Illinois Farmers Have “Given Up” On Planting

[Echo]

Next year we plant rice

[Ruik]

What used to be called mixed farming became the road to bankruptcy. Low prices for goods sold forced specialization and playing the economies of scale game.
This was made possible by chemical farming, insecticide, herbicide, plant food. The costs to play this game are astronomical in terms investments in equipment and land. It is simply too expensive to diversify crops when the outlay in equipment $ is so high. The ROI in these cases is negative even where soil types and climate would allow some diversification.

The problem is farmers started looking at it wrong. When it was subsistence and then sell the excess for profit, it worked. It worked when the family worked the farm. I know a family of farmers here in the valley that grow several crops. The ones I can think of are: hay, oats, wheat, soybeans, and corn. They also have beef cows and they had chickens. They say they make a lot of money on the oats and hay. I think they have a decent sized garden as well. They have around 800 acres or better.

[Samuel Adams]

Bingo ^^^^^

[moestooge]

Whether it's farming or any other endeavor, doing things the way the government recommends is a sure path to defeat.

[jimmyb]

Little bit more than this planted by now but this last rain shut shut it down.
https://www.agweb.com/article/millio...ain-unplanted/

[HouseWolf]

I’m not a row cropper, but I will say I have never seen so much hay still uncut here. So much of it is looking pretty poor right now too.
Hay is going to be very valuable this winter.

[Sandy in KY]

HouseWolf, my husband and I wee talking about this very thing and I believe we are in your area, we "piddle" with a few cattle in retirement but may have to give it up as we buy our hay and cant make any money ir hay too much. Lots of cows going through salebarn right now as people see writing on the wall.

[Summerthyme]

It's not just grains, either. The muck soils south of Lake Ontario in NY are largely unplanted... they supply millions of pounds of onions to Northeastern markets.

A couple weeks ago, we drove through Eden, NY... an area just south of Buffalo which has thousands of acres of produce farms. It was shocking... there was almost nothing growing! Where they normally would have sweet corn at least waist high (planted under plastic, as last frost is around May 10th there) and there should have been fields of cabbage, broccoli, etc getting ready to harvest, as well as acres of young tomatoes, peppers, etc.

NOTHING in the fields. We saw one field of cabbage that looked pretty good.

But it's ugly out there...

Summerthyme

[grower]

It's going to be a good hay year in Tennessee. We've had plenty of rain, but with 2-3 weeks at the start of June that were dry, so seed got in the ground and the first cutting of hay is in the barns. If we get a dry week or two the start of July, we will get a 2nd cutting of hay and maybe some wheat that doesn't have vomitoxin in it.