patriot Intel list on Nostr: Thoughts on Farming, by Single Farmer SURVIVALBLOG CONTRIBUTOR JANUARY 7, 2025 I want ...
Thoughts on Farming, by Single Farmer
SURVIVALBLOG CONTRIBUTOR
JANUARY 7, 2025
I want to tell you about an amazing group of people. They make sure that you not only stay alive, are well-nourished, and that you have your choice of a delicious variety of food that Kings and Queens of yesteryear could not dream of, all at relatively low prices. Contrary to what you’ve been told, prices are still fairly low by historical standards and food quality is high. I know that you or someone you know has recently been to the grocery store and you think the prices are high, but wait until you hear about the state of the farm economy and I will give you some practical thoughts that may help your family in the future. In this article series, I am going to take you on a journey through history until the present where you probably interacted with the products from a family farm, probably three or more times per day.
The full depth of an article covering family farms could cover many volumes. So I will not be able to take you down every interesting road showing you every interesting detour, but I do hope to provide you a comprehensive overview of how a seed planted in the previous year harvested midway the following year could become a component in your breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, or dinner — keeping you alive and healthy. I will introduce you to a farm family that survived the Great Depression including one of their stories of thrift, through using something most people today would discard. There are so many lessons to be learned in these struggles during previous tough times.
Because time only moves forward, I encourage you whenever possible to learn from your elders, talk to them, ask them about their life, also importantly ask them about their ancestors and any stories that they heard going back to their childhood. You can go back very far and sometimes you can learn a lesson that can help you in the future.
The last generation of people who were “born in this century, tempered by war” are quickly passing off the stage of history and the time is short to learn from their lives before they can no longer speak to you with their voice and you can ask them follow-up questions. Most of the few who are still living were children during the years of the Great Depression, with the men serving in World War II, and they came home victorious to a post-war America where decisions were made on farming at a national level that still impact farms today — and by extension you and your family, as well. You may ask what President Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961 has to do with farming, but the family farm was undergoing a rapid transformation during the critical decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Because you are likely a consumer of food that someone else grows or prepares, this story is critical as it most likely has much to do with how you are living and what you are eating today.
In my previous five-part article series on retreat properties, there is a lot of information about land and history for survival retreat purposes. Many retreats are actually working farms because an inescapable fact is that you need to eat: you can store food, but eventually you will eat your way through it. The nutritional value of stored food will also decline over time. And, given the right conditions, you can grow more food. It is better to be in a food-producing area — preferably with plentiful water — than in a food-importing region. To understand farming as it exists presently in the United States, it is critical to understand of how we got here.
There are now people trying to figure out how this generation overall of people is less healthy than previous generations. I applaud their efforts. If you want to know how you got here, you have to know where you have been and the decisions that were made along the way have largely determined how and what you are eating. What you are eating is a large and often the primary determinant of your overall health. I like ice cream in the summer as much as any healthy red-blooded American man, but if my diet consisted solely of that I doubt that I would be as physically fit and healthy as I am today. It is best not to look at one thing in isolation as an overview of how people managed to get the food that they needed throughout history is very important to understand the present.
I am a third-generation prepper, survivalist, or whatever name that we go by these days. More importantly, I am a student of history. I want to learn from the past to see how I can prosper and more importantly to prevent tragedy from occurring. Our ancestors had a saying the “burnt hand dreads the fire,” but we do not have enough hands and time for them to heal enough to teach us in the proverbial “school of hard knocks.”
Throughout most of history, you did not purchase food at a store, you grew it or someone you knew grew it for you as you were doing something else that was important to them (such as being the mother of your children), so they were willing to share their labor with you because there was some sort of trade where you are performing something of value to them. For instance, the most able hunter often was able to attract the best looking mate and who was then able to pass his genes on to future generations. The food that he provided, allowed her and their offspring to be able to eventually pass their genes to the next generation. This is a foundational Biblically derived principle of how gender roles were first expressed with the wife as helpmeet to the man. Because people live beyond their ability to biologically produce children, the grandmother actually has a critical role as expressed through the “grandmother hypothesis” where her role actually is involved in providing care and food to increase the second generation’s fitness to be able to reproduce.
During most of human history just getting sufficient calories was the number one priority, so a grandmother gathering food initially or discovering the secrets of agriculture helped increase the overall family’s survival. Humans can fly a hundred thousand feet into the air at multiples of the speed of sound for long distances and land safely, but we have not overcome the basic facts of physics of calories burned have to be replaced: we need to eat regularly or we suffer consequences starting with hunger pangs leading to muscle loss if enough protein is not consumed with enough of these unfortunate malnutrition events strung together often lead to an untimely death.
Food is not free and someone had to work to grow it consistently. I know there is a farm boy out there who either is still in his “Huck Finn” carefree stage with a cane pole or who is now all grown up who thinks back to a fond memory of fishing by the lake on his family farm and takes a snack of some wild blackberries. Maybe some food is free, but that is not enough. I am going to take you back to an unpleasant time, so you can see how good you have it, historically.
Go back just a few generations, there were no “food stamp” coupons or cards allowing you the benefit of the cornucopia of modern life potentially at your fingertips just for the virtue of living in the post-industrial welfare United States of America. This is so historically abnormal, but tragic because it often can lead people down so many bad roads.
Eating without working for able-bodied adults is contradiction of Biblical wisdom in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 in which we are warned: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” The early colonists at Jamestown actually experimented with a form of “socialism” where everything was held in a common storehouse as that is how their company charter was originally organized. Because the colonists at Jamestown under this system could not individually benefit from their own labors, they often did very little and this contributed to the near collapse.
One of the leading colonists, Ralph Hamor, wrote in his 1615 book “A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia” reflecting back on his time at Jamestown: “When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of the ground and planting corn, glad was that man that could slip from his labor, nay the most honest of them in a general business, would take so much faithful and true pains in a week as now he will do in a day.” Food shortages and leadership challenges led to disastrous results with an 80 percent death rate during the Winter of 1609-1610. The colonists made it through the “Starving Time” although in diminished numbers. From that point forward, their numbers never dipped that low again and they became successful.
The treasurer of the Virginia Company of London Sir Edwin Sandys highlighted an important fact in 1620: “The plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil.” The first permanent English settlement in this country at Jamestown only flourished after it had discovered a few inescapable facts both through a lot of trial and error. People need to have a reasonable expectation that they will individually profit from their labor as Captain John Smith was instrumental in changing how the colonists worked and were compensated. Civilizations and their smaller outposts of colonies only succeed when they are able to grow and flourish through feeding themselves and eventual population growth.
As I mentioned in a recent article, importing brides proved to be crucial to the success of the Jamestown Colony.
Successful survivalists consider a variety of scenarios including looking at how previous generations survived to glean any wisdom that they can take as compensation for their time. All of us are only here because our ancestors somehow managed to carry themselves genetically forward. For most of human history, it was difficult to get enough calories to barely stay alive and this fact is lost upon most people as they have so many choices today often struggling on what cuisine to eat, and not how to find food.
A common cause of death throughout history has been starvation, due to crop failure. A lot of individuals reading this if asked to name a critical event of the 14th Century would say the “Black Death” — also known as the Bubonic Plague — reducing Europe’s overall population from 1346 to 1353 by about a third with mortality rates of often 80 percent or higher depending on the plague year. Few people know that just a little earlier in the 14th Century there was a large food crisis that is very important to our discussion on farming. Throughout history, people would often go from harvest to harvest and the slightest interruption often meant disaster as crop yields were not large multiples, but were often in low single-digit multipliers in productivity. Often it was two to one or even lower with even higher loss percentages.
The closest modern equivalent to a person born at the dawn of the 14th Century is a man born in 1900. A baby born in 1900 was old enough to be eligible to participate in the carnage of trench warfare by his 18th birthday, by his 19th birthday he could have been dead of the influenza pandemic starting in 1918 which killed over 50 million people. He was still under 30 at the beginning of the Great Depression, and was under 40 when the Second World War started, and then in his 45th year he entered an age of the atom with all of its consequences to civilian populations, worldwide.
His 14th Century ancestor by his mid-teens, faced a famine that rivaled the Black Death in its capacity to reduce the population. However, this famine is now relatively forgotten as so many have occurred since then: Like most naturally occurring famines, it started with bad weather in the spring (of 1315) with heavy persistent rains and without warm periods. This did not allow the grain to ripen and this cycle continued off and on for about seven years. Any grain that could be harvested had a low yield and animals starved in some areas with an 80 percent reduction in their numbers. Population declined between 10 to 20 percent in many areas and even royal families who were the richest with many experiencing overall reduced life expectancy. During this seven year period in which disease and deficiency debilitated even those who survived, pandemic followed in the form of the Black Death a little over a generation later.
