In Iowa, most farmland is owned by folks 55+. A third in their eighties. Half women (widows by and large).
The land, if it's farmed at all, is by a younger tenant farmer who pays cash rent.
A huge intergenerational transfer is imminent. What the grandkids will do with eighty acres in Iowa is anybody's guess.
80 acres sounds big to people who don't live in the country, but is fairly small potatoes when it come to agricultural land. Such parcels will get consolidated into nearby large operations/corporations. Sometimes that is a corporate farmer, sometimes a local family or two just hoovers up land as it becomes available. But there is no guessing needed - land ownership will consolidate.
Yeah, even 30 years ago I had farmers around me closing down because their about 400 acres wasn't enough to make any useful amount of money on. Under 100 isnt enough for any sort of row crops to even pay for tractor and impliment maintence.
You would need super specialize production of lower volume products. Flowers, maybe rarer berries, otherwise you just have a large garden that lets you sell some corn and pumpkins on a road stand to offset some fertilizer costs.
Twenty grandchildren are splitting whatever the grandparents had left. But that didn't occur to lots of people, who are unfamiliar with such events as land-inheritance.
Around me, cranberries are another crop where large farms will own thousands of acres. And there are some large dairies that grow the food for their herds as well as give them grazing space. There are no lack of commodity farmers in my state, but you are right that I appreciate those who grow food more.
Sell for cheap to big corporate farming conglomerates. At least until the market is so saturated that even the conglomerates have no use for more.
Meanwhile, a few here and there will be snatched up by people from coastal cities who have made enough to FIRE and have romanticized farming. They won’t grow significant crops but will raise a few chickens and goats and a garden full of cabbages and peppers.
If you had the right background and resources, you could probably make a killing buying up 80 acres for a pittance, carving it up into 5- or 10-acre plots with modern amenities (upgraded plumbing; solar; excellent internet) and pre-built facilities for small numbers of farm animals, and selling them off to that market with the value-add of instant community.
Carving up farmland into home plots is easier said than done. Most fields have zero infrastructure, so you need to drill wells, run power lines, streets and/or ROW for driveways. Internet access is pretty easy as you get get a fiber line run. You'll need to work with the local town and county for permits and be sure that they can handle the additional services such as road maintenance, plowing, trash pickup, etc.
It could be done, but it is not just re-drawing some parcel lines and calling a realtor. Even once you get it done, you now need to build somewhat expensive homes to recover your costs, and the FIRE folks will then probably buy that century farmhouse down the street and re-parcel the connected field to keep a few acres for themselves and sell the rest to the neighbor, as they can almost get a house in the country for free if they do so.
Also you often cant build without owning a minimum of land, like 40 acres. A rule to stop the urbanization of farms. That could change, but for now you'd have to get the zoning board to make an exemption.
Where I live, it's not the conglomerates buying up farmland but developers. This put a huge strain on infrastructure and also exploded the price of land, so much so the county finally outright banned it.
Not sure the dynamics of Iowa of course, so it could be different...but I do not live in a particular big or interesting area, either.
Everyone in my mom's family agreed the farms should be inherited by one cousin so that he could make a go of keeping family farming going. Mom and hardly any of the cousins even lived in state anymore. They didn't get an inheritance but their parents wanted to keep the family farms in the family and this was what they came up with.
My male ancestors died of cancer in their 70's and 80's but my great grandmothers lived to 93, 103, 99, and died in childbirth. I actually remember meeting my great great grandmother when I was 8 or 9 and she was 102.
So true. Folks used pots for tens of thousands of years, and used them mostly like disposable dinnerware. They broke, daily, and got tossed out the window. A settlement of a dozen roundhouses might have a million sherds, depending on how long it persisted.
I just lost my Mom, at 97. We would go to lunch on Tuesday and then grocery shopping. She'd talk of the family and where they all were and what they were doing - it was MY day to catch up.
The last Tuesday we got back and she said "That was too hard. I think that was the last one." I agreed, and thought I'd call her next tuesday just the same and see if she'd changed her mind. But there was no 'next tuesday'.
Anyway, life is a gift and I miss her and Tuesday doesn't come but I feel the gap.
After my mother passed, I found an old essay talking about when her father (my grandfather) passed. She wrote that the last time we saw him, he seemed to know something was up, and then died that night.
My other grandfather figured it out after a blood test determined that he only had a few days left. His kids (including my dad) weren't going to tell him. He was 102 and otherwise healthy. Then, he wheeled himself across the nursing home into the meeting with the social worker, and announced the funeral home, church, and cemetery that his arrangements were with. He had such a big smile too. He "won" and couldn't ask for anything more.
Beautiful really. I feel you, there is something about hearing stories from those close to you that hit 100x harder. I have cousins who keep these memories alive by digging into our far past family trees and document it for the rest of us.
The penalty for legal concealed carry is not death.
Victim blaming may be practical, but it's a measure of the depths the government agents have come to, that we are in fear of our lives from them and stepping out of line might be a death sentence.
I showed up at Convergent just out of school, and the AWS was the newest release. We went on to develop the NGEN, the GWS, the Megaframe before I moved on to other pastures.
Those were pretty incredible machines. You were early for Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer”. I’ve seen the B-21 (or was it the 25?) at Unisys well after it was discontinued. It sold relatively well with financial institutions.
We need more articles on how they worked and reports on how they were used.
It’s a shame business-oriented machines tended to be scrapped and recycled more responsibly than home computers. I’d love to have one of these to play with.
I actually had a cabinet full of them. Sent them off to the guy in the OP, and he was glad to see them! Somebody got some fun out of them anyway. And I got some of the files off of the old defunct disk drive. He's a nice guy that way.
" 58 preservatives on some 105,000 people who were free of cancer in 2009 and were followed for up to 14 years. Only those who completed frequent 24-hour, brand-specific food questionnaires were included."
It's hard to get someone to fill out a questionnaire about food over a whole weekend. Are we to believe, these participants kept it up for 14 years? There's a lot not said in this article.
It's more complex than that. When I'm not looking to sell, I certainly don't want the assessed value of my house to increase. That just means, higher property tax bill for me.
Also, houses get older every day. Tastes change - ranch, open-plan, multi-story, multi family get more or less valued as time goes on. Not just 'fewer houses means better resale value'. In fact, a shortage may not change housing prices at all - sometimes it just makes them sell faster.
It's easy to take a complex picture, connect a dot or two and draw a line from someplace to some conclusion. But it's always a trickier picture than that. You gotta consider more dots and connect them all.
I think too many people jump to the easy-to-understand "owners want to get richer" conclusion without actually engaging with what people are saying and voting for. Often the results of the voting may be related to property staying somewhat scarce, but (in my experience) the vast majority of people don't really care about the value of their house as long as it doesn't go substantially down.
Assessed value raises (and drops) shouldn't directly affect property tax assuming the whole area raises and falls (in most areas) because of how the tax is apportioned.
The reality that people don't want to deal with is that it's personal and it is slow - there is no SimCity-style bulldozing and redeveloping without pouring in tremendous amounts of money, because people like living where they do and it's hard to get them to move involuntarily.
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