiving stolen goods are equally evil.
Hear here!
What does an acre of soy yield? At what price?
LOL!
Go ahead and tell him Mr. Farmer. From the tone of the question, I don't think LL is looking for the candid truth, but tell him anyway.
Especially the yield per acre! As a former farmer, I know that you know, so don't lie! THAT's always so predictable.
Oh, don't forget the price, I have a pretty good guess how much of your crop is pre-sold, so what do you think you're going to get for the rest? THAT'S so predictable too!
I plant soybeans because I can afford to plant this crop. ...From the tone of the question, I don't think LL is looking for the candid truth, but tell him anyway.I don't want the candid truth? Or YOU are afraid to disclose the truth? From the lack of answers I'll safely assume the latter.
The only "tone" I hear is cry babies wanting more from the teet.
Crying about $130 to plant an acre of income producing product as if that's a lot of money? It costs more than that to plant a lawn on a postage stamp sized lot...You know like the lawn at your(taxpayer subsidized) 2nd home at the beach/lake/mountains.
Are you suggesting that a physical laborer or business owner would be in favor of agribusiness subsidies?
OK smarty pants, in my old neck of the woods, soybeans are $15.11 today at the close, down 48 cents from yesterday.
The new beans will be ready to sell about Septembe 1.
Name the 9-1-2013 price.
Come on, you KNOW you can do it. Name the price.
I'm suggesting that quoting in extenso a notorious bloviator with absolutely no first-hand knowledge of farming or business (and during the time of the Farm Revolt in the 1890s to boot) is not going to add a thing to the discussion.
Mencken was a little later, in the 20s, but same idea.
How is mocking the farm subsidies initiated under Harding (the 1922 Grain Futures Act) the same as bloviating (a word coined by Harding) about the Populist movement of circa 1896?
The Populists deserved to be mocked, of course, but were less deserving of ridicule than farm subsidies.
Get it cry baby?
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