All well-read survivalists know that civilization has a very thin veneer. This famine was not much different as what traditionally occurs in famines as food became less and less available and people become increasingly desperate: crime increased even to unspeakable crimes such as cannibalism and infanticide. The origin of the “fairy tale” of “Hansel and Gretel” actually is from this time period and for those who have read the original telling of it includes the famine component. The historical record is unfortunately replete with examples until this day of the principle of the “nine meals” by Alfred Henry Lewis: “Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.”
When we hear statements like 80 percent of the world’s calories come from grain or other staple crops, this is a very critical point for survivalists to remember. Wheat, corn, and rice comprise over half of the world’s calories. Think about it like a three leg stool with even one leg being knocked out it becomes an unstable platform. Previous civilizations that relied on one crop often suffered tremendous consequences if some form of pestilence became prevalent. From 1845 to 1852, the Irish potato crop which was the Irish “Lumper” potato was the most common variety became subject to the blight.
The net result was that a million Irish died and a million emigrated abroad to avoid starvation and for better opportunities. This is an extreme example of monoculture gone wrong. Specialization is one of the key components of the reason why you are able to do what you do instead of being behind a plow from sunup to sundown or engaged in other food growing or gathering like the majority of adult men for most of history, but any type of complex system can fail. The Irish chose a variety known for its ability to produce high calories in a compact space quickly. Unfortunately, a lack of crop diversification led to much wailing and lamentations throughout Eire.
For most of human history, it was a struggle just to survive and a prepared individual should be prepared for historical pendulum to eventually swing back to a historically normal level where food takes a larger proportion of income and is not available in endless varieties. Our farm can be activated very quickly into a retreat and one of the foundational principles even on a farm is food storage. Our farm can harvest multiple times per year, but there are many months when we are waiting for the harvest. We are blessed to have extensive food storage both packed for long term and on shelves, large freezers full of food (with multiple backup power sources), and the ability to purchase food both locally and from around the world. This is wonderful, but it could stop suddenly.
Based on my historical research, the bare minimum for any retreat is two and a half years of food storage and that is for people who have extensive experience with extracting calories out of the ground. History has shown too many times that when problems happen in food production they can often be regional or national instead of just local. Unless a family truly has limited climate-controlled storage space for food or is in the process of moving, food is often an excellent investment as a hedge against inflation, supply chain issues, and other problems that occur.
Our current civilization is founded on several key components. One of them is the principle of food storage. Most people do not store food, but others are storing food for you so you can exchange your dollars for their food that you want when you want. Previous civilizations stored food or they starved. Even if they stored food, many times they starved. You can get food by looking around for it, by knowing which plants will get you some limited nutrition or are your last meal. This is highly inefficient and often dangerous to those who are not experts in identifying the often minute differences between something highly poisonous and something benign.
The most efficient way to produce food is through modern farming techniques some of which will be covered with my discussion starting tomorrow. Most of this discussion is very similar to what other farmers who own grain farms do throughout the United States and the world.
Modern farming is scientific. At its simplest form, this is the idea that you can take a series of steps and repeat them to show an easily repeatable result. Randomly scattering seed at the wrong time of year without planting will often result in a meal for birds, not food for you or to sell so you can buy something else.
Scientific farming has been developed over the centuries. It is no longer folklore or old wives’ tales which sometimes are the basis of how things really work and sometimes just plain nonsense. This has taken much time and experimentation. Go back far enough, and people thought some really strange things that we know now to be incorrect to dangerous. A more recent example is if you tried to explain the chain of events starting in 2020 to most people in 2019, they would have thought that was impossible.
Sometimes discoveries are made by accident and probably not through the rigorous principles of science. Cheese was probably invented when some merchant was transporting milk across a long distance who discovered that it is quite delicious and a way to preserve milk. It took some time to discover that the stomachs of animals contain the enzyme rennet which causes milk to curdle to separate the curds from whey. Eventually someone figured out to make ricotta cheese which uses the whey. We can now accurately gauge every single phase in the life of a plant including which inputs work best and how to most efficiently harvest it to maximize yield and how to store it to preserve it for the point at which you want to consume it for its caloric output or sell it to someone who wants to eat it or further process it.
One of the foundational principles of farming is based on a very simple idea: you plant a seed and try to increase the amount you get back. A seed is an amazing item. In the case of the humble wheat seed (known as a berry or kernel), it can be eaten now or one seed can given enough time, effort, water, fertilizer and sunlight fill an entire room with more seeds with the potential for each of those to do the same. It does not happen overnight or by accident. It requires a lot of planning and everything to go right. There are so many possibilities that can destroy a harvest. An early frost, excessive rain at the wrong time, a drought, fire from a lightning strike, and hail are just some of the events that can turn a “fine stand of wheat” into a topic for a newspaper story on the state of American agriculture.
One ordinary seed has all of the power to restart a crop and all of agriculture. You just need a lot of time, knowledge, and the basic inputs of farming for that one seed to become the progenitor. It is a play on the old game of showing exponential growth of rice thought of a long time ago starting with one square and doubling it each day. Over a hundred years ago someone considered it for wheat and figured it would take 15 years at the rate back then for one wheat berry to turn into over 5 billion bushels. In the United States, we routinely harvest a multiple of what previous generations of farmers would harvest, so it would take less time today to get to the same level of production. The one problem is how to make it over the “starving time” between planting and harvest, so for survivalists deep larders, knowledge, and tools will be necessary if we ever need to restart agriculture.
Consistently repeating that simple idea is often the problem. Seeing that you could turn that one seed into two on a consistent basis was most likely the genesis of agriculture where people could stay in one spot and develop what we often term “civilization” instead of just figuring out a way to stay alive by going from harvesting wild edibles to chasing herds of nomadic animals. Now, we routinely return 30 or more to one seed through amazing agricultural productivity through the principles of scientific farming. An acre of wheat planted in our area in Kansas could yield 50 or more bushels to the acre. We plant about one bushel to the acre, so that could be a 50 to 1 return at that level of productivity. This level of productivity is simply historically amazing and the reason why you are not behind the plow currently (actually not many people are “behind a plow” currently except by lifestyle choice or who are “historically interpreting” animal-powered agriculture).
CORPORATE FARMS VERSUS FAMILY FARMS

As I wrote last time in my series on retreats, family farms are the vast majority of all farms in this country which are owned by families, not large corporations. Depending on the source of the statistics that you read, it is somewhere around 95 to 98 percent of family farms in the United States, currently. Large corporations control between 2 to 5 percent of the farms, but since these are very large, the percentage of their total output is high. However, your food most likely comes from a family farm as over 80 percent of food grown in this country is actually from family farms. At the dawn of civilization, one farmer barely supported his family; now farmers are feeding almost 170 people. This has increased consistently and fewer people are needed each year to be involved in agriculture. Because of the efficiency of modern agriculture, you are most likely able to devote your time to other pursuits which improve our lives.
WHEAT FARMING IN THE HEARTLAND: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A WHEAT FARM

We are a diversified family farm actually growing multiple crops to provide diversified income streams. We own all of our acres and have no debt. This will be covered extensively in the part which covers the “Economics of Farming.” Everything is grown that is sold is for profit. If a crop is no longer profitable or has a strong possibility of becoming unprofitable, it is not grown or sometimes grown in a limited amount. Just because we can grow something in quantity, does not mean that we should.
In pre-industrial America, a wheat farmer had to do these tasks by hand: cutting, bundling the sheaves, drying, threshing, winnowing, and storing. When wheat is at the stage which can be expressed as “amber waves of grain,” it describes the color transformation stage from green to amber in the ripening process on the road to harvest. This first stage of the harvest required great physical stamina in swinging a scythe where two acres a day would be a routine amount using a scythe with a cradle. This was an improvement over using a sickle where usually well under an acre could be cut, but this was a forward movement in efficiency.
The imagery of “bringing in the sheaves” as expressed through the 19th Century song evokes the idea of the Great Harvest instead of wheat it is of believers who are gathered together with whom they have shared the Gospel. Threshing is actually the most labor-intensive because you are separating the wheat berries from the stalk often using a flail although other methods are often used. Other Biblical imagery included the concept of winnowing of separating the wheat from the chaff, so only the edible part of the grain is stored. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick demonstrated the first reaper which ushered in the transition and shifting the burden from man to machine with some animal assistance. Cutting was a gigantic step forward and the next binding the bundles took about until 1874 with John Appleby whose invention mechanized this step which is much more complicated.
Within a half a century of the introduction of the mechanical reaper, steam was replacing animal power on large farms. Now, a modern combine can harvest multiples of that per day with one operator versus a whole team of people. A combine can do all of these steps (the storage step is actually limited as you need to transfer it into another transfer truck to eventually a bin or truck it when the combine’s grain tank is full) at a rate of 30 acres per hour (this could easily be upwards of 100,000 pounds of wheat an hour) with the specs on one of the popular models. The record is over 200,000 pounds per hour for an eight hour test on another model. Of course, tests performed under ideal conditions or even averages can be far from actual results in the field. Comparing the speed of one horse to a modern sports car is nowhere near the ability of a combine compared to a single man harvesting.
