It is expensive to grow alfalfa in Nevada.....

It is like saying, all a trapper has to do is trap the animal. That's all there is to it. There is a lot to running a farm beside manual labor.
They put in LONG day's. 7 days a week. If I was you the next time I see a farmer, stop and thank him or her.. JMO

Swamp wolf, I used a study from UC Davis to come up with those numbers. Every region will differ slightly, but the premise remains the same.

If it's so easy why arent you guys that are complaining lined up to do it . Heck all you need is several million in equipment and a thousand acres of land at $2500 an acre here. Then you can sit on you butt and watch all the money roll in. I watched my brother and brother in law fight mud all last winter to feed their cows they planted most of their corn and soybeans 2 or 3 times because they got flooded . What did come up was full of weeds because the spray didnt work. Then during the summer our area had one of the worst droughts in recent memory. When it was time to harvest the rain came again. As.for the subsidies if it wasn't for them you wouldnt have farmers. By the way I am not a farmer.

Do you know for a fact that those farmers get millions in subsidies? And do you know for a fact that farming is their only source of income?
You couldn’t afford a pound of ground beef without the subsidies the hay farmers get. Farmers work their tails off, and pay for everything themselves. You couldn’t even imagine the insurance premiums a farmer has to carry for a year, let alone the equipment, diesel, seed, water, labor, fences, I could go on for pages on expenses farmers have. I don’t know a single farmer who drives a pickup less than two years old, very few who have a full fleet of brand new tractors. The ones who do are corporate farms. Beside that, as hard as they work, they ought to be able to live comfortable. [/quote]

True words Bob. Those that have never grown up on a farm or farmed really don't know or understand. Many people see farming equipment and just see it as a piece of machinery. They don't realize that USED combine alone cost $300,000 >++ or to just fertilize a 100 acres may cost $18,000 + . . . and that's just the beginning. The labor involved to farm is exhausting and you're at the mercy of the weather, supply and demand for what the market wants and can bear and the "middleman", tax man, etc. take their cut too. Sometimes you get ahead, other times you take a loss :-(

Post y’all’s names and we can look y’all up also. It’s pretty simple, put in your name and we can see how much money y’all get.
I’m not knocking any farmer, but you can’t hide what I typed and see for myself. If you’re not that type of farmer then good for you. If you don’t take subsidies then good for you. But, there are farmers that do and farmers that live a VERY extravagant lifestyle.

Same here ......and it isnt just a Ga thing.

There was a beekeeper that had about 100 hives that got 7 grand.

I farm for a living. Lots of what’s said is true. Most farmers are taking govt subsidies including myself. I don’t live an extravagant lifestyle but my brother send I farm a 5th generation cattle a d crop operation and we have no hired help. It’s hard to make it lots of times cause it’s almost impossible to expand. Lots of our neighbors could take all our land and not even have to buy another tractor. As far as work ethic I really don’t know a lazy farmer. Even the ones that do live extravagantly are very hard working, almost to the point of insanity in some cases I’d say. At what point does working 14 he days 350 days a year so you can keep getting more land become enough? Back to the subsidies, I’d love not to take em, fact is I have to to make it, especially when all my neighbors are taking em to. What gets me is that large farms not only take em but they’re big enough to have several “entities” and full time bookkeepers who can stay on top of the regulations and paperwork so that their one farm actually is multiple farms on paper and therefore gets some of the payments 3 or four times over. It’s all classic govt nonsense, the more they try and help the more it distorts the true market. Add in the PPP and now I have neighbors who pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars cause they have lots of employees and us sole proprietors with no hired hands got nothing. They didn’t see any downturn in “busniness” cause of COVID but they got a free quarter million or more to use to bid against me at the next land auction. Sorry I’m rambling, long post short, yes some frames live very extravagantly, but they’re still not lazy.

At least not around here, your location may very.

So you use no flour either or u grow your own wheat and mill it yourself ? BS !!

