If you asked me why I write this blog, it would be to share my passion of farming. As I age, my passion wanes. As I get more grand children, my focus wanders.
I do try to focus on hot farming topics and my dealings with them. My personal problems or family matters nver got many hits, but write something like the seed is worth more than the planter and you go from 50 hits to 1000 hits.
I am not here to produce numbers but I figure the more people who read a story get more encouragement from it. That may not be true at all.
What is commercial farming anyway? You have Parker Brothers across the street, a family farm around 2500 acres. You have Cochran Farms the other direction, dad and son. You have a lot of small farms around me, some rented out, some still farmed by the owner. What is commercial farming, anyway?
Farming is a very broad subject. I tend to focus on corn, soybeans, and wheat and the way I produce them, which is notill or non tillage production of these crops.
Commercial farming has gotten a bad name. I think people confuse it with corporate farming. Corporate farming to me is when the seed company I buy seed from competes with me for land to farm. Most people see them as people only interested in the money from the operation, not the feeling or esthetics of farming.
When I chose my career of agricultural education, at least I gave myself a chance at farming. I know many ag educators who have little to do with the land and others who seem like teaching is a second career to farming. Those are rare.
What do you think of when you here the words, commercial farming? Is that like commercial fishing?
Ed Winkle
I can see right now that I need to chose my words more carefully. I used the term "commercial farming" only to seperate it from hobby farming or homesteading. You do it for a living, in other words. I didn't mean to give it either a positive or negative connotation. I hope you didn't take it that way, because your passion for farming is obvious.
ReplyDeleteMy neighbour is a commercial fisherman and I guess what he does and what I do are similar in this. He has a passion for what he does, He would fish even if he were't in to make a living. He has to deal with markets, buyers and prices just like us farmers do and he has to compete with his one small boat against the big players with a fleet of boats.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'M trying to say is most of us farmmers are commercial farmers, it's not a bad thing. We are farming a lot different than grandpa did when he was just trying to live off the land, raising most of his own food and hoping for a surplus to sell so he could buy what he couldn't grow or make. We can be commercial farmers or subsitance farmers, but if we went back to the old way there would need to be a lot more of us.
Oh Gorges, I was not picking on you, you just made me think.
ReplyDeleteWhen you add commercial to farming it just sounds like a bad commercial to me, that's all.
A farmer is a farmer no matter the size or how commercial he is. I don't like BTO either, for Big Time Operator.
I tried to be one and that didn't work out as planned.
LOL
Ed
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ReplyDelete