CJones
Final Approach
After THE war, a number of Allison engines went into the pulling tractors.
Yep, it's hard to get a city girl to go to a farm where she is an immigrant (the whole family wonders if she'll divorce the guy and split up the farm in a few years) and can be very hard to prove herself. Kind of like a Chinese daughter-in-law. Farm wives aren't keen on pre-nups.
On the other hand, as the young men go off to the city, an increasing number of young women are getting into all aspects of agriculture and generally doing quite well. They tend to outwork the men. They custom hire much of the heavy work done although there are plenty who find it's not hard to run an air-conditioned combine.
Going back to work on the farm after college can mean getting back into a "hired man" status with Dad, who is likely good for another 30 years. You're 25 but he orders you around like you were 15. I am 76 and there are plenty of farmers older than I, with auto-steer, hydraulics, etc. I'm still doing most of the farming by myself. Is it any wonder that not even grandkids see a future in the farm when there's little prospect of running it themselves? How many young city girls will add being the hired-man's wife to living in the country?
In addition, if you stick it out and Dad dies when you're 55, the rest of the kids (or their spouses) often want to cash-out like right now, and all of a sudden you find the equity you thought you were building up is gone because it was all promises and the will says "divide equally" even though you put all the work into building it up. "But Dad promised us....." Try to explain that to the 53 year old wife who bought into the dream.
As the neighbor buys up that 160, he sells off the house to a city slicker who wants the idyllic country life but doesn't care that your hog facility was there first, that you've been running the fan on that grain drier for 30 years, that he has to pull over to let your ripper by and that combining beans creates a lot of dust.
Yep, lots of dynamics to growing up on the farm.
On the other hand, I fly off my strip. When I have custom workers come in I watch to make d....d sure they don't drive on my runway.
The farmer I worked for when I was in/out/back in college farmed a little over 1,000 acres but also had a hog operation. When I dropped out of college for a while, I worked for him full-time. They were good folks to work for and we got along great - they trusted me to handle things on my own without oversight very quickly. I eventually started thinking there might be a way for me to parlay the experience and opportunity into an operation of my own - find a farm to rent and 'rent' equipment from him and slowly grow from there as I was able. The numbers barely made sense no matter what kind of creative cost splitting I could come up with. Then his small kids started getting bigger and I realized that as soon as they could operate the equipment, I would be gone the way of the Dodo. There really wasn't a positive outcome in sight for me - either the kid(s) would decide they wanted to farm it and boot me out or none of them would want to farm and sold everything off. Either way, I was out in the cold. I eventually went back to school, got a couple of degrees, and now sit behind a computer all day reminiscing of doing fall fieldwork until 3am to stay ahead of the rain.
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