I rent a few hundred acres of mostly marginal farmland to a local farmer. He has developed the most important skill that any farmer has, the ability to convince landowners that not one farmer in the county, and he, in particular, makes any money at all by farming. “I do it ’cause I jes’ loves it, ‘n that’s ’bout the only reason there is.”, or words to that effect, are worked into conversations every eight or ten minutes.
Those who rent farmland always enjoy these discussions, and enjoy repeating them to others, each of us congratulating our renters on their imaginative efforts to reduce rental payments.
Farmers, too, enjoy exchanging stories about the arguments that landowners use to increase rents. Recently, it became public knowledge that companies who owned the rights of way underneath power lines were charging nearby farmers one hundred dollars an acre to farm that land. In this area, most farmers are convinced they can’t afford to pay more than twenty dollars an acre. In preparation for next year’s negotiations, I let Jeff know what the power line owners were charging. Not a word in immediate reply, just an ongoing continuation of our conversation on the high price of fertilizer.
When that was finished, he looked at me and announced: “There’s not one farmer in all of Pennsylvania who could afford to pay a hunnerd dollars an acre.”
I suggested maybe such a thing could be possible if the fields under the power lines were miles long and involved little, if any, tractor turning. He reluctantly allowed that such a thing might be possible, but that none of my smaller fields offered the opportunity to come close to achieving such savings.
This year, I expect an entirely different tactic. Jeff previously mentioned that “Whenever there’s a woodchuck hole, I don’t get any soybeans for an area around that hole fer thirty feet in ever’ direction.” He may have told me that because he’d discovered that the Global Warming Fraudsters have been worried, with the peculiar intensity they reserve for utterly imaginary problems, that Global Warming is causing marmots, a Rocky Mountain version of our Pennsylvania woodchucks, to grow much larger than ever.
This December, I think Jeff is preparing to tell me: “Next year’s field rental has to be a little lower. Them woodchucks is gettin’ bigger now, ’cause of that Global Warmin’. Whar them woodchucks used ter eat a thirty foot circle of soybeans around every woodchuck hole, they is so much bigger now that there’s a forty foot circle around ever’ hole whar’ they’s eaten all of ’em. I jes can’t afford to keep payin’ as much as I am while I’m losing more ‘n more ever’ year ter that th’ar new breed uv giant woodchucks.”
