“It doesn’t matter how wet it is today,” he said. “We’re just two weeks away from a drought.” [/i]
I feel bad for the large scale farmers who have specialized themselves into this mess, but the reality is these news stories are just reporting a symptom of a problem and not the root cause in my opinion. I'm almost 50 years old, and while farming skipped a generation with my dad our family has a long history of Midwest farming. Guess what? Weather has always been happening! You know what average weather is? It's temps in the 90s one year and 70s the next. Just because the average is in the 80s doesn't mean you see it all that often. It also means 24 inches of rain one year and 10 the next. Just because the average sounds great doesn't mean that in either year your rainfall was ideal. I cull trees from my property for firewood, my son and I enjoy looking at the different size rings in the wood and recognizing the story those rings tell us about droughts and rain over the last 20-50 years. There have been a lot of lean and wet years going back to at least the 1950s. And can you imagine the monumental guilt trip We'd be sending ourselves on if a year or two like the 1930s dust bowl happened today?? Crazy weather is not news!
The NY Times and similar reporting organizations have a bias, in my opinion, of wanting to report all weather related stories with a nod towards global man-made climate change (some decades they say we're getting cooler, some decades hotter, but whatever is happening we humans need to feel bad about it). I fully agree the climate is changing. I also can't imagine how we humans aren't having an effect, but the argument is still a red herring.
The real reason we see all these sad farmers in the news year in and year out is that they no longer have the diversification necessary to ride out different types of weather. If you are in corn and your land, which you disc'd into powder two months ago gets flooded out before the seed roots take hold, you're screwed. The reason you are screwed is because all you are in is corn, or beans, or wheat. When I was a kid we did corn, beans, wheat, cow/calf, some hogs, chickens, and a large garden, all on 160 acres. To add even more diversification my uncle built a little shop on a corner of the farm and fixed cars. There was always something that worked and made money. Furthermore the farm and the equipment was paid for. There were times in the depression when they borrowed against it short term, but they always had a plan to pay off the debt quick and they never got leveraged to the gills.
That diversification is starting to come back in small farms, but it is hard to make those profitable (I'm trying to make ours pay now, but our diversification will always include off farm income). For the large farms its gone. Add to that things like the farm bill, which in my opinion is at least partially little more than agricultural welfare, and large agribusiness firms paying huge amounts to our state ag schools to spread the GMO, factory farm, kool aid and you have a recipe for disaster.
Meanwhile the NY Times shows us a sad looking farmer with a flooded field and blames it on the weather...
Sorry for the rant. This is a touchy subject with me.
