Farms today have more than just the cost of land sucking up potential profits.
Adapted from Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America by Beth Hoffman. Photo of wheat field by David Harmantas.
BETH HOFFMAN
IT WAS THE MID-1970S when my father-in-law Leroy Hogeland and two of his neighbors decided to put up a silo, that quintessential symbol of the American farm. “Chopped” hay and corn was the thing back then, as opposed to the big round bales which are preferred today to feed to livestock, and a silo would mean that the trio could store hay as long as they wanted and feed more cattle to sell when their weight was optimum and prices were highest. Leroy took out a $14,000 loan (equivalent to about $80,000 today) from the local bank and built the silo and a small lot beside it in which to feed the cattle on his Iowa farm.
The building worked out well. So well, in fact, that in the early 1980s he decided to buy thirty-five calves to add to the forty head of cattle he already had. He went again to the local community bank and borrowed more money. But by this time many other farmers had also had the bright idea to put up a silo, likewise increasing the number of cows they were raising. And by the time Leroy’s calves were grown, there was a glut of cattle on the market. The price of beef plummeted. In an attempt to pay off his debts, Leroy sold all 75 cows; the amount he made from the sale didn’t even cover the loan.
Today the concrete lot still sits on the hillside amid rusting equipment and bent roofing, trees growing through it all, like a scene from Planet of the Apes. Right next to it stands the empty silo, the idea of storing corn and hay aborted after the cattle fiasco, the wind howling through it eerily, the tall concrete now home to birds.
Unorthodox Truth 