Feed lots rents!! Goose where do you live????

I saw where Goose stated that where he lived the codes did not allow any new feed lot within a mile of existing homes. That would just about make it impossible to build any new live stock buildings. I was wondering where this is at. I would also bet that those type of rules have slowly driven the cattle out of his area.

What the greenies/tree huggers don"t realize is that these type of laws/rules actually make the livestock concentration move more quickly. A small operation is not going to have the resources to fight these type of rules. The smaller guys the greenies say they want to help are the first to go under livestock restriction laws. Think a twenty head cattle feeder is going to be able to hire much in the way of an attorney???

There are still quite a lot of cattle feeders around me here in North east Iowa. Those feeders and the dairies here sure help when the grain prices go down. Think seven dollar corn and thirteen dollar soybean are going to be the new normal???? Let see how $300-$400 dollar an acre rent works when the markets go back down. They do not have to drop real low for the red ink to start to flow. Think $3.50-$4.00 corn works with the current input costs?

I don"t want anyone to suffer hardships but there seems to be an lot of farmer that have forgotten the lessons learned in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Buying land based on some other value other than its economic production capacity will hang you in the long run.

A forty acre field right up the road just rented for $465 per acre. It just came out of CRP. So they will not get a real great crop this year on that sod and low fertility. It takes several years to get that CRP ground back up to good production levels.

I know two different guys that rented their farms this year because of the high rents. Both kept their equipment and will farm their ground again when rents go back down. It sure is tempting to rent the ground when you can rent it for more clear money than you will make most years.

One of the big mega farmers told me he will rent the ground if he can show a $50 per acre profit. So on a gross of maybe over a $1000 per acre he will take fifty??? That does not leave much room for error. Think about how a few hundred dollars per acre loss will work if you have several thousand acres?? It will happen when these grain prices adjust. You always hope to make enough profit when it goes up to survive it coming back down.

It doesn't seem to be the price of corn and beans, but the insurance and government programs are what is being farmed around here. It seems the only thing important is get the money now, not the long term outcome.

Farming sure has changed in my near fifty years of it. Its no longer a family making a living on an acreage helping their neighbors, but try to get it all by any means necessary, fair or foul.

Joe

Cattle feeding ain't profitable if you only feed 20 head,heck it ain't profitable with 200 either.

I would'nt want a big feedlot within a mile of me either.
They stink to beat h3ll and you got flies galore there too.(i lived and worked on one for 5 yrs so i should know)
Ofcourse if one wants to build a house close to one he should not whine about it later if the feedlot was there first.

Anybody that pays $450 an acre rent for farmland is out of his cotton picking mind.I can't blame the owner for renting it though if such an idiot comes along..

Depends where you live I think

I am in south east Indiana and our zoning laws for feedlots begin at 100 head then 500 then 1000 and over each one getting stricter . Anything under 100 is just AG . There is a law that any smells,flys,runoff,etc. can not cross property lines and has to be controled . There is alot of open ground around here and the country that these big feedlots can be put up without putting them in someones back yard .

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't understand is how a farmer can ever pay off the bank when he pays $5000+ acre to buy land, or $300 plus an acre to rent, then spends $3/4 million for a new tractor, planter, and combine. Add to that the fuel, oil, fertilizer, insurance, taxes,and other perifrial cost. Also, large farms have more than one high dollar tractor and equipment, plus trucks and grain storage with dryers, etc.

Even with high current grain prices, I just can't see ever paying everything off free and clear.

I couldn't sleep at night being in debt like that.

A yearly rent makes sense - you can lock in your fert, fuel, and grain prices, you can get crop insurance to protect extreme loss. The high rents make some sense. $400 of inputs, $400 of rent, and $200 of income to pay for the machinery & labor per acre, that works.

I can't see paying $6600+ for low wet land like I have, and try to make that pencil out over 30 years. I don't see it. We're gonna crash again. The 2 pieces by me that sold this late winter for that were odd shapes, ditches cut up the fields, had wet areas that can't be tiled out, etc. Wow.

But, back in the 80's, the big fellas got rid of a lot of debt (walked away from it) and came right back farming bigger and 'better' than ever. They got the paperwork scams figured out, and so it goes I guess.

Didn't get off the tractor once to talk with a neighbor this spring, well it's wet & we are all grumpy & have 1/2 our planting left to do; but still, no neighbors any more, just big rigs and everyone sitting behind glass, too much to do to stop and say hi.

--->Paul

This is in eastern Nebraska, and there is a huge feedlot two miles south of me on the other side of I-80. It's "grandfathered in", and has impacted development on the Interchange.

When the wind is in the south after a rain, let's just say it's aromatic around here. Several years ago, a large manure/compost pile on the premises got on fire and smoldered for at least two months. Nobody could figure out how to put the fire out so they just left it smolder till it burned out by itself. It's too much of a co-oincidence to think all the respiratory problems I had that winter were unrelated, but try to prove something.

It all comes down to the old "not in my back yard" syndrome. There are, in fact, plenty of locations in the area that meet the distance criteria, but I'll have to admit the location across the road from me would have been an ideal site for a feedlot. Almost the entire quarter section has a diagonal slope across it.

Only I'm across the road from the bottom of the slope.

In Davison Co., SD, it is no lot of over 500 within 1/2 mile of an existing home.
Eeach County has it's own zoning laws, and some haare not zoned at all. (Out West).