[titzer]

This is an unfortunate consequence of a long chain of economic transformation. My family was all farmers, a nearly unbroken chain reaching back at least 300 years into western Germany. My father went into the business world, but hated it and tried to return to farming in the mid 1980s, at which point economies of scale had already transformed the market so that the 200 acres of corn and soybeans the family had raised for generations no longer could support his full income. He borrowed money, bought another farm, couldn't even afford the equipment to harvest my grandparents' farm, had to contract out to the burgeoning Wagners who were farming thousands of acres. In the end, he had to give up the idea of farming and became basically a day trader by the mid 1990s. He was nostalgic about the old farm and it was tragic that his entire world was upended by enormous macroeconomic forces that pushed him into dry tech-driven commodity futures trading, about the exact opposite of what was bred into his genes.

I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.