2009 Farm Crisis developing

On top of the 50% decline in commodities and 2009 farmland bubble this will be the final blow to the farmers and food supplies.

I live in Minnesota and in a farm community, this will be huge hit.

This will be different then the housing bubble because the crops will be not planted. I have talked to farmers that may not put in crops this year due to input costs.


Obama's 2009 budget plan to impact farmers with 500K in grain or cattle sales. This is almost any full time farm big or small. Some grain bins hold 500K worth of corn/beans.

minnesota.publicradio.org...


"According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture released earlier this month, there are about 6,700 farms in Minnesota that sell more $500,000 of grain, livestock and other products each year."



Stock up now this will cripple our supplies and global security.

People have to grow their own food to lessen the power of the PTB in controlling people by controlling their food supply

I don't know just how many people are starting their own vegetable or fruit gardens in these tough economic times but the more the better, because otherwise an series of disasters will happen that all but wipes out large harvests, and consequently causes a rise in food prices.

A lot of people will be dead in the following hundred years due to the predicted extreme climate changes ahead.

I base this on a newspaper article I saw in the Vancouver Sun. According to this article, about only a billion people will be alive by 2100.

Can't have a good ole Depression

without the food supply getting hit.

Well I guess the mid-west will be a "good" place to be in the depression. We can live off of the land a bit easier then other places.

Stock up on food now, and prepare to defend your stockpiles.

reply to post by LookingAround


Buy seeds. It's cheap. Make good use of this summer and start a garden if you can. I plan on doing this. It's alittle cold up here right now to do that though.

If nothing happens...then you still have some fresh home grown food...if SHTF...then at least you have a food source to help you get by.

reply to post by David9176


Very good plan, I hope to do the same. It is 8 degrees out right now so it will have to wait.

reply to post by LookingAround


That's just ridiculous, now more than ever American farmers need to step up to the plate and take charge of the ever increasing demand for homegrown fruits vegetables and meat for the American public first and any reserves sent to other countries in need. Problem, is the government and regulations dictate just which farmers and contracts are viable for the most return and not for human need. We all knew this was the direction greed and corporatizing agriculture would eventually lead us.

This is an opportunity for the American farmer to claim their God given sovernty and grow for the people and animals and not for the bottom line.

As more states begin to break free in sovereignty, the need for state sponsored farming will become not only a promise to local farmers but an absolute necessity to get us out of the current contracts that have all but broken the true American dream. If its not grown in South America it does not get the contracts to sell and millions of tons of food have laid waste in the fields because the local farmer has no market to sell.

This is when buying from your local farmers markets and growers come in to play in a positive way. Supplementing what you buy with growing some of your own is an even more solid idea.

It is disturbing to hear farmers say they will just give up because they will not make as much this year as in past years, that's just not the point, flooding the markets with American grown food is.

I am growing enough to feed mine and any others that may need. What more can anyone do? I am not making money, but I am feeding all I can.

reply to post by antar

You know, it's probably different now with better shipping, but years ago when I was "back East" I went to buy carrots. In the store were "fresh" Calif carrots that looked like what I would have thrown away here. I thought, what happened that carrots couldn't be grown there, why ship them in? It didn't make sense.
Maybe we've become too big for our own good. Overdeveloped rather than underdeveloped. Too dispersed. "Farming" has indeed turned into "agribusiness". The old word was even "husbandry", implying a taking care of in a personal manner, in a relationship with the land.

reply to post by desert
[I thought, what happened that carrots couldn't be grown there, why ship them in? It didn't make sense.]

I agree, I go to the superstore and I see imported apples, even during the fall, and wonder why we can't grow apples locally, but I look at the big picture and wonder if maybe our corporate-controlled, monoagriculture, GMO food system was designed to crash hard, to pull the rug from people's feet so quickly they wouldn't have time to react.

I can understand imports during the winter, but It shouldn't be so during the summer. We in our area should be able to take care of our fruits and vegetables for at least 6 months out of 12 but we can't.

In the meantime a lot of people will go hungry or suffer from malnutrition as farmers start to decline and food prices go up and people start cutting corners at the expense of their health.

One day soon communal kitchens may be widespread, where everybody pitches in what they have to make stews and the like, that would prevent food waste and increase nutritional variety for participants.

reply to post by star in a jar

Yes, why shouldn't an area be able to feed its local/regional population adequately. Ok, oranges could be shipped in, but carrots, apples, and other non-tropical crops??

Of course, this takes land. Does an area want to clear land for crops? Or can land being used already for, say, cattle feed, be used to grow human food? Besides the longer growing season, this is what California had going for them, lots of land. Of course, as the urban areas spread to create suburbia, many of the farms left for other areas in CA.

The central valley (along with the southern Coachella Valley) offered land to be reclaimed from marsh and desert to grow crops. (Of course, now, since much is really "desert" and farmers used irrigation, there is a water shortage creating another problem.) Anyway, CA could grow crops to feed a nation; now, however, much land is being taken out of agriculture as, once again, people want to move away from the northern and southern metropolises to rural areas. Orchards were uprooted to make way for housing tracts.

There is a difference between making a profit for a family owned farm and one that is owned by millionaires living elsewhere and run as a megafarm. Yes, then you get the monoagriculture.
You know, CA's citrus crop had a tough time breaking into the Japanese market. The Japanese supported their citrus farmers and did not want citrus from CA.