[Image link]Combines became computerized by the 1990s able to document yields and locations with the ability to analyze field data and now they have extensive self-driving capabilities using GPS. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines five levels of automation for driving (six if you count a level 0 which has no automation). Imagine in the future of a fully autonomous tractor where the farmer can instruct the tractor on what to do using his phone and he can do something else. The current level of autonomy being tested in one model of an “autonomous” tractor is at a level that it has to be dropped off in the field by the operator. This is great progress because if fully implemented it could remove many hours of labor and someday it may be able to do the next scenario.
Maybe at some point in the future, a farmer could give some instructions to a tractor which can leave a garage or barn, perform some type of useful task, and return itself to its parking place delivering a report as to what it accomplished perhaps with a highlight reel of any interesting events plus allowing instructions to be changed whenever by electronic instruction. The next step after that is that the tractor takes information and “decides” that the window is actually correct to do a particular farming task (examining historic weather patterns including monitoring soil temperature for ideal germination rates, considering road traffic and conditions necessary to get to a field reported by other vehicles or sensors) and completes it delivering a report after it is done.
As in most tasks, there will be some human involvement as there is in automated restaurant concepts where someone puts the ingredients into various bins that are needed for the assembly process. For a restaurant that could currently need ten people to produce a product, one or fewer could be needed in the future as this person could be divided between restaurants until even that is further reduced perhaps with robots able to perform increasingly more agile tasks with the same levels of human dexterity as has been demonstrated with robot locomotion in the past decade. In any case, fewer people will be needed for most jobs, not more.
All of this automation costs massive amounts of money. Few businessmen would look at the numbers a modern farm produces and say to themselves that sounds like a great place to park their money for a gigantic return. The amount of product a farm can produce is astronomical, but the small amount of money a farmer receives for all of this risk is just absurd. I am going to take you into some numbers so you can peak under the hood of how farming economics works on a modern grain farm, but first let’s look at the lifecycle on a wheat farm.
If you are like most people, you eat some sort of wheat often multiple times per day. At almost every meal, you are probably eating something made with wheat. You might start your day with a wheat based cereal or if you decide to have an egg and toast. After that breakfast, maybe you had a burger (bun) or fried chicken (breading) for lunch. Many dinners such as spaghetti and meatballs or macaroni and cheese contain wheat. Usually, bread is made of wheat even “white bread.”
I have traveled a lot and I have heard people think that “white flour” is somehow different than wheat. We do not have any “white flour” plants: White flour is an end product of milling and refining wheat flour. White flour is simply wheat flour with the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil removed with five vitamins added back in currently for “nutrition.”
Starting in the late 1800s, roller mills in distant cities would produce flour separating components that could lead to spoilage as wheat flour once ground quickly oxidizes. This process was very different than the community-based stone ground mills which in communities near falling water were water-powered instead of animal-powered. An individual was likely to go from milling to usage that day or very quickly versus something produced in a distant factory could have been milled months ago.
By the 1930s, scientists began to see the effects of a lack of vitamins in factory-produced white flour as through the processing the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil are removed and four vitamins were added back then with folic acid also being added by the 1990s. Many individuals have been rediscovering the benefits of whole grains and are now milling or grinding their own whole grains.
Wheat takes a lot out of the soil depleting it of nutrients such as nitrogen and micronutrients such as copper. Soil depletion is real and this must by addressed by farmers as it is important to monitor individual soil chemistry and deficits. A very important consideration is topsoil loss which unfortunately has been in continual deficit globally although many farmers have begun the long process to mitigate the effects through no-till farming and adding organic matter back into the soil in an effort to restore topsoil.
Continually monitoring and addressing the soil health is important because mineral imbalances often lead to lower yields or increased susceptibility to disease similar to a person who is lacking critical vitamins such as long-distance sailors suffering with scurvy in the Voyages of Discovery before Vitamin C was recognized as a critical component of a well-balanced diet.
The increase in yields is largely the result of scientific understanding of what plants need to grow and how to maximize the life cycle of annual crops to achieve increased yields. Starting with the Haber process which “unlocked” nitrogen into a form that can be readily used by plants, farm yields began a gradual march upward.
Nitrogen is 78 percent of the air you breathe, but being able to effectively use this in farming required factories to produce ammonia which 80 percent of ammonia is used for fertilizer. The story of soil fertility including the concept of how lime is critical as a soil amendment allowing better mineral uptake in plants demonstrates how one imbalance can lead to reduction in both yields and quality of crops. Earlier processes in farming to use various amendments such as animal manure were not as effective in increasing yields, so they have been supplanted over time by most farmers producing at commercial levels.
There has been a great deal of research on the concept of micro-nutrients and other components of soil health besides raw easily definable numbers. It is important for farmers to keep up with the latest developments to increase soil health as the soil is the “home” to the crops providing it with stability and the nutrients it requires. The increases in yields have been fantastic over this period and has dramatically reduced the possibility of starvation for many more people beginning in the mid-20th Century. If you look at wheat yields in our area, we have easily doubled and sometimes tripled our averages over the past 80 years. This has allowed food prices to decrease as a percentage of income and for people to have more choices.
Timing is very critical in getting a crop in because in our area ideally you want to get the wheat planted and in before first snowfall. I describe our winter as moderate compared to many regions, but a nice snowfall helps provide the wheat a nice “blanket” for the winter weather. Like everything, too much and too late often leads to later problems. There are actually 23 segments across 11 stages in the process of going from the seedling growth to tillering to stem extension to heading to flowering to ripening in cereal crops such as wheat.
The timing of the planting of winter wheat is often controlled by the harvest of usually beans. Timing matters in life and especially in farming. Winter wheat is usually planted in our area around the third week of October and the average harvest is usually in mid to late June although there have been early harvests. That is when you will see your first check usually. The average person reading this probably has a regular paycheck or if they own a business are probably paid when the job is completed or within 30 days usually. Imagine performing work for someone in October and them not paying you until June of the following year.
There is a saying that all of us stand on the shoulders of giants and nothing can be more true than in farming. We have the benefit of over a hundred years of scientific reporting and descriptions to understand prior harvests. Wheat has actually been grown in Kansas since 1839. Kansas is known as the “Wheat State” due to the amount of wheat that has been historically grown. We are fortunate that the mild climate in our area often allows us to be able to harvest a double crop of beans after wheat. It is useful to consider a few specific decades of farming, so we can understand different cycles.
If you talk to a farmer who has been around for many decades, you will often hear them talk about particular years and often you can see patterns repeat themselves as climate-like history often rhymes if not repeats in cyclical patterns. In the historical record, you can often find brief reports of major events in the crop year including overall yields and total production.
In parts 2 and 3 of my previous article, there was a discussion about the farm family in the 19th Century who unfortunately lost a parcel that we later bought in the 21st Century. Studying price is often a way to understand economic conditions at the time. The 1880s were a difficult time to be in agriculture and prices declined from $1.05 a bushel for wheat in 1881 to just 45 cents by 1884. Wheat did not even break the dollar barrier again in Kansas until 1916! A student of history would recognize 1916 as the third year of the First World War where wheat production in Europe was limited by the war and United States production was needed. By 1917, the price was $2.12 a bushel and stayed above two dollars until 1920, not reaching the two-dollars-a-bushel price again until 1947.
When prices are high, people tend to rush into investments further increasing price. Then, these booms lead to eventual busts as conditions improve and other sources are brought back into production or new sources are found which causes supply to increase and prices to decline. Crop production in Europe rebounded. During the boom years, farmers took on debt and now had to repay their creditors with crops which brought considerably less when sold. Many farmers who took on debt were unable to pay it back and these farms were lost.
One important discussion in crop history is often to look at both the weather that impacts the crop and also specific diseases or infestations that occur. I will cover one such infestation which has historically wrecked wheat crops. The Hessian fly was actually one of the reasons for the panic of 1837 where crop shortages, speculation, and easy credit caused a cascading series of bank failures and unemployment. If you think the name sounds familiar, the story is that the fly was supposedly carried in the bedding of Hessian soldiers during the American Revolutionary War period. The Hessian Fly devastated many wheat crops through the 1930s and the principles of scientific farming have helped to reduce the devastating effects of this persistent pest. The varieties of wheat are now better able to resist most disease and these improved varieties of wheat are yielding more than ever before with increased resistance to disease. Using integrated pest management strategies, the Hessian Fly is well controlled in many areas through observation of the life cycle, using crop rotation, and better varieties of wheat.
