Episode 65: The Silk Thread of Fragile Farm Profits
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Episode 65: The Silk Thread of Fragile Farm Profits
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This solo episode starts with a memory from 1978 on the tailgate of my grandfather’s Ford pickup and ends with the blunt reality of 2025 farm bookkeeping and modern USDA market reports. What connects those pieces is uncomfortable: farming profitability has always been fragile.
My grandparents scraped through the Depression with $12.34 a month in recorded farm income. My grandfather warned me that “there’s no money in farming.” And nearly fifty years later, I’m running numbers with disaster assistance, government payments, and market swings driven by noon WASDE releases. Different decades, different tools, different programs — same fragility.
In this episode I talk about:
• Why profitability remains fleeting across generations
• What USDA reports actually do to real farm margins
• How disaster programs distort our view of survivability
• The emotional weight behind farm financial decisions
• Why the “zeros” changed, but the struggle didn’t
• The uncomfortable continuity between 1930 and 2025
If you’ve ever felt the stress of bookwork, market reactions, or the silence that comes after a USDA report moves the board — you’re not alone. The tools and programs change, but the story is older than any of us.