Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).
Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever they can get and then re-invest the money?
Re:Rural Kansas is dying
by aerotwelve on Monday April 30, 2018 @10:41PM
(#16964233)
If it's like corn in Iowa, yes, many just hold it and hope for the price to go up. It seems unreasonable, but commodity prices are just that low; selling at the wrong time can be worse for your bottom line than doing nothing. Especially since many farmers go into debt to pay for the initial costs of planting, fertilizing, ...
You tend to see a lot more corn in storage (occasionally this is just huge piles of corn covered with a tarp!) right after harvest time, precisely because that's when the prices are the lowest. There's a surprisingly big market for huge containers that are designed to store crops for long periods of time.
It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed.
Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.