The 1920s and 1930s were a very difficult time in farming because of the high debt load many farmers acquired during the boom war years. Wheat prices averaged about $1.16 a bushel during the 1920s, but many farmers expanded purchasing land at higher prices when wheat was over 2 dollars a bushel. By the end of the decade, the Great Depression began and by 1930 the price for a bushel had declined to 63 cents. The years of 1931 and 1932 were especially tragic with wheat being 33 cents a bushel both years. In those years, it often cost more for producing a crop than you would have achieved in selling it.
The Great Depression affected almost everyone with unemployment surging to about 25 percent of men were unemployed during the height of economic turmoil. Especially difficult was the year 1932 in which the summer of ’32 is now known as the economic bottom of the Great Depression, but few people realized it was the bottom at the time. This was a national event of monumental scope: In Mississippi in April of 1932, 25 percent of the land in the state was sold at foreclosure auctions across the state!
Preceding this was the collapse in the price of cotton: During the boom war years cotton was worth over 30 cents a pound, but in the depths of the Depression it was worth about a nickel a pound. Commodity after commodity could be easily be profiled along with all of the stories about how farm families were forced off their land due to inability to pay back debt, families who were in cities who were unable to pay their rent or mortgages were forced out onto the street.
Booms in agriculture are often event-based many times relatively short term and busts often last for years with often tragic consequences. Events such as the First World War or the recent war in the breadbasket of Europe often send prices higher and in the example of the First World War, these prices stayed higher for a longer time. Sometimes short-term weather events impacting the amount of crop is harvested will lead to higher prices. A poor wheat crop in certain areas when yours was unaffected is a situation that has happened to us when our area had sufficient rain at the right times, but other areas were in drought leading to higher prices.
THE FUTURE OF FARMING

The smallest of agricultural tools demonstrates the largest of problems in farming today. Small funnels are often thought of as almost disposable, but this one and its sticker saying the price survived all of these decades to become a component in this discussion. The funnel is from 1977 when my dad was young long before I was born. It was 59 cents. A comparable funnel today is around 5 dollars. Let us call it almost a ten to one ratio because you have in many states to add sales tax. Corn prices back in 1977 were about $2.30 a bushel. Corn prices 40 years later were $3.61. (I recently had a quote for corn at $4.30 a bushel.
The highest that corn sold for is a little under $8.50 a bushel back in 2012 due to some serious weather issues and decreased production forecasts.) Farmers were selling corn a little over 50 percent more 40 years later while purchasing equipment that could have been 1,000 percent more. Even with increased yields with improved varieties, this is simply not sustainable. Every piece of agricultural equipment that I can think of is higher in that time span. Back in 1977, a 125 hp tractor was about $20,000. Something comparable today can be over $100,000. Even larger tractors can easily cost a million dollars today. There is a lot of truth in the joke of how to make a million dollars farming: start with two million. There is still money to be made for the most efficient farms, but it requires people to have an understanding about business, weather, and history as much as it is about equipment.
What does the future look like in farming? Unfortunately for those who wish to be “operators” of equipment, it is like most jobs with large-scale declines in the amount of labor required to produce the same amount of calories or product. For those owners often knowing how to do a process, but hiring operators on a seasonal, ad hoc basis, or using more fully automated machinery at some point, the future looks brighter as costs decrease. This is part of the natural historical process of the amount of labor required to perform tasks in decline. Even this keyboard I am typing on is so much easier than using a mechanical non-electric typewriter. There are no “help wanted” ads for linotype operators anymore.
The amount of labor required to produce almost anything has been in decline almost continually since the First Industrial Revolution. Farming was actually a later industry to be mechanized than others. The steps to industrializing farming first required some form of portable power to achieve a mechanical advantage first through steam and then through relatively portable gasoline and diesel engines. Unlike most activities, the land is immovable, so you need to bring equipment to the land to work it trying to coax more out of the ground than you put in.
Ancient people would grind grain using an animal and those near water sources were able to figure out that falling water could be used to grind grains. An example of an industrial application of this principle is the factory mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the mid-1850s where over 50 water-powered turbines were powering the drive shaft in factories producing over 350,000 yards of cloth per day being produced in industrially powered looms. By comparison, someone skilled in the loom can produce between one to three yards per day. The mills had over ten thousand people employed, but still this was over a 10-to-1 advantage even with the relatively primitive technology of the mid 19th Century.
At some historical interpretation sites, you often will find someone using a spindle and loom demonstrating the last step in ancient practice of transforming flax into linen which is a 12 step process including such terms as you probably are first reading about such as stooking, rippling, retting, scutching, and hackling all before it is spun from the distaff on a spinning wheel. Much of this was done at home in piecework prior to the First Industrial Revolution. Using the factory model earlier developed in England, centralized factories allowed the ability to achieve higher output of fabric at a lower price driving out suppliers of goods. The factory organizing model led to the first large changes in how families were organized financially and socially with the workers journeying and often moving to the work. The work was not performed in their homes as it had been before, selling or trading at a local general store for other goods.
Centralization was necessary as the factory’s machinery was not portable. Usually, this was near a falling body of water to produce power inexpensively as gasoline or diesel power generation was several generations in the future. You may be wondering what our little journey to meet the “mill girls” of Lowell in the mid-19th Century has to do with farming. Their journey to the factory and centralization of their work was an early symptom of the decline of the family farm.
Many farm families in Massachusetts who were earning cash in piecework at home sent their daughters to work the looms for three or four dollars a week minus boarding expenses. Prior to this expansion into the Americas with the factory system, there is another interesting group of people who saw their jobs going away: the Luddites who starting in 1811 realized that machines were replacing people and they would go around smashing textile machines in order to stop this transformation. They were not successful. Eventually the cloth factories of the North moved to the South and most of this production has moved overseas due to labor costs over the last 30 years.
Factories cost money to build and to run. This requires capital which in its purest form is a free person deciding to take the results of his labor or money he has raised from other free people who decide that they can produce something at a lower cost than they can sell it at. You will often hear about “capital costs” or capitalization of a factory. A farm uses many of these same principles. We put our capital out and expect a return on this capital. This is not an overnight process: a winter wheat crop goes into the next year, but it is always more than six months and usually over seven before we see any financial benefit.
Labor has been declining in overall strength for the last 150 years. A large machine is often the equivalent of more than one man working continually. In many ways, that is the understatement of this century as it often is the power of thousands of men or something man could never accomplish on his own without the machine such as powered flight. In terms of raw number crunching power and ability to generate reports from facts, a machine can generate the report in seconds with the right prompts versus a human could not even begin gathering the data.
One thing that my family has done is given me an appreciation for people who labor and we would often visit factories when going on vacation. Where pictures and movies demonstrated how it was done years ago with countless individuals on various production lines, many people have been replaced by machinery which rarely takes a break to the point of needing some required maintenance or an overhaul. Many jobs will be on the chopping block as men with capital figure out how to reduce their costs with labor often being a significant and escalating cost.
Whenever I consider anything about history to glean some knowledge to use today, it is useful not only to look at battles and diplomacy, but about the people and the men (it was mostly men) working farms. The women made their houses into homes by following what the Bible says about the family in that they were helpmeets to their husbands and their contribution was to build a community in which these patchworks when sewn together became a great nation. The hours and dangerous conditions they faced were enormous, but these farm families were feeding a growing nation.
In the 21st Century, we tend to romanticize the past with our love of the frontier of a pioneer feeding his family, of cowboys driving cattle to the market and men gathered around the campfire telling tall tales. For the most part, men have always dreamed of figuring out how to make things more efficiently and farming is no different. The goal of grain farming is to extract more “seeds” out of the ground than you put in. When successful, it is significantly more than your overhead.
The first men transformed the motions of men using animal-powered reapers and the various tasks were combined into an integrated “combine.” All of those steps which required so many men working around fast moving often sharp metal objects now are accomplished by one man in a combine that often has GPS control over steering. A hundred years ago most farming was done with horses or mules. Successful “combining” was a well-coordinated activity incorporating the labor of multiple men working together to accomplish the task.
The combining task when examined through a modern lens is a safety nightmare. Traditionally, one man sat on an elevated perch reached by a ladder high above attempting to command often more than two dozen horses with no safety equipment such as seat belts or roll bar trying to efficiently drive this literal horsepower to accomplish a task that is now done by one man. (See the photo at the top of this article.) When sitting in an air-conditioned combine seeing computer readouts with steering with GPS capability, it is amazing to see the growth in efficiently. Currently, there are no fully autonomous combines sold in the United States, but that possibility exists in the near future.
Wheat in the field is basically worthless to a grain farmer unless he can figure a way to get it to the point where he can extract the precious wheat berries for his own use or to sell them. The entire point of the modern combine is to make that a seamless process taking the ancient processes and turning it into a usable easily transportable product. Before wheat became easily transportable in semi-trucks that hold approximately 1000 bushels of wheat that can be sold at the grain elevator for checks, it usually was put into sacks and then these sacks were transported to be sold locally or transported by rail.
