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North Central Indiana | My question is does the 6k/ac crap ground I farm also fall back to 2k/ac? I just can’t see that happening. There’s too much wealth. The land management companies would buy every 20k/ac farm available before they got that low around here. And the land they don’t want the solo investors buying 12k/ac ground will grab at 8 or 9k and the wealthy rural businessmen will but the rest at 7k and then it truly will be John Deere and a fleet of autonomous equipment farming the country with a manager for each county or 2 and 10 guys running fuel and seed and fertilizer trucks.
Hell let’s go off the deep end. The government knows where the highly productive land is because we report it to them every year and if you don’t your yield monitor does for you anyway. So only the acres needed to fill our demand the most efficient way possible get farmed. Roads are torn out and old farmstead are torn down. The one farm house per mile areas become 100% tillable. I live between 2 towns, 10 mile stretch, there’s not more than 100 people living in the 20 square miles of the stretch I’m talking about. Eminent domain card is played because ag is a public good at that point. Farm the whole thing in one shot with a 500 hp tractor and a high speed DB 120 planter. 5 of those setups could do it in 24 hours. Roughly 185,000 tillable acres in my county. In 16 days those 5 tractors could plant the whole county running normal field efficiency at 8 mph and 23 hours a day (we’ll assume the 10 person support staff is slow when they grease the planters every day and it takes them an hour to do their 24 rows worth) Don’t need an oil change until 750 hours (31 days, 24 hours a day) so the 10 guys running fuel/seed/etc have 2.5 days worth of time to do greasing and fueling and refilling seed in planting season. They could rebuild each planter once during the season in a day. That only adds 2 days total in planting time. That plants the whole county. Only need seed every 3 hours, so you stagger the refills to one every 40 minutes and you might as well have a fuel fill line running back to the back of the planter to top off while loading seed. The whole state would only need 300 planters to do the roughly 11 million acres of corn and beans in Indiana. There’s at least 9 planters sitting in sheds within a mile and a half of our home farm just off the top of my head. Throw in 2 guys in service trucks always chasing planters for repairs and diagnostics. So 12 guys per county to plant. Spraying is even easier. Big hot loads and a few autonomous sprayers could fly through the acres. Harvest time bottleneck you say? Nonsense, autonomous combines and grain carts do the work and just like the dump trucks that crawl out of the woodwork for road construction, semis and hoppers would do the same. Autonomous tillage only takes fuel and maybe knocking a stone out once in a while. Shoot, once Elon gets self driving figured out well you won’t even need guys running seed and hauling grain. Just a robot at a seed warehouse loading totes and a guy at the field making sure the seed doesn’t spill and a guy standing at the elevator pit to make sure the electric trap opener worked and the leg is running
And that’s why I don’t spend my time worried about a major downturn or reset. If things really got ugly the vast majority of us wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Don’t think it could happen? How many guys did it take to milk the 60 cows that one robot can do now? How about the robots on assembly lines?
Now I don’t believe any of that is reality, but when you take a step back and look at the technology we have it’s impressive and frightening all at the same time. | |
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Future of grain prices
