Fewer bankers, more farmers?

Monday, October 3, 2011

If you want to become rich, become a farmer. That's the essence of an essay published in the July 10 issue of Time Magazine.  The essay quoted Jim Rogers ("investment whiz, best-selling author and one of Wall Street's towering personalities") as predicting that farming incomes will rise dramatically in the next decades, surpassing even Wall Street.

"The world has got a serious food problem," says Rogers. "The only real way to solve it is to draw more people back to agriculture." (That's according to Time).

He cites net farm income as rising 27 per cent last year compared to less than two per cent for the overall economy. That's because of a wealthier and hungrier emerging middle class world-wide and a boom in biofuels. (He doesn't mention that the latter is due to heavy government subsidies which could disappear with the stroke of a pen.)  While general real estate values have fallen, farmland has doubled in six years.

One example Rogers cites of agricultural prosperity is Grand Island Neb. The home to a major beef packing plant and to farm machinery makers is booming and Nebraska itself has the second lowest unemployment rate in the nation.

Yet another Time Magazine story, dated June 28, says that many of the workers producing food in California's Tulare County qualify for food stamps and 23 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. The state and national averages are 14 per cent. So it seems like owners of farmland are gaining wealth while workers on those farms are falling behind. BF