I chose not to attend the tour session in scottsbluff because I wasn't sure the 7 hour round trip was worth an hour and forty five minute forum where it was highly unlikely I would have the chance to compete. I have a lot of complaints, sometimes it seems like the USDA is more intent on putting us out of business. In truth, very little of the farm bill has much to do with agriculture anyways. Instead it has drifted torwards urban development programs and an ever increasing army of beurocrats. Today's small operator is challenged enough, Input costs have increased at a rate far greater than our yeilds and farm prices. Looking back over the last ten years nearly all of our production costs have at least doubles, some have tripled If adjusted for inflation, farm prices have declined in the last fifty years. There has been little interest in pursuing anti trust legislation in the last century. Now we are increasingly squeezed between the consolidation of our input suppliers (agrium, Monsanto, CNH, AGco, Deere) and those who purchase our produce....(ADM, Swift, JBS, Tyson....) Even the elevators have consolidated. 10 years ago there were 5 elevator within 60 miles one could take their grain to. We had a rail line. Today there are two grain elevators and had enough clout to get the rail line ripped out in an effort to drive the other elevators out of business. Now we have basis that often runs in excess of a dollar and forced to ship grain on trucks. A process far less efficient than by rail. The railraods haven't helped. A recent attempt to build a nearby biodesiel plant fell under because BNSF refused to deliver even 100 car hopper units to the facility until the local feed base was built. Our young people are leaving because we have few jobs or opportunities to offer. 1/3 of the houses in our town sit empty, the rural homesteads are at about 50% occupation. How does a young farmer compete with the large corporations...let alone a government that is paying 150% of reasonable land rent for CRP ground? So the old farmers put the ground in CRP, then pass away, and the payements go to their children in the city. Like I said I have a few complaints. I would like toleave with one last thought. Our society seems to be embracing organic farming and recently grain based ethanol has lost it's popularity in favor of cellulosic ethanol I would like to give one word of caution. a hundred years ago our forebearers came was to find a land of rich soil. They put a plow to it and for fifty years we experienced a wealth of abundance. But each time we turned the soil over we lost organic matter. In the fifties it was beginning to get the point it was hard to get a crop with out use of the fertilizer..so they dug deeper and used the fertilizer and now the hillsides are covered with white knobs where the soil blew or washed away. Then the feedyards consolidated and so instead of feeding livestock on the farm we sent the cattle and all of our crops hundreds of miles away where neither the manure nor the nutrients it contained ever came back to our land but instead became a problem on the land near the feed lots where they have to worry about high nitrate levels and phos blooms. When In the fifties when our soil surveys were taken the average organic matter for our counties soils were 1.5 to 1.7%. After another half century of farming essentially "organic" we are down to county average of .7 to .9 %. We are subject to drought and nearly dependent on fertilizer. This trend is reversible..but will take nearly as long to fix as it did to create. We need to quit turning the soil over (no-till) we need to feed our cattle locally (unappealing as the cattle industry faces ever increasing regulation) We need to leave our organic matter on the land it came from. Although grain based ethanol has lost favor in washington at least we left residue in the fields and had livestock feed as a byproduct. If there is a shift to cellosic ethanol and we bale up all of our residue to ship off to some ethanol plant, the effects on our land will be every bit as devastating as the consolidation of the feeding industry. If we really care about the ability to feed ourselves 50 years from now, 100 years from now, we need to start caring about preserving our ag land.

Posted by Patrick Peterson on October 01, 2009 at 08:53 AM CDT #