Dad and I talk every day and as it gets near farming season, we talk even more so. Our latest talk centered around finances. It the time of the year when money goes out the window faster than you can say God Bless You. Dad is nervous at such times and I think I would be too. He's probably more so because he is in charge of the ledgers. I like it that way because then I can't see what comes in or goes out and as long as the tractor doesn't sputter and stop in the field, then I know I'm OK.
Like any business, farming takes an extraordinary amount of money based on the size of your operation. A fellow farmer here in South Jersey once summed it up the best: "I don't need to go to Atlantic City. I gamble every day when I'm on the farm." He's right; in order to make a living at farming you have to make smart business decisions, and then, and even more so, you have to be lucky.
Dad likes to say that farmers make money because of some other farmer's misfortune. There's a lot of truth in that. If you look at farming any more on a commercial scale, it has become a national and sometimes international phenonmena. The latest example I can think of is peaches. We had a neighbor who farmed hundreds of acres of peaches here in Winslow Township. He suffered through some really bad years. A sign that a farmer is hurting financially (and probably physically and emotionally) is when they start to sell off their ground to help pay the bills. When it gets to this point you feel for the guy. Anyway, that's what this gentleman did. He sold some land to the state for farmland preservation and some to developers. Finally, he ended up selling the whole thing. The next year peach farmers in New Jersey, after a decade long losing streak, hit it big when the crop was destroyed in the South due to bad weather. As a matter of fact, it was a couple of bad weather years that made peach farming profitable here in New Jersey. By then, the farmer was in retirement and his son was driving a truck for a living. He was a good farmer too. His crop was always well cared for. But he was at the mercy of the market.
Sam Brick of Marlton told me one time that his Dad's favorite saying about farmers was that the good ones farmed with money, the bad ones farmed for money. There is a significant amount of truth to that. You have to understand what your situation is and know how much financial tolerance you have. The bottom line is that you can't spend over your head and that you can't think about how much money you want to make. That's why a good accountant is a farmer's best friend. We have one in Bill Lemons of Hammonton.
When Grandpop died, we inherited his equipment. I will say this about Grandpop. He grew up during the Depression and he came away, like a lot of people who suffered, with the utmost respect for money and its effect on your life. Grandpop literally kept things going with the proverbial spit and bailing wire. We would laugh about two things when it came to Grandpop and money. One was the story about the tie rod bushings on the John Deere M. Grandpop would find some way to keep that tractor going even with the wheels about to fall off. One day we got tired of them breaking every other time and went out to John Deere and bought new bushings. Grandpop was mad that we fixed his work but he never complained after that.
The other story involved his Agway discount. Grandpop had bought shares into GLF (Garden, Lawn and Farm or as Sam Brick used to put it, Good Luck Farmer!) when it first came to Berlin. Evenutally Agway bought out GLF but Grandpop was still a share holder. As such, he was entitled to a discount on his purchases there. One day I went for chicken feed. Grandpop's big thing was to remind the clerk that he received a discount. Well, it was one of my first trips by myself to the feed store and I forgot the damn discount. When I got home, Grandpop looked at the bill and said, "Where's my Agway discount?" I told him I forgot to get it. He got pissed off. I said, "How much was the discount?" He told me it was 35 cents. I couldn't believe it - he was upset over 35 freakin' cents! I reached into my pocket and took out 35 cents. He refused to take it. "It's not the actual money," he told me, "it is the principal of the thing." I just shook my head.
I will say this. Even as frugal as Grandpop was, he knew where to spend money and he used cash instead of credit. We never had a problem being short on fertlizer or spray. Grandpop prioritzied the things that needed to put you in a position to make money. A tie rod bushing on the tractor was not high up on the list. But making sure that the tomatoes or whatever was well taken care of, that was top priority. And the philosophy worked. We had nice stuff. That's another way you can tell a farmer that farms with money and one that farms for money. I knew a guy who bragged about his apples. I took one look at them and saw how small they were and knew right away that the guy had a cheap operation. Anyone who knows anything about apples knows that apples take an extraordinary amount of spray to produce a good crop. This guy was cutting corners with the spray and you could see it in his fruit.
We've had to upgrade the operation just about every year that Dad and I have been farming together. When it comes time for a piece of equipment Dad has never said no. When we needed a tractor to run the hay and vegetable equipment, Dad went out and bought one. He traded that one for a new one a few years later and he paid that off in three years. Working with someone of that mind set is a God send. Like the existence of a marriage, if you argue over money you are dead in the water.
Do we make money farming? That depends on your definition of financial success. Every year we order what we want and grow what we want to make the farm better than the year before. To my way of thinking we have a successful operation.
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