I grew up on a farm in PA. Farmwork doesn’t suck. That being said, farming in the midwest (we now have land plots of several hundred acres a piece in Iowa, North Dakota, and soon Minnesotta) is completely different than swingin the ol’ plough around. Those tractors are automated using GPS, and much of the remainder of the work is very high tech, including soil samples and chemical maintenance.
Sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day 12 months a year for 1/4 what these guys are doing despite $100k MBA’s is what sucks. I love people without farm backgrounds telling me about farming. LOL.
Read the second article I posted above, it will clearly outline why agriculture is in fact the road to riches. It’s the next oil in the coming decades, as demand squeezes supply, and it’s much less elastic. You think the guys that originally pumped shallow oil were geniouses? No, prolly didn’t have MBA’s either, but they’re rich as hell. I can also tell you for a fact having spent time in the midwest, those guys are sitting on seven and eight figure bank accounts despite being relatively average in wealth 20 years ago.
Yes. Just the owners. But 500 acres can be run by 1-2 people in the midwest. Land is flat and homogeneous. Not gnarly and high maintenance like the east. Even if you rent 1-2 500 acre plots you can turn high six figure easy after investing in your own equipment (too hard to rent it when you need it at peak harvest and plant).
No, point is that farmers are getting super rich in the midwest off of demographic shifts, despite the stigma of farmers making less than IB’ers. I’m very very seriously, thinking about switching back in the next year or two. I think it’s the next oil. Smart money skips MBA and uses those loans to grab equipment and start driving it around in squares.
Plantir said something about farming and girls not being impressed and I said, must not be doing it right, farmers in iowa make xxxxx and work 8 months a year. Then everyone and their mother jumped in and said it’s impossible. So I made my point. So my point is the top 8% of farmers are doing pretty damn well compared to their goldman counterparts, working half the hours, 8 months a year and maybe without a college degree.
I went to high school in Iowa. I lived on the edge of town and it was corn fields for pretty much hundreds of miles after. I had a summer job in the office of a fertilizer company and they were doing well, even back in the 90s. However, I think Black Swan is significantly overstating the difficulty in starting up a farm business in the Midwest without any kind of experience. Sure, if every farmer was making 500k a year with GPS running all their tractors, then we could all be farmers. But who owns the land and why aren’t they increasing the rental costs when they see you driving to their land in a Maserati?
Well, my family owns over 1000 acresout there. Yes, getting in is capital intensive if you buy the land. I never said it was “easy” or could be done without experience. I worked on a farm through college, our family has background. It’s not simple. But it’s also not rocket science. Anyone on here would be capable of doing it if they decided that was the direction the world was headed. Skip the MBA, work for a commercial farm for a few years. Gather some money and loans, get a combine and your CDL and start renting. Rents have gone up. And they are not cheap. But the farmers also have some push back because if rents go up beyond reason they will pass up the land and your fields will sit fallow. You miss an 8-10% dividend.
I think it’s misleading to say there’s big money in farming, like we should all drop our jobs and head out to the midwest to strike it rich on the farms. Sure, if you own a big farming business I’m willing to accept that you are going to making good money. But if you’re a farmer (you actually do the manual labour), I don’t think you can say there’s big money in it.
It’s the equivalent of comparing owning and running a chain of McDonalds franchises to working at McDonalds.
Read the first page of the thread, then read the 3rd page. Not only do you feel you’re in the wrong thread, you feel like it’s 2 threads from 2 different foums.
I agree with BS. I’ve thought for the past 1-2 years this could be like the next oil/railroad bubble. There are no ETFs that do farmland. But it might be a decent idea to look at public firms that have substantial real estate holdings in certain areas.
As for my roommate, he is now making $16/hour and selling some of his art on the side. He still slays dimes, at any one time he has like 2-3 lined up, I don’t quite understand it and I am definitely a bit jealous. So all these guys thinking money is a game changer, that might be right but you need to question the types of people you are attracting.
Anyway, conventional wisdom suggests a guy like him should be down and out on the dating scene. However he is very confident, very charming and articulate. He also has the air of mystery/danger about him as he looks like a defensive lineman and is covered in tattoos, apparently that resonates with alot of women.
Everytime there is a huge run up in commodity prices either production increases, technology changes or comsumption patterns change and the prices fall, sometimes as if they were coming off a cliff. Why is this situation any different?
I found what Black Swan had to say very interesting. So yes, the income concentration is highly skewed in farming (as it is in banking, and pretty much everywhere across the economy, except where it’s just widely shared poverty), but apparently the top range of farmers just do fantastically better than one would expect. That’s interesting, and potentially investable too.
No, good guess though, as he is currently one of my favourite boxers.
The guy in my picture is a now retired muay thai fighter named Buakaw Por Pramuk. He is by far my favourite fighter of all time and an inspiration to myself and many muay thai practitioners.
Its official, this thread needs a healthy dose of risperidone.
“I am one of the most successful men you will ever meet. I led my T-ball team in batting average. Hit 'em where they ain’t, I say.” *spits*…works every time.
Just to keep it scattered, a couple more charts. Peanuts, mmmm, money.
