55 Years And Counting From The Tractor Seat

By Bill Whitman

 Do we older folks still have something to teach the youth of agriculture?

…not quite ready for the rocking chair.

I’m one of those guys that watches the “FarmTubers” on YouTube. I really don’t watch a lot, but I do follow a rather diverse group of farms across the country. The technology they use is mind boggling to me. For the most part I understand the concepts behind most of the advances and have even purchased some of my own.

In years of late, the phrase “ROI” (Return On Investment) has become popular as it’s used in Risk Management. What concerns me about the phrase is how it is defined. Virtually every time I see the phrase used it is segregated to specific pieces of a whole puzzle. The problem is that we farm using the whole puzzle.

Our generation of farmers has watched an evolution of equipment and agronomic practices that have taken us from 2-bottom plows to minimum tillage and high speed planters, and adding 200 bushels to our corn yields. The question is, how does this equate to profit at the end of the year? Are these youngsters doing anything that we didn’t do? Stepping up from the 730 John Deere to the 4020, the 560 International to the 1066? I still remember the first time I spent $10,000 for a pickup truck. It was so hard to get over the fact that I purchased my first home for $10,000 and it was a pretty nice home.

What I do see though is that behind each of our decisions has been the overall goal of building equity in our business. We spent the winters rebuilding our equipment, from hay wagons to combines, we took care of our equipment so that it would last for years… not a three-year lease period. Now I see young men spending so much money without thought of what will happen if they’re caught by surprise by a bad year.

The question is, has modern agriculture and the way agri-business is conducted passed us older guys by? I hope not. With average age of farmers and ranchers in the United States being 63-64 years old, I think we still have something to offer. In most cases, our equity. In some cases, the wisdom we may have attained through decades of survival in a business that has been ruthless to the fainthearted. A man I grew up respecting as a good dairy farmer, told me recently that the lesson he learned in farming was that in order to survive you had to “squeeze every penny.”

It brought to my mind something that an old farmer told me when I earned my first dollar baling hay, “that should be the hardest dollar you ever earn if you manage it wisely,” I wish I had really listened to him, it would have saved me from some pretty hard lessons.

So yes, I think we older farmers and ranchers have much to offer in terms of advice to the next generations. It would serve the larger corporate farms well to seek the counsel of farmers who have “survived” some really hard times. And to the younger folks, ask. Unlike other industries, you’ll find no more willing people that the American farmer and rancher willing to share and honestly hope that you will succeed.