Iowa Farms Minting Millionaires as Rich-Poor Gap Widens - Bloomberg
Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- At an auction in northwestern Iowa, 314 acres of cropland fetched $4.5 million this July. The price reflects a booming worldwide demand for grain that has showered wealth on some farmers and tripled land values in Iowa in the past decade. The surge is creating local millionaires.We're all going to die and no-one's talking about it - YouTube
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Thirty minutes later the bidding stopped at $14,300 an acre, more than four times the average for U.S. cropland. That meant about $4.5 million for the Schoenemans, a pioneering Iowa family that owned the property for generations.
Farmland auctions in Iowa now resemble a dressed-down spectator sport with Sotheby’s prices, a reflection of the yawning divide that has opened in some of the most bountiful stretches of rural America. Farm earnings in the state and throughout the U.S. increased at eight times the rate of nonfarm wages from 2008 to 2011, fueling resentment and straining the social fabric of places with deep egalitarian roots.
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Booming worldwide demand for grain has showered wealth on farmers by tripling Iowa land values in the past decade and setting them up for record profits this year, even in the face of the nation’s worst drought in more than half a century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects.
... Advances in technology --mechanical planters outfitted with GPS can be 54 corn-rows wide -- have accelerated the consolidation in agriculture. “Same acres, bigger farms, fewer farmers,” Duffy said.
Our planet is rapidly changing - scientists across the world are freaking out - farmers are getting hysterical and, in many countries, committing suicide in mass numbers - and yet our two Presidential candidates are fighting about who's going to pump more carbon pollution into the atmosphere
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