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SURVIVALBLOG CONTRIBUTOR
JANUARY 7, 2025
I want to tell you about an amazing group of people. They make sure that you not only stay alive, are well-nourished, and that you have your choice of a delicious variety of food that Kings and Queens of yesteryear could not dream of, all at relatively low prices. Contrary to what you’ve been told, prices are still fairly low by historical standards and food quality is high. I know that you or someone you know has recently been to the grocery store and you think the prices are high, but wait until you hear about the state of the farm economy and I will give you some practical thoughts that may help your family in the future. In this article series, I am going to take you on a journey through history until the present where you probably interacted with the products from a family farm, probably three or more times per day.
The full depth of an article covering family farms could cover many volumes. So I will not be able to take you down every interesting road showing you every interesting detour, but I do hope to provide you a comprehensive overview of how a seed planted in the previous year harvested midway the following year could become a component in your breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, or dinner — keeping you alive and healthy. I will introduce you to a farm family that survived the Great Depression including one of their stories of thrift, through using something most people today would discard. There are so many lessons to be learned in these struggles during previous tough times.
Because time only moves forward, I encourage you whenever possible to learn from your elders, talk to them, ask them about their life, also importantly ask them about their ancestors and any stories that they heard going back to their childhood. You can go back very far and sometimes you can learn a lesson that can help you in the future.
The last generation of people who were “born in this century, tempered by war” are quickly passing off the stage of history and the time is short to learn from their lives before they can no longer speak to you with their voice and you can ask them follow-up questions. Most of the few who are still living were children during the years of the Great Depression, with the men serving in World War II, and they came home victorious to a post-war America where decisions were made on farming at a national level that still impact farms today — and by extension you and your family, as well. You may ask what President Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961 has to do with farming, but the family farm was undergoing a rapid transformation during the critical decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Because you are likely a consumer of food that someone else grows or prepares, this story is critical as it most likely has much to do with how you are living and what you are eating today.
In my previous five-part article series on retreat properties, there is a lot of information about land and history for survival retreat purposes. Many retreats are actually working farms because an inescapable fact is that you need to eat: you can store food, but eventually you will eat your way through it. The nutritional value of stored food will also decline over time. And, given the right conditions, you can grow more food. It is better to be in a food-producing area — preferably with plentiful water — than in a food-importing region. To understand farming as it exists presently in the United States, it is critical to understand of how we got here.
There are now people trying to figure out how this generation overall of people is less healthy than previous generations. I applaud their efforts. If you want to know how you got here, you have to know where you have been and the decisions that were made along the way have largely determined how and what you are eating. What you are eating is a large and often the primary determinant of your overall health. I like ice cream in the summer as much as any healthy red-blooded American man, but if my diet consisted solely of that I doubt that I would be as physically fit and healthy as I am today. It is best not to look at one thing in isolation as an overview of how people managed to get the food that they needed throughout history is very important to understand the present.
I am a third-generation prepper, survivalist, or whatever name that we go by these days. More importantly, I am a student of history. I want to learn from the past to see how I can prosper and more importantly to prevent tragedy from occurring. Our ancestors had a saying the “burnt hand dreads the fire,” but we do not have enough hands and time for them to heal enough to teach us in the proverbial “school of hard knocks.”
Throughout most of history, you did not purchase food at a store, you grew it or someone you knew grew it for you as you were doing something else that was important to them (such as being the mother of your children), so they were willing to share their labor with you because there was some sort of trade where you are performing something of value to them. For instance, the most able hunter often was able to attract the best looking mate and who was then able to pass his genes on to future generations. The food that he provided, allowed her and their offspring to be able to eventually pass their genes to the next generation. This is a foundational Biblically derived principle of how gender roles were first expressed with the wife as helpmeet to the man. Because people live beyond their ability to biologically produce children, the grandmother actually has a critical role as expressed through the “grandmother hypothesis” where her role actually is involved in providing care and food to increase the second generation’s fitness to be able to reproduce.
During most of human history just getting sufficient calories was the number one priority, so a grandmother gathering food initially or discovering the secrets of agriculture helped increase the overall family’s survival. Humans can fly a hundred thousand feet into the air at multiples of the speed of sound for long distances and land safely, but we have not overcome the basic facts of physics of calories burned have to be replaced: we need to eat regularly or we suffer consequences starting with hunger pangs leading to muscle loss if enough protein is not consumed with enough of these unfortunate malnutrition events strung together often lead to an untimely death.
Food is not free and someone had to work to grow it consistently. I know there is a farm boy out there who either is still in his “Huck Finn” carefree stage with a cane pole or who is now all grown up who thinks back to a fond memory of fishing by the lake on his family farm and takes a snack of some wild blackberries. Maybe some food is free, but that is not enough. I am going to take you back to an unpleasant time, so you can see how good you have it, historically.
Go back just a few generations, there were no “food stamp” coupons or cards allowing you the benefit of the cornucopia of modern life potentially at your fingertips just for the virtue of living in the post-industrial welfare United States of America. This is so historically abnormal, but tragic because it often can lead people down so many bad roads.
Eating without working for able-bodied adults is contradiction of Biblical wisdom in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 in which we are warned: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” The early colonists at Jamestown actually experimented with a form of “socialism” where everything was held in a common storehouse as that is how their company charter was originally organized. Because the colonists at Jamestown under this system could not individually benefit from their own labors, they often did very little and this contributed to the near collapse.
One of the leading colonists, Ralph Hamor, wrote in his 1615 book “A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia” reflecting back on his time at Jamestown: “When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of the ground and planting corn, glad was that man that could slip from his labor, nay the most honest of them in a general business, would take so much faithful and true pains in a week as now he will do in a day.” Food shortages and leadership challenges led to disastrous results with an 80 percent death rate during the Winter of 1609-1610. The colonists made it through the “Starving Time” although in diminished numbers. From that point forward, their numbers never dipped that low again and they became successful.
The treasurer of the Virginia Company of London Sir Edwin Sandys highlighted an important fact in 1620: “The plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respect of wives and children fix the people on the soil.” The first permanent English settlement in this country at Jamestown only flourished after it had discovered a few inescapable facts both through a lot of trial and error. People need to have a reasonable expectation that they will individually profit from their labor as Captain John Smith was instrumental in changing how the colonists worked and were compensated. Civilizations and their smaller outposts of colonies only succeed when they are able to grow and flourish through feeding themselves and eventual population growth.
As I mentioned in a recent article, importing brides proved to be crucial to the success of the Jamestown Colony.
Successful survivalists consider a variety of scenarios including looking at how previous generations survived to glean any wisdom that they can take as compensation for their time. All of us are only here because our ancestors somehow managed to carry themselves genetically forward. For most of human history, it was difficult to get enough calories to barely stay alive and this fact is lost upon most people as they have so many choices today often struggling on what cuisine to eat, and not how to find food.
A common cause of death throughout history has been starvation, due to crop failure. A lot of individuals reading this if asked to name a critical event of the 14th Century would say the “Black Death” — also known as the Bubonic Plague — reducing Europe’s overall population from 1346 to 1353 by about a third with mortality rates of often 80 percent or higher depending on the plague year. Few people know that just a little earlier in the 14th Century there was a large food crisis that is very important to our discussion on farming. Throughout history, people would often go from harvest to harvest and the slightest interruption often meant disaster as crop yields were not large multiples, but were often in low single-digit multipliers in productivity. Often it was two to one or even lower with even higher loss percentages.
The closest modern equivalent to a person born at the dawn of the 14th Century is a man born in 1900. A baby born in 1900 was old enough to be eligible to participate in the carnage of trench warfare by his 18th birthday, by his 19th birthday he could have been dead of the influenza pandemic starting in 1918 which killed over 50 million people. He was still under 30 at the beginning of the Great Depression, and was under 40 when the Second World War started, and then in his 45th year he entered an age of the atom with all of its consequences to civilian populations, worldwide.
His 14th Century ancestor by his mid-teens, faced a famine that rivaled the Black Death in its capacity to reduce the population. However, this famine is now relatively forgotten as so many have occurred since then: Like most naturally occurring famines, it started with bad weather in the spring (of 1315) with heavy persistent rains and without warm periods. This did not allow the grain to ripen and this cycle continued off and on for about seven years. Any grain that could be harvested had a low yield and animals starved in some areas with an 80 percent reduction in their numbers. Population declined between 10 to 20 percent in many areas and even royal families who were the richest with many experiencing overall reduced life expectancy. During this seven year period in which disease and deficiency debilitated even those who survived, pandemic followed in the form of the Black Death a little over a generation later.
