Have we all been duped?

[hurleyjd]

I think there are several reasons.

The spiritual has been eliminated from most of public life.

Most people came from farms back then. Now, it's very few and they think farming is easy. A disdain towards farmers began with the invention of suburbs and has only gotten worse. We're just dumb hillbillies/hicks/rednecks, etc...

In the not so old days, Democrats stood up for farmers and rural areas had pro life Democrats. That animal is extinct, I believe. I still know some old party Democrats, but most have changed over. It's whole 'nother mean world now as far as politics. I don't want to discuss specifics about the parties. I don't like any politicians.

I agree. I grew up on a row crop farm. I know how hard Dad and my Grandpa's worked. I was away from it for almost 40 years. We are back now, and the weather, the government, the costs are all killing the farmer, and yet they persevere. They are big farms now, with bigger challenges.

Americans do not give the farmers and ranchers the respect they deserve, and God knows they don't get the prices they need.
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Suburban folks don't understand us at all. I can't relate to them either. They'll always say stuff like "Did you see that football game and Saturday" - "No, I have to haul firewood and feed calves"

All of the T-ball and little league and peewee football are designed to make a kid a spectator for the games when they get old and spend a lot to watch them on tv and in person. And the whole town turns out to cherish and celebrate a national champion team that most of the players are making over 25 million a year.

 

[Dave]

Within about 6 or 7 miles of me there are 9 ranches that their only source of income is cattle. They range in size from 900 mamma cows to about 200. One is an old family who stopped their covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Four came here with not much at all and built their operation in the last 20 years or so. The other 4 are second generation. They all work. And they do that every single day. But it is not that they never go anywhere or do anything. In the year I have been here I know of trips to Hawaii, the NFR, a week in a cabin over by Yellowstone, and an out of state hunting trip. But on a daily basis they don't stop at the convenience store, eat out, and the cloths they wear look a bit tattered. They all seem to own one nice vehicle but they regularly drive ones that look like a rolling wreck. There is some newer equipment but a whole lot more that has been used and repaired multiple times. I have watched them buy both cows and bulls at sales. They buy good useful ones but certainly not the top of the sale. In some cases a long ways from the top selling critters.

 

[ALACOWMAN]

Back then you were old at 50 and dead by 70, if you made until your 90s you were a freak. You could die from a small cut as no antibiotics.
Dances were well attended as that was pretty much your only socialising. It all sounds romantic but i think today is a much better way of life.

No telling how many died of a tooth abscess , gall stones,appendicitis ...

 

[callmefence]

Over the years I have accumulated a large number of old agricultural books from the period of around 1870 through the 1940s. They display a reverence for the land and an almost religious devotion to the lifestyle and vocation of farming that is absent in similar publications today. I suppose the bitter hard times of the depression shook this approach out of people's minds as much as anything and made them open to "scientific" methods of farming that were supposedly going to make things so much better.
Sometimes I wonder, wonder if all the advancements I have seen have only served to empty the countryside of people and enrich the few at the cost of the many.
We have EPDs for selecting our bulls and expensive mineral mixes that control flies, but how many families are able to live off the returns of a cattle operation?
Corn growers can grow huge crops with sprays and seed that has been genetically manipulated and spend the winter in Florida while their topsoil flows down the Mississippi. Only the leveraged few can make even this work, and then only by the force of government through ill planned programs that burn their excess crops for fuel.
I wonder if we have not been duped and that our country was stronger when large families grew up on farms and the product they were most proud of was the men and women that these children became.

If you think you need epds and expensive mineral. Yes you've been duped.

Nobody made it running cattle in the 1870s on a small farm. Cattle operations where huge some over a million acres. Cattle lived of the resources of the land you provide.
Nowdays people get a hundred acres and think they should be able to live of it. The people that make it ranching, practically without exception, have other irons in the fire. You can't afford to buy equipment to run 100 cows. But if you can use that equipment in other business closely related, where it crosses over. you can make it work.

 

[sim.-ang.king]

The only one's getting duped in modern Ag today, are the one's that believe government programs are for the benefit of farmers. They're only meant to keep enough blood flowing to the farmers so they can keep paying more in inputs, and borrowing more money.

 

[bball]

The only one's getting duped in modern Ag today, are the one's that believe government programs are for the benefit of farmers. They're only meant to keep enough blood flowing to the farmers so they can keep paying more in inputs, and borrowing more money.

The millstone turns ever so slowly, but it still grinds the bones.

 

[Hootowl]

One thing that has changed here is when I was young we lived and farmed on someone else's land. Sharecropper. We got a small share of the crop but also an old shack to live in. We had gardens, chickens, pigs, a milk cow.
I can remember my dad charging groceries all year and paying for them when he sold tobacco. Most time would be pretty well broke and would start charging them again within a month.

 

[greybeard]

Nowdays people get a hundred acres and think they should be able to live of it. The people that make it ranching, practically without exception, have other irons in the fire. You can't afford to buy equipment to run 100 cows. But if you can use that equipment in other business closely related, where it crosses over. you can make it work.

Agree, but I've known people that thought they could do it on a lot less than 100 ac. Were they ever disappointed...

You are lucky, if a 100 ac cow operation pays all the property taxes and pays for the cattle's annual upkeep.

Hoot, I never sharecropped even when I was a kid, but my father, mother and their siblings did. Long time ago.
Closest I ever came to it was agreeing to pick a neighbor's mullberries on the halves when I was about 15. I learned a lot about business with that endeavor..and I ain't forgot it.

 

[Little Cow]

I will say that I think the animals have changed through breeding etc... Cattle have higher nutrient requirements today because we have bred them to be bigger and mature faster. In addition, hormones commonly used increase the feed requirements.

Dairy cattle are drastically different and are quite a bit more complicated to feed. They also don't last as long in production.

Are we better off? Well, we can certainly feed more people.

Horses have certainly changed, but for the worse.