Highland Center, in Southeast Iowa | alnciowa - 4/6/2024 14:54 Our kids grew up in the 80's, never encouraged them to farm or be in an ag related job. One came back when came back when I was +65, perfect timing. I might have had the kids in mind as I was buying land, sure would NOT build a livestock blding hoping they would come back. The ads encouraging you to build livestock operations for your kids stink, it is called child abuse. Don't commit them to a bunch of hard work and risk, let them decide for themselves. You can have your farmland rented in about 5 minutes, bldings are a different animal. I see a lot of hog buildings that are showing their age, costs a lot of money to bury cement.
That's the kind of position we found ourselves in. Kids (boys) were middle school/high school and we raised a lot of hogs the old way.....pull-together farrowing houses and A-sheds in the pasture, finished in old barns with 80 bushel round feeders. As the boys got older, it was very obvious that they had absolutely zero interest in livestock of any form. We had to make a choice to either get bigger, as our old tired facilities were coming apart at the seams, or phase out all together. Timing was perfect. We soldiered on, F-to-F as they finished school. Then 1998 came, and we sold hogs for $8.75/cwt. Decision was very easy at that point. We avoided buying ourselves full time jobs up to and including retirement and then the stress of outdated buildings sitting on ground that we could be farming. |
Weight put into next generations opinions?
