Agriculture facing its own Katrina

[DOGG]

Agriculture today is facing a major catastrophe not experienced since the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. Based on expert economic projections, for the first time in decades, many U.S. farmers cannot possibly "cash flow" a crop or crops for the year 2006. Bankers are saying "No." Many of us will not be able to farm this year or the next. The doubling and tripling of fuel and petrochemical prices are the last link in a chain of bad economic events.

http://www.txfb.org/TexasAgriculture/2005/102105/102105opinions.htm

[Arcane1]

At one point in my life I knew a good many older farmers. They were predicting this 10 years ago. Most farmers in the US make more money NOT farming their fields than farming them based on the subsidies they recieve from the US Gov.

The reality is that the farmland is worth more as housing or commercial development land and as the last generation of farmers dies off their kids are selling the properties off to developers. A good example of this is the land around Chicago that 20 years ago was all farm is now "suburb". Areas as far from the City of Chicago as 80 miles are now considered suburbs.

The US used to be the "world's breadbasket", now it is the "world's center of cookie cutter homes and shopping malls".

[Deimos]

Within the next 2 decades there will not be enough food and there will not be enough clean water to feed everyone. That is, unless bird-flu or some other such epidemic decreases the world's population by about half and the people left over happen to know a thing or three about agriculture. We live in interesting times...

[berserk]

Simple economics really. American farming has been kept on life support with government protection for decades. The sooner they stop farming the heritage way the better IMHO. The same goes for the Western Europeans & Japanese.

[Uther Pendragon]

I say we take off, and nuke the planet from orbit... its the only way to be sure

[splendid]

farmers have continually borrowed money because of bad crops from previous years.
what the government needs to do is pay out all the farms loans so they can start with a clean slate.
all would work well as long as they didnt have a bad year.

[berserk]

Thats the same argument most of the heavily indebted least developed countries use when asking for debt relief.