re: Question for the farmers on the OT

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Corn dogs. Corn fritters. Creamed corn. Cornbread. Grilled corn. Corn salsa. Cornbread dressing. Corn nuts.

Fried corn.

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Taco Bell would like to keep using tortillas, as well as most of Central America and parts of S. America, Mexico (including the North Mexican state of California)

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Taco Bell would like to keep using tortillas

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pretty sure those are flour tortillas at taco bell and not corn tortillas...fyi

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Farmers rotate crops and grow what’s in demand.

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Maybe in most of the country. In South Louisiana, they grow rice and crawfish or sugarcane. They aren't jumping to another crop. That's the market down here, and that's what the land can grow.

You didn’t leave your trailer this weekend, idiot

They are rotated

AG subsidies are like Defense Spending and Public Education. You don’t necessarily have to fund any of the three.

Trouble is, the cost of NOT doing any of them may be EXPONENTIALLY greater than what they cost to do. There is no amount of political pressure that can force another country to sell you food or fiber. If they decide to cut you off, they have you by the short hairs, literally.

People credit President Reagan (correctly) for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I would also say one of the first and most important salvos was fired by Jimmy Carter. His grain embargo on Russia was devastating to American grain farmers, but I think it was just as deadly to the Russian political leadership. Their people saw that the USSR, despite having tremendous amounts of arable, productive farmland, couldn’t feed their own population. They saw it was due to ineptness, not natural disasters. This wasn’t the first, nor the most important blow struck against communism, but I say it was a big one.

Let me close with this. The average row crop farmer will have $4-800 per acre invested in his crop. His govt subsidies will usually amount to under $150 of that. With that govt largesse, he does a LOT for his local economy.

He rents land, usually form a local.
He buys seed, chemical, and fertilizer from a local vendor.
He buys parts, fuel, equipment etc locally usually.
He takes his crop to a local gin, elevator, or buying point.

All those places he spends money employ locals. That $ he gets from the USDA wash through the local economy MULTIPLE times and have a great positive effect.

We absolutely need to end corn for ethanol. Total scam on every end.

Cotton lost a lot of ground to corn and soybeans during the ethanol boom, is a more intensive/difficult crop to grow, and faced serious competition from cheap synthetics and foreign producers. We seem to be somewhat stabilized on acreage right now, but who knows what will be the hot crop in the coming years.

Georgia and Texas are the two largest cotton producing states in the U.S. due to climate (it’s too dry to grow much else in most of Texas), soil limitations (you can grow a decent cotton crop on way worse dirt than other crops could stand), and crop rotation (cotton rotates very well with peanuts for Georgia).

I can’t speak for everywhere else, but the gins in my area have been steadily consolidating and stepping up their game. Only the best/most efficient are left. Yes, the managers are generally old guard holdouts, but there’s also serious interest from the young blood.

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Was probably the fallow/soybean year for those guys. Some guys will plant soybeans after plowing out their cane; others leave it fallow and go right back into cane.

Most of the cane farmers I know seem to go fallow, so the cane gets plowed out October/Nov/Dec, and they turn around and plant it back into cane in August after working the fields.

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Do farmers collect much data to analyze, or is it just kind of a "feel" for it? Do they know how much the soybean boosts yields? Does it vary much by field? Do they track yields per field to know when something must be done? Do they monitor crop health with imaging or other methods?

I'm really ignorant about farming but I like to think about how tech can be used to boost profits.

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Do farmers collect much data to analyze, or is it just kind of a "feel" for it? Do they know how much the soybean boosts yields? Does it vary much by field? Do they track yields per field to know when something must be done? Do they monitor crop health with imaging or other methods?

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Yeah, I’m a cotton, corn, and soybean farmer, and we use a couple different platforms to analyze data. We use a platform called Climate to log and analyze planting, application, and harvest data. You can analyze how all kinds of stuff affects yield. Seeding rates, amount of fertilizer applied, was a fungicide worth it, how planting slower or faster affected emergence and plant spacing... And about 1000 other things. A guy from LSU is the regional manager for Climate in the MidSouth.

We use another platform to analyze profit/loss of fields, enterprises, etc.