Fellas,

I was doing some mindless internet browsing and saw a video of a live performance by Merle Haggard singing Max D. Barnes' "In My Next Life", which is a song about a dying farmer lamenting that he failed at what he had hoped to do with his life.


Anyway, in the comments section, a farmer weighed in with this statement:

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Farmers often measure their self-worth by the success of their farming operation. Two dangers in this. If they get rich they are proud and arrogant. But if their farming does not succeed then they are told they are failures by the banker, the neighbors and often their family as well. In Montana we have some of the highest suicide rates in the country. We edged out Alaska for #1 this year. Those of us who are lucky come to end of our farming careers half-way in between rich and poor. Some humility and some assets to spend on our honey's during retirement.

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Is this fairly accurate, or not?

My dad never plowed the ground, so my family has no experience in farming. Dad grew up on a dairy farm and messed with cows the rest of his life just for the heck of it, and to make some extra money. It was never something he did to earn his living.

Not really sure. My experience nowadays is some farmers are farming for subsidies, they don't care if they crop makes it and lots (rice and cotton) will
Make more if it gets claimed on insurance they than would if it is harvested due to poor yield and bad rates.

I've been in the business for a while and have known several farmers, some very successful farmers, many successful farmers, and mostly broke farmers scraping by. Have only heard of one suicide. Most of them are eternal optimists and I'd say more than half of them have no business running a business. Good farmers and good people but have zero business sense. Granted my experience is almost entirely in Texas. Always hear about farmer suicides in India that they are trying to blame on Monsanto

Farmer here, that comment struck a chord that I'd never really thought about.

I'm 36, but good and bad years don't stir those feelings in me. Possibly because I have plenty of other interests, and know that I can't control the weather but will always try to make it work.

Noticed this again in my dad this year. No interests outside of ag. When it dumped 3-4 feet of water in spring of 2015, he went in a funk. Mom told me he felt like he wasn't a good farmer. Same thing has happened this spring. We'll have about 40-50% of land prevented plant, but he's still trying to plant sorghum or other less profitable crops, when no one else around is trying to get anything in. Part of it is he's on directors board of a US Grains group for sorghum and is embarrassed he won't have much. But its pretty easy to see getting everything planted has a correlation with his ego.

OnlyForNow said:

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Not really sure. My experience nowadays is some farmers are farming for subsidies, they don't care if they crop makes it and lots (rice and cotton) will
Make more if it gets claimed on insurance they than would if it is harvested due to poor yield and bad rates.

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This is such bullcrap.

No one can afford to farm "for the subsidies and insurance".

That's like saying you wreck your car so you can afford the payments

CanyonAg77 said:

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OnlyForNow said:

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Not really sure. My experience nowadays is some farmers are farming for subsidies, they don't care if they crop makes it and lots (rice and cotton) will
Make more if it gets claimed on insurance they than would if it is harvested due to poor yield and bad rates.

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This is such bullcrap.

No one can afford to farm "for the subsidies and insurance".

That's like saying you wreck your car so you can afford the payments

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+1

Easiest way to go broke is to not make your best crop and hope for a subsidy or insurance claim.

Some farmers in the Midwest are going to lose their asses this summer due to all the rain leading to preventative planting acres. None of them want to skip getting corn and soybeans planted but mother nature is being a big ol' B right now.

CanyonAg77 said:

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OnlyForNow said:

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Not really sure. My experience nowadays is some farmers are farming for subsidies, they don't care if they crop makes it and lots (rice and cotton) will
Make more if it gets claimed on insurance they than would if it is harvested due to poor yield and bad rates.

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This is such bullcrap.

No one can afford to farm "for the subsidies and insurance".

That's like saying you wreck your car so you can afford the payments

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I don't think thats what he's saying ... or at least I didn't read it like that.

I read it as ... being a 'good' farmer doesn't equal financial success. Even if you **** up because you are a 'bad at farming,' at the end of the day, between subsidies and insurance you make the same money at the end of the year when all is said and done whether you put in the extra effort to be 'good' at your job or not.