We have put profit motive into everything essential to human life, food, shelter, clothing and are witnessing the results. Houses are not homes, but investments to be "flipped", clothes are not made at home or locally but are made with cheap labor elsewhere, and food has been turned into a commodity.

I think what we have witnessed also is the putting of crops into even more profitable prepared food. Americans have been brainwashed with advertising into eating usually more expensive prepared/fast foods. Cooking is seen as needless, time consuming drudgery. Why, just open this box or tear open this bag (can't even use scissors anymore ), heat and serve.
The grocery bill skyrockets, and people are made to feel less if they don't buy prepared food. Jeez, there's even ads to sell cereal in a bowl already. What a waste, literally.

Your idea of a communal kitchen is an older one, and I'm happy to see you bring it up. Yes, housing developments have been planned where there is a central kitchen. Instead, we convince Americans that that somehow is "communism" or "socialism", and that, by God, Americans are independent individuals, who need huge individual houses in order to buy a lot of things to fill it up, etc etc. What's good for greedy capitalists may not always be good for those that live under and enjoy a smaller version of capitalism.

I don't think agribusiness is a conspiracy, other than a conspiracy to make money, lots and lots of money for people other than the family farmer.

I know grain prices have tumbled but it hasn't shown up at walmart. Nearly every food i buy costs more than it did a year ago.

For those of you who are wanting to grow a garden now is the time to start most seedlings indoors. By the time it is warm enough outside they will be ready to plant and half way to production. Once you have a climate that is warm enough you can plant the second string outdoors and by the time you have finished with the first the second will be coming in and ready for use or canning also.
It is very easy to grow plants indoors all you need is a regular lamp and some containers with drainage holes in them. My kids and I use old paper milk cartons and even soup cans sometimes. It isn't hard at all to start plants indoors or keep a garden indoors. You guys should really try it if you have kids, they not only learn from it but it is FUN for them.

I have always believed that both banking and farming should be community-based. That way, if something goes wrong, the entire system doesn't go down. I'm 57. I grew up in a small New Englad town that wasn't agricultural nor rural but we did have several local farms. We got our eggs from a small poultry farm, our milk was delivered from one of three local dairies and we'd get fresh veggies from one of three or four farms in our town. And there were several others in neighboring towns.

Today, ALL of that irreplaceable farm land has been developed. It has ceased to exist. And these weren't small hobby farms. They were huge, family owned operations. All gone. There is one small commercial produce farm in that town today. It didn't exist when I was a kid and essentially runs a farm-stand operation.

People bitch-and-moan about farm subsidies. I understand why. Mainly because what started out as a noble, worthwhile cause got infected with politics and went way, way off-course. The original intent of the subsidies was to prevent farmland from being sold to developers when prices declined. But when industrialized farming put community farms out-of-business subsidies evolved into agri-welfare. With all the community farmland gone we're screwed.

And since we've sent most of our manufacturing over seas lets hope we don't need to gear-up for a major war any time soon either.

Buy heirloom seeds and save your seed every year!
Otherwise you will be SOL because current
hybrid seeds have a terminator gene, so you
HAVE to keep buying (from big ag) every year! FYI
By design? Hmmmm.....

And no matter how many times this story is repeated I still get a weird looks when I said this will lead to massive food shortages.

This is scary, a few days ago i was reading about the cost of Rice around the world also increasing, i don't know the exact numbers off hand but thought it was around 30 % increase in China alone. I can't believe the cost in grocery Stores, we're feeling it everyday and it's getting worst, Who will save our Souls? Seems Canada hopes the US will since all decisions lately have been made after the a presidential announcement, it's worst then it's being said even i personally think, it's really hard to gauge right now. I'm jobless in Alberta, The strongest economy in Canada, and the lines in the Employment office are so backed up 3-4 weeks to get even an Interview, that's not Money, it's a disaster, and our society is not set up to handle such a huge blow.

[edit on 28-2-2009 by Nifron]

Due to the lack of banks that will give farm loans that the farmer will need to run pumps and for other farm needs this year and the fed taking water from the farmers in Calif the agricultural crop this year in calif is expected to be down by 40 to 60%.

many farmer are not even going to plant this year and going to ask for federal disaster funds because of this double hit they are taking.

I have a huge stockpile of seeds in my closet and let me tell you how hard it is to find heirloom seeds. Out of 35 different types of edible plant seeds I have only 5 are heirloom. It's horrible. You have to buy them online to get any good seeds these days.

Get them now before they are hard to afford.

For those who live in rural areas, it would help to get more proof of any of this. ie, speak to your farming neighbors, take pictures of unplanted fields (when season begins). If this happens, it would not be reported by the MSM untill it is too late. So for any of the neysayers, don't wait to post a link to when it is announced, let's find out first.

www.forexpros.com..." target="_blank" class="postlink">

"We haven't crashed yet," said David Boyes, the CWB's commodity risk manager. "We've had a cabin depressurization leading to a loss of altitude."

Apparently CWB(Canadian Wheat Board) are optimistic, and feel that Canada is in a reasonably good position.

what will happen if farmers hold their crop to escalate prices later in the year, i've talked to a farmer in the fall and apparently they do this alot to wait for better prices. Wouldn't this stress the system, and also what if there is a bad crop and shortage here, then debts rise due to loans not being paid back. I'm not an expert to say the lest but it concerns me.


Source for Food prices increase in last year:
lfpress.ca..." target="_blank" class="postlink"> lfpress.ca...

[edit on 28-2-2009 by Nifron]