July 10, 2024

During the early 1980s, the Reaganites bankrupted thirty percent of the farmers assuming corporations would take over agriculture and create an improvement. It was the young farmers that went under, because they start with bank loans. They couldn't pay the banks and went under, while the old-timers had loans payed off and could sit out the bad times.

The corporations were the first to go bankrupt, because corporations can never compete as well as owner-operators in any business. Owner-operators stay on top of everything and do preventative maintenance, while corporations have to wait for something to break before they know whether it needs fixing.

The method Reaganites used was to dump stored-up reserves onto the markets continuously over several years. In 1952, wheat was $1.25 per bushel. In 1983, wheat was $1.25 per bushel. It should have been $3.50.

A surplus of products has been the only major problem farmers have had since WW-II. During the 1950s and 60s, a good program was to have farmers set aside some acres, called soil bank, and get paid rental equivalent from the government. It worked marvelously well. And it resulted in very high pheasant populations in the Midwest, because the soil bank acres were planted into grass and alfalfa. The viny, old, uncut alfalfa prevented coyotes from getting to the pheasants. So pheasants thrived on the soil bank acres.

But as pheasants thrived, the coyotes stopped going after jackrabbits preferring pheasants that migrated off the soil bank acres. So the jackrabbit population increased. The rabbits would eat bark off trees in shelter belts during the winter, which killed the trees. So some farmers wanted the process to end to reduce jackrabbit populations.

Now days, monoculture corn and soybeans dominate agriculture as the prevailing power structure. Everyone loses from that process except the producers. They over-produce and demand the government to require more ethanol in gas tanks to use up the surplus corn on ethanol.

The driving force for over-production is GMO corn and soybeans, which allow spraying without tillage. The spraying can be contracted freeing up farmers to work twice as many acres.

But the absence of tillage damages the ground resulting in gulley erosion, because tillage is needed to work debris into the surface and loosen up the surface to allow moisture and oxygen to penetrate the soil. With a hard crust on the surface, water runs rapidly over the surface cutting trenches which take form as gulley erosion. Trying to prevent gulley erosion from no-till has been the largest subject studied in agriculture with no significant solutions.

Conservatives assume agriculture needs to be large-scale to produce efficiency. They are wrong. Small farmers diversify combining crop and animal production, which allows time and space to be used more efficiently and reduces pollution. The smaller the scale of farming, the greater the efficiency, because small-scale farmers stay on top of everything, which is extremely important in agriculture.

Large-scale operators have everything planned in advance and do not have the opportunity to adapt to conditions. Or with monoculture corn and soybeans, the necessary tillage is omitted to increase size of operations. In the central corn belt, conditions are so ideal that there is not much variability. Elsewhere, there is a lot of variability.

In most of agriculture, conditions are quite variable and must be accounted for. It's important to plant seeds in highly moist soil. If planted in dry ground, the seeds will be damaged before getting proper moisture. Therefore, the ground needs to be conditioned properly in the fall to minimize working in the spring, because working the ground dries it out.

Seeds germinate from humid air, not water, because water seals out oxygen. So seeds have humidity absorbing surface chemicals called phytates consisting of phosphate groups which attach to calcium, as calcium is very hygroscopic. The humidity is then absorbed from moist ground. So getting moisture into the ground before planting and not working it out requires concerted effort. If it matters, pre-planned processes won't be as adequate as adapting to conditions. Only small farmers can adapt, while large operators are stuck with pre-planned processes.