I reread the original post and there was no statement regarding livestock or dairy being excluded. Therefore I took your comments to be very general in nature. There are greater differences in farms and farming then there are in trappers for sure.
The use of subsidies allows farmers to produce commodities and livestock and livestock products at lower costs which allows the food and fiber prices to be lower for consumers to buy and also for us to compete in the export market. We have been doing this for generations in some form or other. There are arguments on many sides as to what would be a better system or if there should be government involvement at all. Most other nations have some to considerable subsidies for food related products as many have been hungry in the past and if we want to export a significant portion of our production we need to manage to be competitive.
Yes there are some extremely wealthy farmers in our country. Here in WI we have lead the nation in farm bankruptcies for many years as of late, which is showing us that small and medium sized family farms have a real uphill battle and due to small size, subsidies are welcomed but in many cases not nearly enough to stay competitive. As in almost all industry those who are successful will choose to grow and expand and buy and utilize all the available resources they can obtain and manage. When I started working in the county I live in 1975 there were 1,216 licensed dairy farms milking 54,000 cows. Today there are roughly 280 farms milking 55,500 cows. We have lost an average of over 40 farms a year over the last 40 years.
Bryce

One of the saddest parts about farming is that most farmers have several children. When a parent(s) pass, many times the siblings can't get along and due to such bickering among themselves, the farm is, or has to be, sold to developers or other non-farming industries sometimes because of debt. The other reason generally that the children have no interest in carrying on the family tradition. It's hard work and not much of an easy life for young people in today's world. Even the Amish are losing the kids at higher numbers than before. Sad.

I realize this has been replied to alot already but, here's my 2 cents worth.
I am 15yrs old, I've been farming cattle with my money (an occasional loan from dad the first year or 2 but all paid off now) by my self since I was 10. When I was 13 I started working for a beef and dairy goat farmer 5 miles down the road. He's sold me some cattle in the past at a fair market price, and loaned me his equipment to put up hay on fields I rented. I finally bought a old 460 farmall last year, and a skidsteer. In the summer between working for the farmer down the road and for myself I sleep 4 or 5 hrs a night and crash on the couch when I can. Now that's winter there's still lots of work to do but I also have school on top of that. Call me lazy if you want. But I know no farmer around here that's got there fancy equipment paid off, and yeah some of them take subsidies from the government but you can't grow crops and can barely grow livestock without it. And sometimes it cost more to fix then replace, or somtimes its cheaper to replace. Yes its fancy but don't let your jealousy get the best of you, you'll never outwork a farmer.

There you go

I was talking to a farmer the other day, they were actively losing 200,000 a year dispite their government subsidies of x amount of millions. Until you outwork a famer, and lose 200,000 a year doing it, shut up.

As I've stated before I've worked and been involved in agriculture my whole life. I've had the debate about agriculture subsidies with others in agriculture probably over 20 times. Its a very touchy subject when you make your living in agriculture and your debating the topic with another who's got his hand in the cookie jar. I won't get into a full fledged debate on here because I would probably upset some people. To my knowledge in all my previous debates the person defending subsidies in the end always could only say 2 things, one was if they are handing it out im going to take it or if I dont take it someone else will. Not justifiable reasoning for subsidies in my opinion. Two things ill say and then I'm done. The first I would point out the amount farmers are paying for land,both purchase $ and rent$. They continue to pay more and more but keep saying the need subsidies to keep going. In other words they will keep cutting into there margins without giving themselves enough room for the lean years. Second main argument is we couldn't afford the food costs if subsidies weren't in play, the cost of the wheat in a loaf of bread is somewhere around 5% of the cost of a loaf of bread. If the cost of wheat doubled I think we could still buy bread

Just to be clear I make my living raising cattle, wheat, corn and soybeans.

Swamp wolf: You said there was a beekeeper that got 7 grand. I do not know how he got it. But do you know how much money it cost to run 100 bee hive. I am running about that number at this point and I wish I could do it for 7000 a year.

Why don't the government subsidies everything that way it would all be cheaper

Don't know, so I'll ask. Are bees a vital necessity for the pollination of Georgia Pecans and Peach crops? I know they are for other crops. That may be a reason for the 7k?

Back when I was lowly Ag major I had a farm economics class where the prof once stated (this was 1976) that farming was the only business he knew of that took a million dollars of investment to make an annual return of $30,000. You only do it if you love the lifestyle.

If you're losing 200,000 a year, no matter what it is, you're doing it wrong.