All well-read survivalists know that civilization has a very thin veneer. This famine was not much different as what traditionally occurs in famines as food became less and less available and people become increasingly desperate: crime increased even to unspeakable crimes such as cannibalism and infanticide. The origin of the “fairy tale” of “Hansel and Gretel” actually is from this time period and for those who have read the original telling of it includes the famine component. The historical record is unfortunately replete with examples until this day of the principle of the “nine meals” by Alfred Henry Lewis: “Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.”
When we hear statements like 80 percent of the world’s calories come from grain or other staple crops, this is a very critical point for survivalists to remember. Wheat, corn, and rice comprise over half of the world’s calories. Think about it like a three leg stool with even one leg being knocked out it becomes an unstable platform. Previous civilizations that relied on one crop often suffered tremendous consequences if some form of pestilence became prevalent. From 1845 to 1852, the Irish potato crop which was the Irish “Lumper” potato was the most common variety became subject to the blight.
The net result was that a million Irish died and a million emigrated abroad to avoid starvation and for better opportunities. This is an extreme example of monoculture gone wrong. Specialization is one of the key components of the reason why you are able to do what you do instead of being behind a plow from sunup to sundown or engaged in other food growing or gathering like the majority of adult men for most of history, but any type of complex system can fail. The Irish chose a variety known for its ability to produce high calories in a compact space quickly. Unfortunately, a lack of crop diversification led to much wailing and lamentations throughout Eire.
For most of human history, it was a struggle just to survive and a prepared individual should be prepared for historical pendulum to eventually swing back to a historically normal level where food takes a larger proportion of income and is not available in endless varieties. Our farm can be activated very quickly into a retreat and one of the foundational principles even on a farm is food storage. Our farm can harvest multiple times per year, but there are many months when we are waiting for the harvest. We are blessed to have extensive food storage both packed for long term and on shelves, large freezers full of food (with multiple backup power sources), and the ability to purchase food both locally and from around the world. This is wonderful, but it could stop suddenly.
Based on my historical research, the bare minimum for any retreat is two and a half years of food storage and that is for people who have extensive experience with extracting calories out of the ground. History has shown too many times that when problems happen in food production they can often be regional or national instead of just local. Unless a family truly has limited climate-controlled storage space for food or is in the process of moving, food is often an excellent investment as a hedge against inflation, supply chain issues, and other problems that occur.
Our current civilization is founded on several key components. One of them is the principle of food storage. Most people do not store food, but others are storing food for you so you can exchange your dollars for their food that you want when you want. Previous civilizations stored food or they starved. Even if they stored food, many times they starved. You can get food by looking around for it, by knowing which plants will get you some limited nutrition or are your last meal. This is highly inefficient and often dangerous to those who are not experts in identifying the often minute differences between something highly poisonous and something benign.
The most efficient way to produce food is through modern farming techniques some of which will be covered with my discussion starting tomorrow. Most of this discussion is very similar to what other farmers who own grain farms do throughout the United States and the world.
Modern farming is scientific. At its simplest form, this is the idea that you can take a series of steps and repeat them to show an easily repeatable result. Randomly scattering seed at the wrong time of year without planting will often result in a meal for birds, not food for you or to sell so you can buy something else.
Scientific farming has been developed over the centuries. It is no longer folklore or old wives’ tales which sometimes are the basis of how things really work and sometimes just plain nonsense. This has taken much time and experimentation. Go back far enough, and people thought some really strange things that we know now to be incorrect to dangerous. A more recent example is if you tried to explain the chain of events starting in 2020 to most people in 2019, they would have thought that was impossible.
Sometimes discoveries are made by accident and probably not through the rigorous principles of science. Cheese was probably invented when some merchant was transporting milk across a long distance who discovered that it is quite delicious and a way to preserve milk. It took some time to discover that the stomachs of animals contain the enzyme rennet which causes milk to curdle to separate the curds from whey. Eventually someone figured out to make ricotta cheese which uses the whey. We can now accurately gauge every single phase in the life of a plant including which inputs work best and how to most efficiently harvest it to maximize yield and how to store it to preserve it for the point at which you want to consume it for its caloric output or sell it to someone who wants to eat it or further process it.
One of the foundational principles of farming is based on a very simple idea: you plant a seed and try to increase the amount you get back. A seed is an amazing item. In the case of the humble wheat seed (known as a berry or kernel), it can be eaten now or one seed can given enough time, effort, water, fertilizer and sunlight fill an entire room with more seeds with the potential for each of those to do the same. It does not happen overnight or by accident. It requires a lot of planning and everything to go right. There are so many possibilities that can destroy a harvest. An early frost, excessive rain at the wrong time, a drought, fire from a lightning strike, and hail are just some of the events that can turn a “fine stand of wheat” into a topic for a newspaper story on the state of American agriculture.
One ordinary seed has all of the power to restart a crop and all of agriculture. You just need a lot of time, knowledge, and the basic inputs of farming for that one seed to become the progenitor. It is a play on the old game of showing exponential growth of rice thought of a long time ago starting with one square and doubling it each day. Over a hundred years ago someone considered it for wheat and figured it would take 15 years at the rate back then for one wheat berry to turn into over 5 billion bushels. In the United States, we routinely harvest a multiple of what previous generations of farmers would harvest, so it would take less time today to get to the same level of production. The one problem is how to make it over the “starving time” between planting and harvest, so for survivalists deep larders, knowledge, and tools will be necessary if we ever need to restart agriculture.
Consistently repeating that simple idea is often the problem. Seeing that you could turn that one seed into two on a consistent basis was most likely the genesis of agriculture where people could stay in one spot and develop what we often term “civilization” instead of just figuring out a way to stay alive by going from harvesting wild edibles to chasing herds of nomadic animals. Now, we routinely return 30 or more to one seed through amazing agricultural productivity through the principles of scientific farming. An acre of wheat planted in our area in Kansas could yield 50 or more bushels to the acre. We plant about one bushel to the acre, so that could be a 50 to 1 return at that level of productivity. This level of productivity is simply historically amazing and the reason why you are not behind the plow currently (actually not many people are “behind a plow” currently except by lifestyle choice or who are “historically interpreting” animal-powered agriculture).
CORPORATE FARMS VERSUS FAMILY FARMS

As I wrote last time in my series on retreats, family farms are the vast majority of all farms in this country which are owned by families, not large corporations. Depending on the source of the statistics that you read, it is somewhere around 95 to 98 percent of family farms in the United States, currently. Large corporations control between 2 to 5 percent of the farms, but since these are very large, the percentage of their total output is high. However, your food most likely comes from a family farm as over 80 percent of food grown in this country is actually from family farms. At the dawn of civilization, one farmer barely supported his family; now farmers are feeding almost 170 people. This has increased consistently and fewer people are needed each year to be involved in agriculture. Because of the efficiency of modern agriculture, you are most likely able to devote your time to other pursuits which improve our lives.
WHEAT FARMING IN THE HEARTLAND: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A WHEAT FARM

We are a diversified family farm actually growing multiple crops to provide diversified income streams. We own all of our acres and have no debt. This will be covered extensively in the part which covers the “Economics of Farming.” Everything is grown that is sold is for profit. If a crop is no longer profitable or has a strong possibility of becoming unprofitable, it is not grown or sometimes grown in a limited amount. Just because we can grow something in quantity, does not mean that we should.
In pre-industrial America, a wheat farmer had to do these tasks by hand: cutting, bundling the sheaves, drying, threshing, winnowing, and storing. When wheat is at the stage which can be expressed as “amber waves of grain,” it describes the color transformation stage from green to amber in the ripening process on the road to harvest. This first stage of the harvest required great physical stamina in swinging a scythe where two acres a day would be a routine amount using a scythe with a cradle. This was an improvement over using a sickle where usually well under an acre could be cut, but this was a forward movement in efficiency.
The imagery of “bringing in the sheaves” as expressed through the 19th Century song evokes the idea of the Great Harvest instead of wheat it is of believers who are gathered together with whom they have shared the Gospel. Threshing is actually the most labor-intensive because you are separating the wheat berries from the stalk often using a flail although other methods are often used. Other Biblical imagery included the concept of winnowing of separating the wheat from the chaff, so only the edible part of the grain is stored. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick demonstrated the first reaper which ushered in the transition and shifting the burden from man to machine with some animal assistance. Cutting was a gigantic step forward and the next binding the bundles took about until 1874 with John Appleby whose invention mechanized this step which is much more complicated.
Within a half a century of the introduction of the mechanical reaper, steam was replacing animal power on large farms. Now, a modern combine can harvest multiples of that per day with one operator versus a whole team of people. A combine can do all of these steps (the storage step is actually limited as you need to transfer it into another transfer truck to eventually a bin or truck it when the combine’s grain tank is full) at a rate of 30 acres per hour (this could easily be upwards of 100,000 pounds of wheat an hour) with the specs on one of the popular models. The record is over 200,000 pounds per hour for an eight hour test on another model. Of course, tests performed under ideal conditions or even averages can be far from actual results in the field. Comparing the speed of one horse to a modern sports car is nowhere near the ability of a combine compared to a single man harvesting.
