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Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#131

Post by lotsofpulp »

dismalaf wrote: post #128
libraryofbabel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills. Non-judgmental curious question: why do you keep doing it? (As opposed to selling the land and buying tbills.)

Land can be financed over long periods and held forever. So a few hundred grand will pay off $5 million in about 20 years and then that's steady income forever after (as long as you keep farming).

Land can’t be financed, businesses can be financed. Businesses that own land are much more easily financed, with the lowest interest rates.

When you buy land to develop, you have to pony up cash for it. I have never heard of a lender lending without a cash flow producing asset as collateral.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#133

Post by lotsofpulp »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #107
arbor_day wrote: post #62

I own the farm and farm it in Illinois. I owe the land through an LLC, because farming is dangerous and I don't want to go bankrupt if somebody sues me. Farms are expensive and hard to subdivide, so people will put them into a legal entity and pass down to the next generation via a trust. All of my neighbors are doing the same, so we're all counted as "not farmers" here Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred…

Land does weather inflation quite a bit better than T bills do, though.

Some land does. A lot of land does not.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#134

Post by lotsofpulp »

ImJamal wrote: post #130
quesera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not. For me, "most" is 50% + 1 (Edit: or more).

I think most would usually mean plurality not 50% + 1. If there are 3 people and 2 of them have $5 each and the third has $6 it would be correct to say the third has the most money despite not having 50% + 1. Regardless, the majority is also the plurality so using most when it is over 50% would also be acceptable.

Most and majority mean more than half, in the context of proportions.

>If there are 3 people and 2 of them have $5 each and the third has $6 it would be correct to say the third has the most money despite not having 50% + 1.

This is not an applicable example, as most is not being used to refer to the proportion of money. It is using a different definition of most, which is the top rank when ranking things by quantity.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#135

Post by hoistbypetard »

cyberax wrote: post #105
hoistbypetard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, even if you are a licensed commercial pilot, there are still strict rules around payment. You can be paid for your skill as a pilot, but you cannot, e.g. charge for giving rides in your personal airplane. While that sounds like a bad rule when I first read it, I smell Chesterton's fence here. I'd like to understand why that regulation was written before getting rid of it.

> I'd like to understand why that regulation was written before getting rid of it. It's simple. Getting a commercial pilot license is a much more involved process than getting a private pilot license. A private pilot needs just around 30 hours of flight time to get a license. A commercial pilot needs at least 250 hours and a medical certificate that needs to be renewed periodically.

> It's simple. Getting a commercial pilot license is a much more involved process than getting a private pilot license.

I understood that. But the post I quoted said that you couldn't accept payment even if you were a licensed commercial pilot, if you owned the plane. I'd expect the 250 hours and the medical certificate to be enough to make it safe for you to accept payment, and apparently the regulators who formulated the rule don't think that's the case. I was saying that I'd like to understand why they don't think that's the case before I'd want to support any relief on that rule.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#136

Post by hoistbypetard »

mandevil wrote: post #71
hoistbypetard wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, even if you are a licensed commercial pilot, there are still strict rules around payment. You can be paid for your skill as a pilot, but you cannot, e.g. charge for giving rides in your personal airplane. While that sounds like a bad rule when I first read it, I smell Chesterton's fence here. I'd like to understand why that regulation was written before getting rid of it.

I'm not totally sure what the GP meant, but I think it has to do with the owning/operating organization of the plane not being a qualified (Part 121/135) company for commercial operations. A grandfather-in-law owned his own small business (a civil engineering firm), and had a plane that he flew to get to meetings/job sites across the Midwest. He could fly company employees just fine- and the company could reimburse h…

That makes sense, at least as a partial explanation. Thanks.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#137

Post by rjpower9000 »

Part of the land — 120 of the nearly 700 acres — is rented from a family who owns multiple farm properties and wants their fields weed-free with perfectly straight grids of crops, a deep-rooted tradition among Midwestern farming communities.

“They want that land to be clean corn and soybeans,” Bishop said. Before the restrictions, his father was growing organic corn and soybeans on part of the field and letting Bishop grow vegetables on the rest.

I've seen this mentioned elsewhere, but the idea that you'd force someone else to create a mono-crop desert, not even out of a sense of efficiency, but _just because it looks right_, is just so frustrating.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#138

Post by harmmonica »

LastTrain wrote: post #122
harmmonica wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the friendliest way to reply, but are you saying 65% does not mean most? Just wondering if we're violently agreeing. I shouldn't have said 80%. Was just trying to articulate that most is a high threshold and also not defined as an absolute number.

You have a misconception about what the word means. Most has a meaning: more than any other quantity. > 50% meets that definition every time, but even 2% could mean ‘most’ if everything else in the comparison is less than 2%.

You're right about the 2% and I just totally had blinders on when thinking of "most" used when comparing a set of numbers (where one of those numbers is the most in the set). I disagree with your ">50% meets..." comment, but pretty sure we're not going to agree on that one so I'll just shut up now.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#139

Post by tialaramex »

freeopinion wrote: post #119
ASalazarMX wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a use case where I think a current LLM shines. Ask it to summarize the important points of n papers, and slow read only the ones that pique your interest. It won't be perfect, but it will save you a ton of time while letting you focus on the things that need more attention.

I'm not anti-LLM even if the following statement sounds like it. I don't trust LLMs, even to summarize for me. I have to fact-check every single statement. For instance, if I ask ChatGPT, "Is PLA more dense than ABS?" it answers, "No, PLA is not more dense than ABS." Those are direct quotes. In the third paragraph, ChatGPT says, "So technically, PLA is denser than ABS, not less — I misspoke earlier." I find LLMs good…

> It makes me shudder to think about code that is written in such a manner.

Often it has the property which was good enough for generations of C and C++ programmers, it compiles. Does it work? Eh. Do the tests, if there even are tests, check anything useful? Eh.

The focus on "it doesn't matter so long as it compiles" justifies everything up to IFNDR†, the explicit choice in C++ that if what you've written is nonsense but it would not be easy to modify the compiler to notice, just don't worry about it and say it's somebody else's problem.

† "Ill-formed, No Diagnostic Required" these words or near equivalent occur frequently in the ISO definition of the language.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#140

Post by dismalaf »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #131
dismalaf wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land can be financed over long periods and held forever. So a few hundred grand will pay off $5 million in about 20 years and then that's steady income forever after (as long as you keep farming).

Land can’t be financed, businesses can be financed. Businesses that own land are much more easily financed, with the lowest interest rates. When you buy land to develop, you have to pony up cash for it. I have never heard of a lender lending without a cash flow producing asset as collateral.

You've got it backwards. Hard assets like land, buildings (aka. your house), machinery (a tractor or your car) are all much easier to finance than businesses. A simple Google search gives a wealth of resources for someone looking to finance (aka. mortgage) land and/or property for a farm.

https://www.farmcreditil.com/Products/farm-loans

There's even government grants and loans to help:

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/resources/farm-loan-programs/farm-o...

Edit - we're on HN. If you'd ever tried to get a business loan you'd know it's near impossible for a new business without 100% collateral, which is why the entire venture capital business, and HN, even exists...

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