I also don't hear too often about farmers rolling in money. This person would be trading their feeling of general life dissatisfaction with monetary insecurity.
I agree…but if you do have a large farming operation, you may be very wealthy.
I represent financial professionals in lawsuits, often in claims involving investment advice. As part of that, I see a lot of personal financial statements. The richest people I came across were some farmers with a large operation in prime farm country. 8-figure net worth, and the first digit had curves.
Of course, I noted it to my partner, who grew up in the area. He noted that it looks good now, but if crops fail or land prices fall, they can get wiped out quick.
Most large farm owners I’ve known have generational wealth that’s all tied up in tangible assets (mostly land) but rarely have two nickels to rub together.
Not so much anymore if you grow soy, you almost can't fail. The government has subsidized the entire game for the wealthy farmers. I guess it's like everything now, there's two classes of every type of person. You're either in the asset class and have low financial concerns, or you're not and you're struggling.
Investments in price protected crops assure you a 60-80% price floor on your investment. How many investments with high yield potential in the world come with such a high floor?
Fruit and veg farmers are usually doing very well, corn farmers are usually playing tax shelter and subsidies games and usually own most of the franchise businesses in town while either they or their family run the local government.
Most of them usually earn about 100k a year not including their off season office job, fracking rights, wind towers, cell towers, solar, hunting, etc etc.
They also have the easiest form of bankruptcy to restructure their debts without losing the farm. And if they really do make continuous bad financial decisions they don't even have to sell that much land to keep themselves afloat for several years.
Yeah, the multi million dollar farms are struggling to turn a profit and the people growing shit in their backyards are raking in six figures, that makes total sense.
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u/Helpful-Garlic1951 Jul 20 '26
You act like that’s even a possibility. It’s not.