The way the insurance and subsidies are set up is akin to the inflatable tubes they put in the gutter at the bowling alley.

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The way the insurance and subsidies are set up is akin to the inflatable tubes they put in the gutter at the bowling alley

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Only if every game, they use smaller and smaller tubes and after 4-5 games they make the gutters twice as big as normal gutters.

I trust you as I believe you're an actual farmer, but a man I met who leases 5,000 acres for rice told me that it was better if his rice crop was unharvestable, and there for covered by insurance, than if he tried to sell it.


Is he lying or is there a difference in what is farmed?

Look, so it doesn't totally come off as merely snippy, let me explain about crop insurance. Your payout is based partially on the premium you pay. The higher the premium, the greater the percent of the established yield you can receive insurance on.

Second, it's based on the established yield, or the history of production on that farm. I don't recall all the ins and outs, but I believe it's a five year average.

So if you're growing kumquats, and made 100 pounds of kumquats per acre the past 5 years, you have an established yield of 100 pounds. And you can pay a premium that guarantees payment for anywhere from 50-75% of that 100 pounds, at last year's price. The higher your guarantee, the higher your premium.

So say that kumquat weevils ruined your crop, and you gathered 0 kumquats this year. You have spent a normal year's worth of seed, chemical, fuel, fertilizer, labor, etc., and you only got 50-75% gross revenue, less the premium.

But, by golly, you're a kumquat farmer at heart, and you try again next year. And you pay the same high premium, but wait a minute, your established yield is down to 80 pounds per acre. Why? Five year average.

So you plant anyway, but this time the dreaded kumquat ducks land on your field and eat all your kumquats. You turn in a claim, and anxiously wait for your check in the mail, which is now 50-75% of 80 pounds, not 100.

But OnlyForNow told you you could make a living "farming for subsidies and insurance", so year three, you try again. But now, your establshed yield is only 60 pounds for acre....

Why does your established yield change if you don't produce a crop?

It's not snippy, I don't know **** about actual farming.

With regard to the suicide issue,

It may be the case that modern farming is more of a science than an art. Its like that with a lot of professions that once required a high level of skill and a little good luck. Sort of like driving a race car with modern features like traction control / ABS and the like. It is less about the skill of an individual driver and more about keeping it between the lines. Modern day pilots are another example. Theres a process thats been dialed in. The right way or conventional way to do things is pretty much settled. Follow the checklist weve developed and don't go off script.

Second is probably social isolation due to modern technology.

Third, is what I think is an epidemic in society in general ... being bombarded with so much non-local information / entertainment options that it makes people feel like thy are somehow inadequate and question and or disassociate with their overall their role in society. At one time there was a clear separation between the entertainment and reality. Now, not so much.

OnlyForNow said:

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Why does your established yield change if you don't produce a crop?

It's not snippy, I don't know **** about actual farming.

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because 0 becomes 1 year of your 5 year average yield...

Not producing a crop isn't part of your produced average though, it's just what you're getting paid for.

I think my guys go off a 10 year and they can remove 2 zeros. We are on year 4 of zeros

OnlyForNow said:

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I trust you as I believe you're an actual farmer, but a man I met who leases 5,000 acres for rice told me that it was better if his rice crop was unharvestable, and there for covered by insurance, than if he tried to sell it.


Is he lying or is there a difference in what is farmed?

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People will tell you all sorts of incredible bullcrap.

Now, is it possible, that in some years, insurance is more profitable?

Sure.

Is it a long term, sustainable practice?

Or, heck, no.

Let's look at what could be happening here....say the guy was a good farmer, and had a good established yield for insurance, having made good crops for years. I have no idea what a good yield is, but let's say it's 8000 pounds per acre.

And as I said above, the price is set based upon some time in the previous year. And let's say that the price was excellent, say $15/cwt.

So your friend may have insured a 65% yield, or about 5200 pounds, or $780 an acre.

