Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#281

Post by dzhiurgis » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

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…

How does vertical vs horizontal integration work? I imagine most of specialized gear doesn't make sense to acquire until you are at some scale.

Cute it's a status symbol. But that just screams market inefficiency ergo everyone worse off.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#282

Post by dzhiurgis » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #175

9rx wrote: post #118

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 Well, it is ultimately a real estate business. The "hundred grand" in profit is really there only to support the mortgage payments — meaning that's what other farmers are counting on, so they're going to drive the prices down to that point. It is like a tech startup. You are counting on the asset…

If you don't need a couple of million dollars worth of tractors, combines, and other equipment that are all driven by GPS then you don't have enough acres.

Do you need to buy them or can they be hired / outsourced? I guess they all are needed at roughly same time and cannot be easily transported huge distances.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#283

Post by droopyEyelids » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 7:59 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #117

droopyEyelids wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The highly optimized manufacturing operation has made farming into a powerful tool of statecraft internationally. Other countries become dependent on our beans and corn to [indirectly] feed their people or for inputs for their own industries. That gives us diplomatic leverage. Once you start thinking about that, a lot of the mystery or 'inefficiency' of farming in the USA makes more sense. For example, the subsidies…

It’s worth noting that this industrial scale is only possible with pesticides and herbicides that are very bad for insects and suspected hormone disruptors and carcinogens, etc.

Im not sure we were on the same page. I'm saying that the importance of these agribusinesses is similar to the importance of the military- so something like insect damage or hormonal disruption, soil erosion, etc don't rank as factors that count.

Re: Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers

#284

Post by skeezyboy » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #279

skeezyboy wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he could spend 90% on tbills, 10% on a small farm, and then each year take the 2.5% the tbills generate and buy more farm fields, working the farm as it grows, or something like that, a mix of finance and farming

If $1 million in cash means you can get a $4 million plot of land, spending 90% on T-bills means you have only $900k in bonds and a measly $400k farm (25% down). So you have 1/10th of the land and your bonds are yielding $22,500... What really happens is as you pay off equity on your land and equipment, you leverage that into buying more land and more equipment. Successful restaurateurs buy more restaurants, successf…

youve not accounted for the interest on the mortgage, which is probably double the initial figure