Chapter 11 is an expensive process that does not accommodate the special needs of farmers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Programs that pay farmers not to farm often devastate rural areas. The reductions hurt everyone from fertilizer companies to tractor salesmen.
A lot of other things come along with Chapter 11, which basically end up in a lot of pain.
The big producer is going to figure out how to deal with whatever the rules are, but the little guy who is running a few hundred units or maybe feeding 1,500 cattle a year, how will they ever comply with these requirements?
We have to understand that we want to pay the farmers the real price for the food that they produce. It won't ever be cheap to buy real food. But it can be affordable. It's really something that we need to understand. It's the kind of work that it takes to grow food. We don't understand that piece of it.
In the summer or fall of 1974, I read some books about factory farming, and decided that I wanted no part of it.
Running a farm is about solving a problem, and that's always interesting to me. But it's a constant process.
This entrepreneurial energy that we have in the Midwest doesn't have to go out to the coasts to get fed and watered.
People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.
Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.
There is no law for farm labor organizing, save the law of the jungle.