Best case scenario, is that the price and yield stay excellent, and he eats the premium, just like you do when you don't wreck your car.

But say the price plummets, to $10/cwt. Now, he's going to have to make 7800 pounds of rice, just to equal the price that insurance would pay.

If he's going to make 9000 or 10,000 pounds, he shrugs his shoulders and runs the combine.

But if it's going to be a normal 8000 pound yield, he'll have lower gross income, after paying for harvest.

So if he's expecting less than that, it would be more profitable in the short run, if a hurricane just wiped it out, and he could collect and not pay harvest costs. But it hurts his established yield, and is not sustainable in the long run.

I've run into that, where a wheat crop had drought or hail, and was going to make 5-10 bushels per acre dryland, on an established yield of around 20 bushels. I had to prove that the yield was that dismal, in order to get the insurance company to pay on the delta between actual yield and the insurance guarantee.

So I had to run the combine through that lousy wheat (talk about depressing) and haul it to the elevator, paying the costs to harvest. Not as expensive as a good harvest, but not cheap, either.

To add insult to injury, if the insurance price per bushel was higher than the market price, I also got to absorb that delta, as every bushel I did harvest went for market price rather than insurance price. (Assuming it was higher that year, which has happened.)

OnlyForNow said:

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Not producing a crop isn't part of your produced average though, it's just what you're getting paid for.

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Wrong.

EDIT: Sorry, meant to explain.

If you try to produce a crop, and it fails, it becomes part of your rolling five (or 10) year "produced average".

It's like you went to Vegas and won $1000 every year from 2013-2017. You have good established average of winning $1000 at Vegas. But in 2018, you won nothing. Your established record for Vegas 2019 is now $800.

If you simply fallow, or grow a different crop, different rules come into play, which are escaping me right now.

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It's not snippy, I don't know **** about actual farming.

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Which is why I told you that "farming for insurance and subsidies" is bullcrap.

Maybe next time, qualify it as something you were told, and maybe didn't fully understand, rather than as fact.

Grew up on a farm, work in the Ag industry and own an 85 head cattle herd. Here's my take, the more $$ you chase the more risk of suicide/a miserable life there is.

I don't mean making money is bad or even trying to make more is a problem. If you're a farmer and you decide to lease more land and buy a bigger tractor and implements to farm 50% more land than you currently have, sure you may very well make more money. But you also run the risk that you may not make enough to pay for your land lease and cover your payments on an extra $400k worth of equipment. The same with cattle ranching. When you chase dollars you start putting everything at risk. Buying new tractors to farm more land, buying expensive bulls to produce more beef, buying better equipment to improve production or efficiency, etc all of a sudden makes it to where you owe a lot of money to someone and that is where the risk creeps in. Then if you have a hiccup you get behind and if you have another hiccup all of a sudden you're in a hole that you may not be able to climb out of and that puts your family and for some people their own life at risk. If you can get by with a 40 year old tractor and 10 year old truck you'll probably be ok. But when you need a new truck every 3 years and you have to have the latest tractor with the most current computer system and crop monitoring system and you can't pay for it in cash, then you may turn into a statistic. The old adage don't live beyond your means is something that farmers/ranchers can do pretty easily if they aren't careful.

I think you've just described the modern mentality of: "if you're not growin', you're goin' "

Ain't saying its right. Thats just what its called.

OP - my family is from Wyoming. The suicide problem has nothing to do with farming. It has to do with living in extremely rural isolated areas. Cold long winters add to the mix and short days don't help either.

Your average rancher in Abilene has a lot more day to day interaction than the rancher in Medicine Bow Wyoming

So canyon already did a pretty good job covering it all but I still want to jump in and defend the guys I work for. As part of my job I work with about 50 operations around central Texas and can tell you none of them is farming for insurance. AG is just like any other sector, during downturns and slow economic times (kind of like right now where commodity prices have been pretty low the last 5+ years) the bad operators and less efficient people are forced out. So over the years the herd is culled and you are left with the best operations. Maybe guys could get away with farming just for insurance and subsidies 30 years ago, but not today. As he said, there might be a year or two where it makes sense to take insurance on a crop, but as a continual practice will have you out of the business before too long.

