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It isn't just that we have to much machinery but that the machinery we do have is fancier and not as durable as the old stuff. My grandfather told a story about going to Detroit with my great grandfather to buy their first Ford Model A pickup truck and driving it back to California. He said that at that time it took 10 steers to buy a pickup and each time he bought a new pickup it took more steers to buy it. Today it is not uncommon to hear of pickups costing more than a $100,000 and basic little ranch trucks are no longer made. Mahindra makes an updated version of the Wily's Jeep for around 10 steers but it isn't street legal.
The tractor that I disked with as a kid was an IH TD-9 crawler tough as nails. One year it flooded and we took it home flushed out the engine with gasoline and brought it back from the dead. Now a day, you can't even work on your equipment.
If that was the TD-9 with the gasoline engine to start the diesel engine, i remember my dad had one. As for the pickups today yes the bodies are not as thick and tough as the old ones. Progress hehehe.
 
The biggest takeaway that I got from this book is that it takes roughly a generation of neglect for a family business to fail. It may be a slow decay or it may be the result in getting to big and not keeping an eye on things. We may talk about the impact that the government or foreign competition has on the decline of the farmer and rancher but the more relevant threat to our way of life is ourselves. The hot shot who takes on a lot of debt, over expands on a thin margin and then goes broke not only hurts themselves but also raises rents and brings about an oversupply which hurts everybody.
 
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The classical economist Adam Smith divided income into three categories: wages of labor, rent of the land and interest on capital. The profit margin of an enterprise is what is left over after wages, rent, and interest is paid. Wages are fairly straightforward; rent and interest are more complicated. I come from a gold rush family. My great grandfather and his brothers were mining attorneys. With the mines, every ounce of gold taken out of the claim was gone forever. So too is it with pastures and farmland when nutrients are removed from the soil from grazing, haying, or tillage, that is a cost that needs to be factored in when determining profitability. Unlike mining, we have the ability to make things better, we can in effect buy more land by improving its productivity. With interest, it is a price paid for risking losing the principle. That has to be factored in when making an analysis of how profitable an enterprise is.
Lawrence Lasater wrote that one of the great problems with American agriculture is that we account based on cash rather than an accrual basis which would force us to have a better idea of how profitable we really are.
 
When we think of cattle record keeping; we think of cattle record keeping. We don't think in terms of keeping track of how our pastures are doing. How many of us know how much grass we actually have? And what is limiting our grass production?
Yep. You will hear people say in a drought or the winter.... but the cows still look good. They are always behind the curve. Feed, cull, etc off pasture condition not cow condition.
 
With technology and smartphones we have the ability to handle much more data than before. I would like an app that we could use when we put out polywire and then keep track of how long the animals stay in each area. I have found that even on even looking land there is a radical difference in productivity acre to acre.
 

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