[Image link]Combines became computerized by the 1990s able to document yields and locations with the ability to analyze field data and now they have extensive self-driving capabilities using GPS. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines five levels of automation for driving (six if you count a level 0 which has no automation). Imagine in the future of a fully autonomous tractor where the farmer can instruct the tractor on what to do using his phone and he can do something else. The current level of autonomy being tested in one model of an “autonomous” tractor is at a level that it has to be dropped off in the field by the operator. This is great progress because if fully implemented it could remove many hours of labor and someday it may be able to do the next scenario.
Maybe at some point in the future, a farmer could give some instructions to a tractor which can leave a garage or barn, perform some type of useful task, and return itself to its parking place delivering a report as to what it accomplished perhaps with a highlight reel of any interesting events plus allowing instructions to be changed whenever by electronic instruction. The next step after that is that the tractor takes information and “decides” that the window is actually correct to do a particular farming task (examining historic weather patterns including monitoring soil temperature for ideal germination rates, considering road traffic and conditions necessary to get to a field reported by other vehicles or sensors) and completes it delivering a report after it is done.
As in most tasks, there will be some human involvement as there is in automated restaurant concepts where someone puts the ingredients into various bins that are needed for the assembly process. For a restaurant that could currently need ten people to produce a product, one or fewer could be needed in the future as this person could be divided between restaurants until even that is further reduced perhaps with robots able to perform increasingly more agile tasks with the same levels of human dexterity as has been demonstrated with robot locomotion in the past decade. In any case, fewer people will be needed for most jobs, not more.
All of this automation costs massive amounts of money. Few businessmen would look at the numbers a modern farm produces and say to themselves that sounds like a great place to park their money for a gigantic return. The amount of product a farm can produce is astronomical, but the small amount of money a farmer receives for all of this risk is just absurd. I am going to take you into some numbers so you can peak under the hood of how farming economics works on a modern grain farm, but first let’s look at the lifecycle on a wheat farm.
If you are like most people, you eat some sort of wheat often multiple times per day. At almost every meal, you are probably eating something made with wheat. You might start your day with a wheat based cereal or if you decide to have an egg and toast. After that breakfast, maybe you had a burger (bun) or fried chicken (breading) for lunch. Many dinners such as spaghetti and meatballs or macaroni and cheese contain wheat. Usually, bread is made of wheat even “white bread.”
I have traveled a lot and I have heard people think that “white flour” is somehow different than wheat. We do not have any “white flour” plants: White flour is an end product of milling and refining wheat flour. White flour is simply wheat flour with the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil removed with five vitamins added back in currently for “nutrition.”
Starting in the late 1800s, roller mills in distant cities would produce flour separating components that could lead to spoilage as wheat flour once ground quickly oxidizes. This process was very different than the community-based stone ground mills which in communities near falling water were water-powered instead of animal-powered. An individual was likely to go from milling to usage that day or very quickly versus something produced in a distant factory could have been milled months ago.
By the 1930s, scientists began to see the effects of a lack of vitamins in factory-produced white flour as through the processing the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil are removed and four vitamins were added back then with folic acid also being added by the 1990s. Many individuals have been rediscovering the benefits of whole grains and are now milling or grinding their own whole grains.
Wheat takes a lot out of the soil depleting it of nutrients such as nitrogen and micronutrients such as copper. Soil depletion is real and this must by addressed by farmers as it is important to monitor individual soil chemistry and deficits. A very important consideration is topsoil loss which unfortunately has been in continual deficit globally although many farmers have begun the long process to mitigate the effects through no-till farming and adding organic matter back into the soil in an effort to restore topsoil.
Continually monitoring and addressing the soil health is important because mineral imbalances often lead to lower yields or increased susceptibility to disease similar to a person who is lacking critical vitamins such as long-distance sailors suffering with scurvy in the Voyages of Discovery before Vitamin C was recognized as a critical component of a well-balanced diet.
The increase in yields is largely the result of scientific understanding of what plants need to grow and how to maximize the life cycle of annual crops to achieve increased yields. Starting with the Haber process which “unlocked” nitrogen into a form that can be readily used by plants, farm yields began a gradual march upward.
Nitrogen is 78 percent of the air you breathe, but being able to effectively use this in farming required factories to produce ammonia which 80 percent of ammonia is used for fertilizer. The story of soil fertility including the concept of how lime is critical as a soil amendment allowing better mineral uptake in plants demonstrates how one imbalance can lead to reduction in both yields and quality of crops. Earlier processes in farming to use various amendments such as animal manure were not as effective in increasing yields, so they have been supplanted over time by most farmers producing at commercial levels.
There has been a great deal of research on the concept of micro-nutrients and other components of soil health besides raw easily definable numbers. It is important for farmers to keep up with the latest developments to increase soil health as the soil is the “home” to the crops providing it with stability and the nutrients it requires. The increases in yields have been fantastic over this period and has dramatically reduced the possibility of starvation for many more people beginning in the mid-20th Century. If you look at wheat yields in our area, we have easily doubled and sometimes tripled our averages over the past 80 years. This has allowed food prices to decrease as a percentage of income and for people to have more choices.
Timing is very critical in getting a crop in because in our area ideally you want to get the wheat planted and in before first snowfall. I describe our winter as moderate compared to many regions, but a nice snowfall helps provide the wheat a nice “blanket” for the winter weather. Like everything, too much and too late often leads to later problems. There are actually 23 segments across 11 stages in the process of going from the seedling growth to tillering to stem extension to heading to flowering to ripening in cereal crops such as wheat.
The timing of the planting of winter wheat is often controlled by the harvest of usually beans. Timing matters in life and especially in farming. Winter wheat is usually planted in our area around the third week of October and the average harvest is usually in mid to late June although there have been early harvests. That is when you will see your first check usually. The average person reading this probably has a regular paycheck or if they own a business are probably paid when the job is completed or within 30 days usually. Imagine performing work for someone in October and them not paying you until June of the following year.
There is a saying that all of us stand on the shoulders of giants and nothing can be more true than in farming. We have the benefit of over a hundred years of scientific reporting and descriptions to understand prior harvests. Wheat has actually been grown in Kansas since 1839. Kansas is known as the “Wheat State” due to the amount of wheat that has been historically grown. We are fortunate that the mild climate in our area often allows us to be able to harvest a double crop of beans after wheat. It is useful to consider a few specific decades of farming, so we can understand different cycles.
If you talk to a farmer who has been around for many decades, you will often hear them talk about particular years and often you can see patterns repeat themselves as climate-like history often rhymes if not repeats in cyclical patterns. In the historical record, you can often find brief reports of major events in the crop year including overall yields and total production.
In parts 2 and 3 of my previous article, there was a discussion about the farm family in the 19th Century who unfortunately lost a parcel that we later bought in the 21st Century. Studying price is often a way to understand economic conditions at the time. The 1880s were a difficult time to be in agriculture and prices declined from $1.05 a bushel for wheat in 1881 to just 45 cents by 1884. Wheat did not even break the dollar barrier again in Kansas until 1916! A student of history would recognize 1916 as the third year of the First World War where wheat production in Europe was limited by the war and United States production was needed. By 1917, the price was $2.12 a bushel and stayed above two dollars until 1920, not reaching the two-dollars-a-bushel price again until 1947.
When prices are high, people tend to rush into investments further increasing price. Then, these booms lead to eventual busts as conditions improve and other sources are brought back into production or new sources are found which causes supply to increase and prices to decline. Crop production in Europe rebounded. During the boom years, farmers took on debt and now had to repay their creditors with crops which brought considerably less when sold. Many farmers who took on debt were unable to pay it back and these farms were lost.
One important discussion in crop history is often to look at both the weather that impacts the crop and also specific diseases or infestations that occur. I will cover one such infestation which has historically wrecked wheat crops. The Hessian fly was actually one of the reasons for the panic of 1837 where crop shortages, speculation, and easy credit caused a cascading series of bank failures and unemployment. If you think the name sounds familiar, the story is that the fly was supposedly carried in the bedding of Hessian soldiers during the American Revolutionary War period. The Hessian Fly devastated many wheat crops through the 1930s and the principles of scientific farming have helped to reduce the devastating effects of this persistent pest. The varieties of wheat are now better able to resist most disease and these improved varieties of wheat are yielding more than ever before with increased resistance to disease. Using integrated pest management strategies, the Hessian Fly is well controlled in many areas through observation of the life cycle, using crop rotation, and better varieties of wheat.