Just look at this year, the brazos bottom would normally plant cotton mid to late March. Well it kept raining and they never did, insurance deadline is coming up at the end of May, but rather than take prevent plant, they are now planting cotton 2 months late since we've had a dry spell the last week and a half. It should tell you something about the "help" they get, that they're willing to plant a crop 2 months late and try to grow cotton at its youngest stage through the hot Texas summer instead of taking prevent plant payments. Sure there's a lot of irrigation around the bottom, but there's plenty of dryland acres that are getting planted right now too....

OnlyForNow said:

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Not producing a crop isn't part of your produced average though, it's just what you're getting paid for.

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It occurred to me later, that you might be confusing this year with next year.

For 2019, if you're on a 5 year average, your potential payment is based on 2014-2018. So if this year is a zero yield disaster, yes, you are being paid on the previous 5 years, with no deduction.

The problem is next year, in 2020, when your average yield for potential insurance is now less, based on the yields for 2015-2019, which includes the zero year of 2019.

But the 2019 rate of yield is based on your insurance premium you paid right?

And man, did I really ruin the initial issue of this thread. Sorry about that OP.

No, based on your production history. The percentage of coverage is based on premium.

Certainly glad I'm not a farmer based on all this.

I'd lose my hat and farm.


I appreciate what all of y'all do, whether it's putting groceries on the table or commodities into production.

Mtn_Guide said:

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OP - my family is from Wyoming. The suicide problem has nothing to do with farming. It has to do with living in extremely rural isolated areas. Cold long winters add to the mix and short days don't help either.

Your average rancher in Abilene has a lot more day to day interaction than the rancher in Medicine Bow Wyoming

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While I get this I somewhat disagree. Give me a prettt lady and a couple of kids or grandkids and i don't need to see many folks at all. I think suicide epedimics happen in this country by being too densely populated. Too much showing of what you don't have. To much of wanting even more. Sure kids out west whine about nothing fun to do but once the folks pair up and start famalies I see much more happiness in pinedale Wyoming than I do in Austin Texas.

My business is ranching not farming. There is nothing more depressing than heading back into work on Monday for my 8-5 job after spending a nice weekend enjoying life and spending time with my family. The ranch work is harder but more fulfilling than my day job. I probably make more per hour of work ranching but the barrier for entry is such that I cannot expand my operation.

Turf96 said:

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Mtn_Guide said:

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OP - my family is from Wyoming. The suicide problem has nothing to do with farming. It has to do with living in extremely rural isolated areas. Cold long winters add to the mix and short days don't help either.

Your average rancher in Abilene has a lot more day to day interaction than the rancher in Medicine Bow Wyoming

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While I get this I somewhat disagree. Give me a prettt lady and a couple of kids or grandkids and i don't need to see many folks at all. I think suicide epedimics happen in this country by being too densely populated. Too much showing of what you don't have. To much of wanting even more. Sure kids out west whine about nothing fun to do but once the folks pair up and start famalies I see much more happiness in pinedale Wyoming than I do in Austin Texas.

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You just painted the fairy tale of real life in rural, cold, isolated areas. Yea, convince that pretty lady to move into isolation with you (after you find her first). Kids, grandkids are wonderful but raising them can be a ***** a lot of the time.

You also skipped over a major problem as ranchers/farmers age....access to health care. This life takes a toll on your body. Getting in to see someone for simple issues like flu, eye glasses, etc. is hard enough. Have a major injury or illness and it's unbelievable. Try this life after a major injury that left you with chronic major pain and trying to get treatment and pain meds. Imagine what basic chemo would be like if you get cancer as it might be three hours each way to get the chemo. I've lost several friends to suicide as they could no longer endure the chronic pain or didn't want to shrivel up dying from cancer.

