ArtfulDodger

13 Agriculture Myths Busted: This Bubble Is Ready to Pop

Dear Kalpa:

Ah, a tiny wind out there in the vast morass of flesh who enjoys feeding off of my dangling participles, ruptured metonymies, and broken parallelisms. Honored!

When I say classicist, however, I must tell you that, although I have obediently swallowed every piece of literature called classic (except for Hemingway, and that farrago of his bores me to noontime naps), I mean classical rhetoric, philosophy, and my major love, architecture.

In respect to Joyce, though, you’re in another world there. Certainly nothing out there today to compare! I keep paragraphs and phrases and lines from everything I read, and I have quite a few from Joyce.

How about the perfect structure and fine lines in these two paragraphs from “The Dead”:

“The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

Lots of rhetoric to dissect and discuss in those two (makes my heart swell!), but I better stop, because I know the folks on this site and they’re going to curse us now for deserting the subject—and, rightly so I suppose.

Have a good week and thanks again. AD

PS: Keep up the good work. This was really a worthwhile article!

13 Agriculture Myths Busted: This Bubble Is Ready to Pop

Dear Live Free or Die:

You are dead right. The government is a huge problem when trying to make money farming.

Love your moniker!! I hope you get to live free and don't have to die, but with what's going on lately I fear the latter may have to come to fruition sooner than most of us would like. AD


On Jul 13 11:22 AM LIVE FREE OR DIE wrote:

> Excellent comments and response.
>
> My wife's family farm goes back 200 years. Unfortunately anytime
> the government touchs private enterprise/industry (pretty much most
> things) it is a killer. Example - price of a gallon of milk continues
> to rise over the last 30 years, the farmer's profit has deteriorated

13 Agriculture Myths Busted: This Bubble Is Ready to Pop

Jabalong:

Thank you for pointing this article out. But let me tell you, National Geographic is just about the most cynical magazine out there, and it always has been.

Back in the late sixties and early seventies, the magazine was dead sure the planet was about to run out of natural resources. I don't read it anymore, but as far as I know they never recanted their failed predictions.

I'd be really wary of investing because of their predictions, because I found several mistakes and misleading statements in the article.

The best to your investing. AD


On Jul 13 12:54 AM Jabalong wrote:
-food/bourne-text

13 Agriculture Myths Busted: This Bubble Is Ready to Pop

Dear Kalpa:

Thank you much for your kind response.

You are right about my reasoning behind buying more farmland in the `70s. I am a trained classicist—and of course we are all romantics. That doesn’t mean we can’t reason though, and so, I’ve put a relative small amount of my overall portfolio into farming and farmland.

I don’t mean to sound as though I’m complaining about my farming experience; it’s actually taught me a great deal—and it enables me to help a fine family stay in a business that they love.

These are southern folks—the type that you can stop by their place in the afternoon and they’ll make you to come in and have supper with them. You’ll eat well too: fresh goat’s milk and cheese; tomatoes the size of Obama’s (or perhaps even Bill O’Reilly’s) head; lots of beans and okra; and in the summer always watermelon and cantaloupe. And the biscuits—let me tell you, you can’t stop eatin’ `til you’re stuffed. Your water will come from a well; and at night they'll have attic fans running with the windows open. You’ll think you’re in a 1930s movie. I’ll guarantee it.

As far as the environment goes, we’ve had no problems with damaging it. Farmers do more good to the environment here than bad.
However, almost all the old farm homes (made of wood side-slatting and metal or slate roofs) that used to dot the South like kernels on a fat ear of corn are all gone.

The families have splintered to and fro around the world, and many of the old farmlands lie fallow or were sold off to developers during the boom.

The good thing about this current downturn is that it’s shut the land-cold builders down! Thank God for that.

As far as some of the comments go regarding farming, some have mixed subjects at least in respect to what I was speaking of. I am speaking of individual investors and the money-making potential for them to go out as Jim Rogers suggests and “buy farmland and learn to farm.”

I think JR is speaking and thinking through his own eyes—someone who has made hundreds of millions of dollars—and not through the eyes of the average investor. I am not at all addressing corporate farming, as it’s called.

Commodities too are another subject—one which I was not at all addressing. At this point all commodities look to be in a sluggardly state. At this point I still like hard commodities—especially the metals used in industrial building, mainly because we know China is running headlong to build a new, vibrant nation. (forty new nuclear plants, e.g., and hundreds of thousands of more railroal lines)

In respect to soft commodities, however, China wants to be self-sufficient in that area—at least they want to buy from other Asian countries, and this is no problem. So the investment potential in that arena is not nearly as clear.

Back in the 1980s I used to trade futures—mainly indices, but some commodities too. And let me tell you the toughest ones to predict are the soft commodities. Of course, the way to make money trading is not to try to predict anything—simply go with your winners and snip your losers quickly. The catalyst you use to get started makes little difference; proper money management is the key to making money trading anything.

Another point to ponder when thinking of investing directly in any type of land is exiting. You can’t always get out of a property investment overnight—as you can a stock or futures contract trade.

As all of you well know, you can buy a stock on Monday morning and if for some reason you decide you don’t like it or you made a mistake, you can dump it that afternoon. You may not get exactly what you want for it—but you can get rid of it. Not at all necessarily so with land—much less farmland.

And why buy something on the order of the DBA? If you’re sure about a commodity price direction, then go to the futures market—the leverage is much greater, and if you can predict a price direction you can make gazillions.

Personally, I have a better sense of buying into a company when it’s out of favor, one that perhaps pays a dividend, and I believe has a decent chance to grow its business and better its margins. Right now I’m in VALE at $11.50 and YZC at $6.00. I have been in CEO, PTR, STO, FCX, and PCU, but sold them last month. They should be good investments again before long if they continue to ease southward.

And indeed, let me tell you again: there are tons of quality farmlands left in the South—and at reasonable prices.

Kalpa, your last paragraph is another good point for individual investors to take note of:
“Anyone sitting in an air conditioned 22nd story of some modern office building in mid-July in some large US city's downtown, who decides to put his or her retirement into a hedge fund investing in farmland hasn't a clue what's behind the scenes, do they?”

For the most part, I would say that they absolutely do not know what they’re getting themselves into. And if you don't think "big agra-farming" is tough, just check out the five-year margin average on a company like ADM. Such thin margins are always a sign that the hoeing is rocky.

Another caveat to think about when betting on a future shortage of soft commodities is that most of this thinking (at least recently) has been based on “global warming” as a fact—and that it is going to devastate the earth to the point that most farming will fail, thereby creating a world shortage of food.

Well, for the last ten years the planet has been cooling—the last three months are excellent examples, in that they’ve set cooling records that go back to the 1890s. This summer the polar icecaps, which were never melting in the first place, are back to their pre-1979 sizes when they were at record large sizes.

Take great heed before making an investment on such predictions as the earth’s cooling or warming, because as the more objective scientists will tell you: the scientific ability to make such longterm predictions is simply not available at this time. Here is an article that points that out:

www.cornwallalliance.o...

Thank you again Kalpa for presenting this article, and thanks to the other commentators for their knowledgeable views.

Pardon my long-windedness, but I'm on vacation for the summer and this is my first post in a while, so I'll shut up now and let the others continue.