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Agrimoney.com | Farmland Partners unveils $197m land purchase – and plans for more

The group takes its portfolio of US land nearly to 100,000 acres – in a deal which will provide collateral for funding for more acquisitions

Source: Agrimoney.com | Farmland Partners unveils $197m land purchase – and plans for more

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s time to start to become worried about this trend. Farmland Partners is just one of dozens of investment companies buying up enormous amounts of farmland. Not to farm it themselves, but to turn around and rent it at the highest prices they can possibly get.

Given the volatility of the stock, bond and commodities markets, and the ridiculously low interest rates being paid by banks for standard savings accounts, the desire to invest in a fairly stable and relatively profitable venture like farmland is understandable. Farmland values do fluctuate, true, but not nearly as wildly as stocks and commodities. Compared to those ventures, farmland seems a fairly safe investment.

And a potentially profitable one because the land doesn’t just sit there, it gets rented for as much as $200 – $500 an acre, depending on local demand.

But I get very nervous when I see more and more farmland being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer owners, especially investment companies who have no vested interest in preserving the long term quality of the land, and only in making a return on investment. This practice makes it increasingly difficult for real farmers who want to get into the business to get started. Land has become so expensive in many parts of the country that it’s difficult or even impossible for a small start up farm to get off the ground without having the backing of outside investors.

Even worse, because the holding companies are going to charge the maximum rent they possibly can, those who can afford to rent the land are going to be forced to engage in the most intensive, potentially damaging, high chemical input farming techniques they can in order to maximize their own profits. This results not just in increased pollution from fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide run off, but also results in the degradation of the quality of the land and it’s fertility, causing even further reliance on intensive chemical intervention to continue to get the best yields.

Is this legal? Yeah. It is. At least in most states. Some states have restrictions on the amount of farmland that can be owned by out of state investors, but over the years those laws have been changed or even eliminated to permit companies like Farmland Partners to move in and take over. And I can understand the attraction. I own a fairly big stock portfolio, and the volatility of the market often makes me more than a little nervous. Farmland seems a far more stable, if a bit less profitable, investment for a lot of people.

While it may be legal and understandable, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Personally I feel the adverse effects of these companies; the artificial inflation of land prices, potential degradation of farmland, etc. outweighs the benefits.

So this, apparently, is what all the hype has been about at Tumblr

Screen Shot 2015 11 11 at 11 09 09 AM

This thing, the fourth from the left, the weird blobby thing that looks like some kind of mutated Pac-Man ghost. That’s it. That’s why Tumblr has pissed off about half of it’s users, pushed thousands of people to start looking for alternative blogging systems and social networks…

What is it? A messenger service. That’s all. You can send a message to someone.

Ooo, be still my pounding heart! Oh, the excitement! Oh, my blood pressure! Oh brother…

Yes, the staff at Tumblr is wetting their collective knickers over — over what, exactly? A brain dead, featureless and totally useless rethread of Instant Messenger or ICQ straight out of the 1990s… For this they alienated tens of thousands of users. For this the removed the “reply/comment” function…

Oh, come on… Seriously, are they deliberately trying to kill the service? If that’s their goal, just do it. Don’t just whittle away changing features, removing features, becoming increasingly annoying until you end up as another MySpace (remember them?) 

Tumblr Driving Me Nuts

Tumblr is well known for pulling crap on it’s users. Crap like drastically altering the way it works without bothering to tell anyone what the hell it’s doing.

We’re going through that now over there. They recently pulled the comment/reply function, making it difficult if not impossible to comment on or reply to postings by other people without re-blogging the entire post.

Since a lot of people over there, including me, enjoy the interaction of the comments system, like getting feedback and comments form people, we’re more than a little irritated.

Tumblr says ‘big changes’ are coming. Well, so far the ‘big changes’ have been the introduction of a brain dead, barely functional instant messaging system that no one wanted and no one cares about, along with the removal of the ‘comments’ functions.

Tumblr says comments are coming back ‘real soon now’, but it’s been a week or more now, and with no announcements, and not even the support staff able to tell us what the hell is going on, well, we’re jumping ship.

A lot of us are moving off Tumblr to alternative services.

Me? I’ve had Grouchyfarmer.com in place for ages now. I started the site because of the last time Tumblr ticked me off with something they did. But things changed over there, and I missed the old crowd over there, and I’ve been spending most of my time there.

But now… This may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m so tired of Tumblr ignoring what the users want, failing to respond to questions, and taking a ‘the hell with you, we’re going to do whatever we want’ attitude.

So watch this space. I’ll be posting more and varied material here in the near future, and possibly abandon Tumblr entirely.

fldigi help (radio stuff so everybody can ignore this)

Saw your posting about PSK31 and stuff. I got fldigi installed on my macbook air and it’s up and running fine. Wanted to put it on my iMac too and thought the easiest thing to do was just copy the configuration files, but I can’t find them! Where in the world does fldigi keep the blasted thing?

Ah, you discovered that, have you? It’s OSXs fault. The program keeps all of the configuration files in a folder called .fldigi and that’s where the issue is. OSX apparently things that any folder that starts with a . is a system file and should be invisible. It’s there, you just can’t find the dopey thing. I ran into the same thing when I wanted to put it on my iMac and couldn’t find it.

You can make the invisible files visible. Go to this website:

http://www.mikesel.info/show-hidden-files-mac-os-x-10-7-lion/

He’s got instructions on how to do it.

Oh, and make sure you change things back to invisible again! You DO NOT WANT TO MESS WITH INVISIBLE FILES under normal circumstances!

Me and Furniture

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We’ve been doing upgrades to the house. Well, to be honest it seems that all we ever do is do upgrades to the house since we bought the place. It’s sort of a running joke between my wife and I. I wanted a new ranch house, all sleek and modern and brand new. She wanted a house with ‘character’. Well, she got her wish with this place. It’s got ‘character’ all right, as I remind her every opportunity I get when she complains about the uneven floors, out of plumb door frames, etc. Great fun!

We’ve decided that now that the dog is too old to climb up on chairs and shed all over them and rip fabrics with his toenails, and that the cats have turned out to be reasonably well behaved and aren’t going to shred our furniture, we need to get some new furniture. I hate to say it, but all of the commercial stuff we’ve looked at has been either way, way too expensive, or, frankly, crap.

So, what does this have to do with the two photos? Well, the table and the chair are mine. I made the table — must be 10, 11 years ago. It’s made from white ash harvested from trees that went down on my father-in-law’s farm decades ago and which were stored up in a shed until I got my hands on the stuff. Most of it went into a wardrobe I made for my wife’s sister and her husband as an anniversary present, and what I had left over went into this table. I liked the design, with the kind of quirky way the table top is cut out around the tops of the pyramid topped legs.

The Morris chair is made from white oak and is the most comfortable chair in the house. The extra-wide, flat arms were designed deliberately so people can set things on them when they’re sitting. They’re also made extra strong, thanks to the corbels that support the arms and the fact the bottom of the arms are mortised their entire length and fit into the top rail. I made them extra strong because I knew people would be tempted to perch on the chair arms.

Anyway, ‘she who must be obeyed’ has decided there is going to be no crap commercial furniture. It has been decided that I am going to make a mission style sofa to match the chair and table.

Well, we’ll see.