With what land prices are these days, it seems to me that farming is becoming what you do while waiting for the land you just bought to appreciate in value.

I went to high school with one farmer who farms something like 60 to 75 sections (I've heard different figures from different people) and have been told his goal is to be farming 100 sections before he retires. As I understand it, the farmland is all leased -- he doesn't own any of it.

eric76 said:

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With what land prices are these days, it seems to me that farming is becoming what you do while waiting for the land you just bought to appreciate in value.

I went to high school with one farmer who farms something like 60 to 75 sections (I've heard different figures from different people) and have been told his goal is to be farming 100 sections before he retires. As I understand it, the farmland is all leased -- he doesn't own any of it.

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He's aiming for 64,000 acres. Think that's a tall tale. Got some ranches for cattle that big in NM, CO, WY but not crop farming.

Old RV Ag said:

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eric76 said:

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With what land prices are these days, it seems to me that farming is becoming what you do while waiting for the land you just bought to appreciate in value.

I went to high school with one farmer who farms something like 60 to 75 sections (I've heard different figures from different people) and have been told his goal is to be farming 100 sections before he retires. As I understand it, the farmland is all leased -- he doesn't own any of it.

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He's aiming for 64,000 acres. Think that's a tall tale. Got some ranches for cattle that big in NM, CO, WY but not crop farming.

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I forgot to mention that he farms it with his brother.

It's not a tall tale. I'd be amazed if SunrayAg doesn't know who he is. CanyonAg77 probably knows who he is, too.

CanyonAg77 said:

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So say that kumquat weevils ruined your crop, and you gathered 0 kumquats this year. You have spent a normal year's worth of seed, chemical, fuel, fertilizer, labor, etc., and you only got 50-75% gross revenue, less the premium.

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I work in ag and encounter growers that haven't spent much if any) of their yearly inputs and drag their feet to plant a crop. Now, we are too wet and they will go the insurance route. Some growers did everything they could to get their crop in the ground, but some did everything they could to NOT plant a single seed.

Sure, they could have had their crop planted if they tried too, but they didn't want to (in some situations). They didn't have any pop-up fertilizer applied, seed cost is $0, not much fall fertilizer out and $0 in herbicides. No harvesting cost or planting cost. Biggest expense is land lease and possibly some equipment payments. Some growers will walk away with $150-200+ per acre. For a 1,000 acre dryland corn farmer in texas, that isn't too bad.

Now, for his neighbor that already had a fertility program in place and fall herbicides applied, he is sitting in a different position and has already spent a pretty penny and doesn't want to stop now. He cant afford to and truthfully, probably doesn't want to

The part that kills me is when a poor farmer can continue to cash in on insurance and continue to do so every other year or 3 out of 5 years. And one can't make the correlation between crop insurance and car insurance. One is backed by the federal government and one is not. When I see a farmer continue to make bad "farm decisions" knowing that he can collect insurance, it really aggravates the rest of the ag industry. A percentage of those insurance payments are coming from my and your taxes we paid. One can make the same argument for food stamps for the poor. It's great that some of these programs are in place when we really need it, but not everyone on food stamps truly needs it!

eric76 said:

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Old RV Ag said:

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eric76 said:

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With what land prices are these days, it seems to me that farming is becoming what you do while waiting for the land you just bought to appreciate in value.

I went to high school with one farmer who farms something like 60 to 75 sections (I've heard different figures from different people) and have been told his goal is to be farming 100 sections before he retires. As I understand it, the farmland is all leased -- he doesn't own any of it.

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He's aiming for 64,000 acres. Think that's a tall tale. Got some ranches for cattle that big in NM, CO, WY but not crop farming.

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I forgot to mention that he farms it with his brother.

It's not a tall tale. I'd be amazed if SunrayAg doesn't know who he is. CanyonAg77 probably knows who he is, too.

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I know several farms with over 40,000 irrigated acres, and at least 1 over 50,000.