Dont take much to piss some people off.

[agchat]

Saw a old school buddy, the other day who got into the oil patch right out of school and worked his way up over the years. Made a comment to him about seeing him around alot lately, if he was retired. He said not really retired, but forty five dollar oil has slowed things down. Jokingly said to him "funny started farming in 1977 and getting about the same price for some of my grain now as back then, but I never slowed down. Wasn't oil back then around 14 bucks a barrel. Why the slow down now?" He did not seem to like that.

[bucket]

The thing that pisses me off is 40 dollar oil and 1.05 gas at the pumps.

Someone is making great margins.

[agchat]

Bucket, I agree, infact like some have said, they may as well left oil at 100 bucks a barrel, lot better for economy, cause gas has not come down accordingly.

[Oliver88]

No other industry could deal with commodity prices like the family farm.
The existing family farm today is the leanest type of business that exists, else the farm would of disappeared.

Consultant/Investment Group farmers like One Earth, Broad Acres, etc will never survive as proven over and over again.

[furrowtickler]

Agreed Oliver - exactly

[farmaholic]

I'm not saying that you are, but nothing to brag or be proud about. That's why we're all "expected" to farm a gazillion acres to be viable on the sometimes razor thin margins.

[boarderbloke]

Oliver88, agchat, was wondering the other day, if you had some new equipment, say air drill, sprayer, combine, swather, heavy harrow bar and say tandem disk, even with zero interest rates,,,how many acres would you have to plant in order to pay for those items? (5yrs x 5000ac = 1yr x 25,000ac) Growing your avg mix of crops, how many acres would it take, remembering you need some of that income to buy groceries! (Remember , that's only 6 pieces of equipment, and doesn't include bins.)

[samhill]

How is oil price hurting drilling so much when $45 US dollars = $60.00 Cdn?

[farmaholic]

You mean the oil Industry gets the true FX applied? LOL

[cottonpicken]

That's more like the bench mark rate then the pipeline buys the oil and takes the spread trans are better but still cost thought I heard 30 out of Alberta was happening but not sure about all of this.