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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Are farmers “rich”? I grew up in a big farming family in a big farming community and I don’t think anyone is rich.

My grandpa probably has a few million dollars in assets, but he saved aggressively his whole life and probably worked 40% more than the average non-farmer over the same time span (longer hours, fewer/shorter vacations, retired in his late 70s, etc).

Yes, farmers have a lot of capital invested in their businesses, but their incomes (i.e., what they take home rather than reinvesting in their businesses) still seem pretty modest.

Compared to my cousins who farm, I’m pretty sure I’m wealthier than they are as a software engineer, certainly with respect to income and perhaps also with respect to total asset value.

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Your grandpa is rich, yes.

The fact that many farmers choose to operate their business in a way that is under-leveraged and often over-work themselves instead of hiring outside help that they can certainly afford is an artifact of culture, not a measure of wealth.

Of course, coming from a rural community there is a pretty good chance that you engage in an unusually high level of personal savings and as such have converted a high income into high asset holdings, I know I do - it is something in the water I think!

If they scale up, buy out other farmers, basically go corporate, they can be rich. It also feels like there are huge regional differences (eg a California walnut farmer is going to be a lot richer than an Illinois corn farmer).

Sure, farmers can be rich, but I was responding to the general statement (or implication) that farmers en masse are becoming rich.

If small land holding farmers are leaving the profession en masse, leaving only the bigger farm operations, then “farmers” are becoming richer simply because the poorer ones are dropping out.

It’s bound to happen eventually, but we probably haven’t crossed that threshold yet.

There are a lot of confounding variables in the question but if you look at the labour required to operate the average farm size in Iowa (360 acres) it is not a full time job, not close to a full time job.

Grain farming doesn't become a full time job until you reach over 1000 acres, if a guy farms one section of land and makes a decent living and chooses to spend that extra time enjoying life, more power to 'em, but farming in that 640-1280 acre pocket scales really well - it is a choice!

The over half of farmers in Iowa, most of which are row-crop farmers, that are running farms under 640 acres, are they dropping out because of economic pressure? Maybe some, but I think mostly it is old-timers that had a great run but they have a business that provides half an income to the next generation at the current scale and the next generation would rather do one thing than two. Either way, Dad's not retiring "poor"!

(This happens a lot in my neck of the woods, lots of 1,000 acre-ish farmers retiring with kids that are professionals that "love the farm" but have no interest in it at this scale.)

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