The 1920s and 1930s were a very difficult time in farming because of the high debt load many farmers acquired during the boom war years. Wheat prices averaged about $1.16 a bushel during the 1920s, but many farmers expanded purchasing land at higher prices when wheat was over 2 dollars a bushel. By the end of the decade, the Great Depression began and by 1930 the price for a bushel had declined to 63 cents. The years of 1931 and 1932 were especially tragic with wheat being 33 cents a bushel both years. In those years, it often cost more for producing a crop than you would have achieved in selling it.
The Great Depression affected almost everyone with unemployment surging to about 25 percent of men were unemployed during the height of economic turmoil. Especially difficult was the year 1932 in which the summer of ’32 is now known as the economic bottom of the Great Depression, but few people realized it was the bottom at the time. This was a national event of monumental scope: In Mississippi in April of 1932, 25 percent of the land in the state was sold at foreclosure auctions across the state!
Preceding this was the collapse in the price of cotton: During the boom war years cotton was worth over 30 cents a pound, but in the depths of the Depression it was worth about a nickel a pound. Commodity after commodity could be easily be profiled along with all of the stories about how farm families were forced off their land due to inability to pay back debt, families who were in cities who were unable to pay their rent or mortgages were forced out onto the street.
Booms in agriculture are often event-based many times relatively short term and busts often last for years with often tragic consequences. Events such as the First World War or the recent war in the breadbasket of Europe often send prices higher and in the example of the First World War, these prices stayed higher for a longer time. Sometimes short-term weather events impacting the amount of crop is harvested will lead to higher prices. A poor wheat crop in certain areas when yours was unaffected is a situation that has happened to us when our area had sufficient rain at the right times, but other areas were in drought leading to higher prices.
THE FUTURE OF FARMING

The smallest of agricultural tools demonstrates the largest of problems in farming today. Small funnels are often thought of as almost disposable, but this one and its sticker saying the price survived all of these decades to become a component in this discussion. The funnel is from 1977 when my dad was young long before I was born. It was 59 cents. A comparable funnel today is around 5 dollars. Let us call it almost a ten to one ratio because you have in many states to add sales tax. Corn prices back in 1977 were about $2.30 a bushel. Corn prices 40 years later were $3.61. (I recently had a quote for corn at $4.30 a bushel.
The highest that corn sold for is a little under $8.50 a bushel back in 2012 due to some serious weather issues and decreased production forecasts.) Farmers were selling corn a little over 50 percent more 40 years later while purchasing equipment that could have been 1,000 percent more. Even with increased yields with improved varieties, this is simply not sustainable. Every piece of agricultural equipment that I can think of is higher in that time span. Back in 1977, a 125 hp tractor was about $20,000. Something comparable today can be over $100,000. Even larger tractors can easily cost a million dollars today. There is a lot of truth in the joke of how to make a million dollars farming: start with two million. There is still money to be made for the most efficient farms, but it requires people to have an understanding about business, weather, and history as much as it is about equipment.
What does the future look like in farming? Unfortunately for those who wish to be “operators” of equipment, it is like most jobs with large-scale declines in the amount of labor required to produce the same amount of calories or product. For those owners often knowing how to do a process, but hiring operators on a seasonal, ad hoc basis, or using more fully automated machinery at some point, the future looks brighter as costs decrease. This is part of the natural historical process of the amount of labor required to perform tasks in decline. Even this keyboard I am typing on is so much easier than using a mechanical non-electric typewriter. There are no “help wanted” ads for linotype operators anymore.
The amount of labor required to produce almost anything has been in decline almost continually since the First Industrial Revolution. Farming was actually a later industry to be mechanized than others. The steps to industrializing farming first required some form of portable power to achieve a mechanical advantage first through steam and then through relatively portable gasoline and diesel engines. Unlike most activities, the land is immovable, so you need to bring equipment to the land to work it trying to coax more out of the ground than you put in.
Ancient people would grind grain using an animal and those near water sources were able to figure out that falling water could be used to grind grains. An example of an industrial application of this principle is the factory mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the mid-1850s where over 50 water-powered turbines were powering the drive shaft in factories producing over 350,000 yards of cloth per day being produced in industrially powered looms. By comparison, someone skilled in the loom can produce between one to three yards per day. The mills had over ten thousand people employed, but still this was over a 10-to-1 advantage even with the relatively primitive technology of the mid 19th Century.
At some historical interpretation sites, you often will find someone using a spindle and loom demonstrating the last step in ancient practice of transforming flax into linen which is a 12 step process including such terms as you probably are first reading about such as stooking, rippling, retting, scutching, and hackling all before it is spun from the distaff on a spinning wheel. Much of this was done at home in piecework prior to the First Industrial Revolution. Using the factory model earlier developed in England, centralized factories allowed the ability to achieve higher output of fabric at a lower price driving out suppliers of goods. The factory organizing model led to the first large changes in how families were organized financially and socially with the workers journeying and often moving to the work. The work was not performed in their homes as it had been before, selling or trading at a local general store for other goods.
Centralization was necessary as the factory’s machinery was not portable. Usually, this was near a falling body of water to produce power inexpensively as gasoline or diesel power generation was several generations in the future. You may be wondering what our little journey to meet the “mill girls” of Lowell in the mid-19th Century has to do with farming. Their journey to the factory and centralization of their work was an early symptom of the decline of the family farm.
Many farm families in Massachusetts who were earning cash in piecework at home sent their daughters to work the looms for three or four dollars a week minus boarding expenses. Prior to this expansion into the Americas with the factory system, there is another interesting group of people who saw their jobs going away: the Luddites who starting in 1811 realized that machines were replacing people and they would go around smashing textile machines in order to stop this transformation. They were not successful. Eventually the cloth factories of the North moved to the South and most of this production has moved overseas due to labor costs over the last 30 years.
Factories cost money to build and to run. This requires capital which in its purest form is a free person deciding to take the results of his labor or money he has raised from other free people who decide that they can produce something at a lower cost than they can sell it at. You will often hear about “capital costs” or capitalization of a factory. A farm uses many of these same principles. We put our capital out and expect a return on this capital. This is not an overnight process: a winter wheat crop goes into the next year, but it is always more than six months and usually over seven before we see any financial benefit.
Labor has been declining in overall strength for the last 150 years. A large machine is often the equivalent of more than one man working continually. In many ways, that is the understatement of this century as it often is the power of thousands of men or something man could never accomplish on his own without the machine such as powered flight. In terms of raw number crunching power and ability to generate reports from facts, a machine can generate the report in seconds with the right prompts versus a human could not even begin gathering the data.
One thing that my family has done is given me an appreciation for people who labor and we would often visit factories when going on vacation. Where pictures and movies demonstrated how it was done years ago with countless individuals on various production lines, many people have been replaced by machinery which rarely takes a break to the point of needing some required maintenance or an overhaul. Many jobs will be on the chopping block as men with capital figure out how to reduce their costs with labor often being a significant and escalating cost.
Whenever I consider anything about history to glean some knowledge to use today, it is useful not only to look at battles and diplomacy, but about the people and the men (it was mostly men) working farms. The women made their houses into homes by following what the Bible says about the family in that they were helpmeets to their husbands and their contribution was to build a community in which these patchworks when sewn together became a great nation. The hours and dangerous conditions they faced were enormous, but these farm families were feeding a growing nation.
In the 21st Century, we tend to romanticize the past with our love of the frontier of a pioneer feeding his family, of cowboys driving cattle to the market and men gathered around the campfire telling tall tales. For the most part, men have always dreamed of figuring out how to make things more efficiently and farming is no different. The goal of grain farming is to extract more “seeds” out of the ground than you put in. When successful, it is significantly more than your overhead.
The first men transformed the motions of men using animal-powered reapers and the various tasks were combined into an integrated “combine.” All of those steps which required so many men working around fast moving often sharp metal objects now are accomplished by one man in a combine that often has GPS control over steering. A hundred years ago most farming was done with horses or mules. Successful “combining” was a well-coordinated activity incorporating the labor of multiple men working together to accomplish the task.
The combining task when examined through a modern lens is a safety nightmare. Traditionally, one man sat on an elevated perch reached by a ladder high above attempting to command often more than two dozen horses with no safety equipment such as seat belts or roll bar trying to efficiently drive this literal horsepower to accomplish a task that is now done by one man. (See the photo at the top of this article.) When sitting in an air-conditioned combine seeing computer readouts with steering with GPS capability, it is amazing to see the growth in efficiently. Currently, there are no fully autonomous combines sold in the United States, but that possibility exists in the near future.
Wheat in the field is basically worthless to a grain farmer unless he can figure a way to get it to the point where he can extract the precious wheat berries for his own use or to sell them. The entire point of the modern combine is to make that a seamless process taking the ancient processes and turning it into a usable easily transportable product. Before wheat became easily transportable in semi-trucks that hold approximately 1000 bushels of wheat that can be sold at the grain elevator for checks, it usually was put into sacks and then these sacks were transported to be sold locally or transported by rail.
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