It is so hard to believe now, that my being a farmer seemed reasonable to me. Being young, arrogant, a few years out of the army, I naturally thought that I was a fucking genius. A natural born anything I chose to be.
Turns out that farming is an art, damn near genetic. A Bronx Jew, castrating, slopping hogs, worming sheep, milking cows, and feeding cattle were things that my genes couldn't accommodate. Plus my father-in-law turned out to be more than a little perfidious, but understood the 'lay of the land'. He drowned leaving me to be a genius on my own.
Sitting on a fucking tractor, cultivating (plowing in straight lines) what seemed to be, endless rows of corn, was the ultimate in eye glazing boredom. My feelings about marriage had not yet settled in except that at least in marriage arguing over the kids and/or money did break up the boredom of it all.
The worst of it though was my failure to recognize that farming is really a commodity business. A commodity business controlled by the weather, the government and the inclinations and convictions of the so called investing public. And how the fuck could I ever dream that Cargill, a company I'd never heard of, could have such an enormous impact on my life.
During first year of my farming life, may the Lord have mercy on my arrogant soul, I went to the St. Paul Stockyards and bought a set of 25 Black Angus 700 LB. steers, fed them out and sold them at a big profit. So the next year I doubled down, bought 50 Black Angus steers, fed them, made a bigger bunch of money.
By the third year I knew that I was a fucking genius and bought 150 White Faced 700 pound steers out of Texas. 700 pounds seemed to be my magic number. The fact that my feed lot was the only one in the 'neighborhood' with cattle in it never really registered on me, until it was too fucking late. The really smart operators were not feeding.
My timing was nothing short of horrendous. Cattle prices went straight to hell, didn't pass go, and every time one of those fucking steers put on a pound I lost money. You couldn't stop feeding those fucking animals and you couldn't sell them at less than 1,100 hundred pounds without taking a real hit because of the weight loss from moving.
The Kosher market started at 1,600 pounds which was a lifetime away. Kosher Jews ate only the front end of cattle. To make the front end close to palatable you had to really fatten the whole of the animal. Kosher Jews by definition have strong teeth, powerful jaws and tough stomachs.
Been there, done that.
That was a painful commodity price lesson. Very fucking expensive. Tough to make money buying high and selling cheap.
I also bought 4 carloads of oats, 10% margin, made some money. Would have made more but this dumb Bronx Jew was putting up hay and was too busy tossing bales of hay on to a trailer, to sell the oats when I should have. I didn't know enough to call the broker. Though I had to go to his office to buy or sell. Made for a very expensive hay crop.
But now that making money in oats seemed so fucking easy, the commodity world was my cupcake.
Being a commodity genius really suited me. So I bought 4 carloads of corn on margin, thinking that I had Federal price supports to back me up. Prices started moving up sharply. Greed took over. Commodity advisory services predicted substantially higher prices. Selling seemed stupid. But stupid is as stupid does. Trees were going to grow to the sky and I was one smart Bronx Jew watching my money grow with the speed of a weed.
Then President Eisenhower appointed Ezra Taft Benson to be Secretary of Agriculture. A very powerful position in those days. Benson with his appointment declared that he only believed in price supports in times of .disaster thereby causing a price disaster. Corn went off the limit every day for days and I barely got out with all my ass and money.
Then there was the time that breeding sows to ‘come in’ during December to feed out the pigs to sell as fat hogs in February seemed really clever. Everyone knew that hog prices always went up in February. But not the year this commodity guru (that's me) had them. Turns out there was a huge carryover surplus of those fucking hogs from the previous and hog prices went the way of my money. Straight to hell.
'Farming' is a misnomer. You have to know and understand more than just how to raise crops, operate farm machinery, help sows 'come in', castrate pigs, milk cows, feed cattle, worm sheep and rotate fields with the fucking weather being the real elephant in the farmer's room.
Operating and making money in that complicated world was out of this Bronx Jew's realm. It was easy for me to confuse brains with a bull market, which is the curse of all commodity and stock market speculators.
Been there, done that.
The plus has been real lessons in paranoia, which does improve peripheral vision.
1 comment:
There's a book in this. And a movie. Very, very funny :)
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